Statistics

My latest piece for the New York Times Learning Network is inspired by a recent NYT editorial from mathematician and author John Allen Paulos. In “We’re Reading the Coronavirus Numbers Wrong”, Paulos opens with a warning about our addiction to up-to-the-minute:

Numbers have a certain mystique: They seem precise, exact, sometimes even beyond doubt. But outside the field of pure mathematics, this reputation rarely is deserved. And when it comes to the coronavirus epidemic, buying into that can be downright dangerous.

The lesson uses Paulos’s essay to help frame student analysis of new reporting. By asking questions like “Is the data what we think it is?”, “Does the data mean what we think it means?”, and “Is there other data that could help put this in context?”, students can improve their quantitative literacy skills. And maybe spot a few “dangerous numbers” of their own!

The full lesson is freely available at the New York Times Learning Network.

My latest piece for the NYT Learning Network gets students using statistics and data analysis to create entries for the American Statistical Association‘s Election Prediction contest.

The ASA’s contest invites students to predict the winner of each state in the upcoming Presidential election, as well as the vote-share for each major party candidate.  My piece offers students some basic strategies to consider when making their predictions.

A straightforward strategy for predicting the winner of each state would be to use the latest aggregate polling data from a reputable source. The New York Times offers a state-by-state probabilities chart that provides a projected outcome for each state as determined by each of several media outlets, including The Times itself as well as FiveThirtyEight and Daily Kos, among others.

Students could choose one of the outlets to use as the basis for their predictions, but to satisfy the written requirement of the contest they should be prepared to provide some justification for their choice. For example, they could research each outlet’s methodology and explain why they found one more compelling than another (perhaps more polls are used from each state, or the predictions have been more stable over time).

In addition to introducing students to several basic prediction strategies, there are plenty of links to online resources where students can explore visualizations of voting trends and research historical voting data.  The lesson is freely available here.

The ASA’s contest ends October 24th, so get predicting!