Why this blog?

It makes sense for my first post to explain why I am writing this blog.  Well, the first reason is commercial - it accompanies my text book and allows me to write supplementary material that fills out some of the topics covered in the book.  A physical text book has a number of constraints: there is a page limit for a start, it cannot be right up date with some of its examples and a text book requires a fairly formal writing style concentrating on the techniques of statistics.  A blog gets around some of these restrictions.  The limit to the amount of material depends more upon the time I can devote to it rather than a physical page limit.  I can post about up to date stories and research very easily.  And I can write in a more informal style and give some of the informal insights into the world of statistics.

The second reason for writing is that I believe there is a genuine value in educating people about statistics.  There is a huge amount of ignorance about the subject and few people are even moderately competent at it, never mind experts.  It is therefore very easy to misinterpret events and information, and there is certainly no shortage of bodies ready to supply misleading information.  I hope therefore that readers of the blog will learn at least a little about the subject and become aware of these issues.  Furthermore, I hope that people will come to actually like the subject and see that it is actually interesting and fun!  OK, maybe I'm being a little optimistic here.

In this blog I'll be commenting upon stories with a statistical slant appearing in the press and also upon interesting research that I come across.  The title of the blog comes from the saying "the plural of anecdote is statistics" which tells an important truth.  Psychologically, people are more often swayed by a powerful anecdote than by reams of dull statistics.  But those statistics are the summary of many anecdotes and hence generally give a more accurate account.  I will try to combine both in order to grab your attention and to illustrate something about statistics.

Here's a first attempt (it's in the book).  Some while back, The Guardian newspaper in the UK listed the '100 best schools' based on the fact that they each had 100% of their students pass a national exam.  Most of the schools in the list were small schools.  Does this prove that small schools are better than bigger schools?

Enjoy the blog.