Category Archives: Statistics

Trust the experts. Believe in science. These are literal mantras that are in the air today. But I have to be frank and admit that I do not trust the […]

Read more

A bunch of vital stats from South Asia from Google Data Explorer. Since Zach and I started looking at these data since the early 2000s Pakistan and Bangladesh have diverged, unfortunately. I don’t understand what’s going on with Bangladesh’s anomalously high adolescent fertility though. This could be a function of variation among women as they …

Continue reading “Vital stats in South Asia”

Read more

We’ve all been burned too often. Vitamin D and moderate alcohol consumption may not do anything special. Correlations and observations. Correlations and observations. Now, Red Meat Increases Risk of Dying From 9 Diseases: “This is an observational study,” said the lead author, Arash Etemadi, an epidemiologist with the National Cancer Institute, “and we can’t determine […]

Read more

Genomes Unzipped, Size matters, and other lessons from medical genetics: …Smaller studies, which had no power to detect these small effects, were essentially random p-value generators. Sometimes the p-values were “significant” and sometimes not, without any correlation to whether a variant was truly associated. Additionally, since investigators were often looking at only a few variants […]

Read more

Two of the main avenues of research which I track rather closely in this space are genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which attempt to establish a connection between a trait/disease and particular genetic markers, and inquiries into the evolutionary parameters which shape the structure of variation within the human genome. Often with specific relation to a particular […]

Read more

In response to my two posts below on atheism statistics, people in the comments and around the web (e.g., Facebook) have pointed out that Buddhism is necessarily/can be atheistic, and that Buddhism, is not/not necessarily a religion, and therefore that explains the statistics. Some of these people are lazy/stupid judging by the way the argument […]

Read more

6/6
Razib Khan