How politicians poisoned statistics - FT.com
by Tim Harford
▻http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/2e43b3e8-01c7-11e6-ac98-3c15a1aa2e62.html?siteedition=intl#axzz465hy8PL1
Excellent article signalé par Alberto Cairo ici :
▻http://www.thefunctionalart.com/2016/04/visualization-against-statistical.html
▻http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/54e5e2b2-01fb-11e6-99cb-83242733f755.jpg
▻http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/c4d40358-01fe-11e6-99cb-83242733f755.jpg
In January 2015, a few months before the British general election, a proud newspaper resigned itself to the view that little good could come from the use of statistics by politicians. An editorial in the Guardian argued that in a campaign that would be “the most fact-blitzed in history”, numerical claims would settle no arguments and persuade no voters. Not only were numbers useless for winning power, it added, they were useless for wielding it, too. Numbers could tell us little. “The project of replacing a clash of ideas with a policy calculus was always dubious,” concluded the newspaper. “Anyone still hankering for it should admit their number’s up.”
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Lire aussi à propos de Florence Nightingale ;
Nightingale’s ’Coxcombs’ | Understanding Uncertainty
▻http://understandinguncertainty.org/coxcombs
Through her work as a nurse in the Crimean War, was a pioneer in establishing the importance of sanitation in hospitals. She meticulously gathered data on relating death tolls in hospitals to cleanliness, and, because of her novel methods of communicating this data, she was also a pioneer in applied statistics. We explore the work of Nightingale, and in particular focus on her use of certain graphs which, following misreading of her work, are now commonly known as ’coxcombs’.