Do you believe in zombies? It’s possible you do but don’t realize it. It’s possible you even have some on your web site! So, let’s make sure that you do what you can to root out all the zombies in your life. So what exactly is a zombie statistic? It’s a number that seems dramatic, …
Sometimes you hear about studies that seem pretty crazy. Like the one that determined (based on facial expressions monitored through ultrasound) that fetuses enjoy music played through a device in the vagina over music played through the belly. While that one was tied to (shocker!) a patented device to help parents connect through music, many …
In my last article, I talked about confirmation bias and how it might impact how you interact with research. Today we are going to talk about some tips for how you can counter that as you explore and read research. Change your mindset from conviction to curiosity When we think about research, the temptation is …
When we think of bias in research, we often think of bias as something that exists in the researchers and publishers of medical research. But that’s not the only kind of research we should be aware of! Confirmation Bias is a special kind of bias that effects YOU. And time you’re interacting with research, you …
I recently came across this great article on 5 ways that charts can be created to be misleading, and thought I’d share it with my readers here. I hope you enjoy it!
A randomized controlled trial published in the reputable medical journal BMJ in December 2018 proved that whether or not you use a parachute when you jump out of a plane or helicopter made no difference in the rate of death or serious injury. Sound weird? It’s true! It’s a real study! It was called the …
Sometimes charts and graphs are designed in a way that is very misleading. Here are some examples, and explanations for what makes them misleading. Directional Disorientation This is a pretty famous bad graph that I have edited to remove the actual subject matter and protect the innocent. If you take a look at it, you …
5 Kinds of Bad Data Visualization and how it can lead you wrong Read More »
Every few years, a billboard company in my area runs a little market study. They do a phone survey asking a bunch of people some random fact, to get a baseline for how many people in our area know that fact. Then they run billboards all around town with that random fact on it for …
Picking a small thing that happened to be significant – Sometimes studies set out to see if intervention A has an effect on outcomes 1, 2 or 3. But they find no change in those outcomes, so they comb the data looking for SOMETHING, and come up with some small difference in some small subgroup. …
They are everywhere. Research articles, abstracts, press releases, and news articles touting that such and such will DOUBLE THE RISK of some dread happening. Or cut the risk of some dread happening in half, depending on what slant they want to take on it. Describing risk this way makes small differences seem large. Which is …