Not statistics that act in a Christian way, but rather trying to use statistics to understand the state of Christianity. Is it growing? Shrinking? Healthy? Dying? Turns out that describing statistics collected and making inferences is tricky, and the link describes some nice examples of where things can go wrong. Thanks to Brad for the link.
Monthly Archives: January 2010
When is an average or not an average?
First, I have not followed up on the reference in this Instapundit blog post, so I do not know whether this is really the way the British Met Office really computes average temperatures:
In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
But suppose for a minute that an average for a whole season (year) really is fifteen days, and that the highest fifteen all (most) came from November. Would that really represent the average for the winter? Can you think about why they would not use every day’s reading from November through March? Should they use just the high for the day, or the high and the low for each day? And where should the reading come from? How many locations around England would be enough for what would seem like a good average calculation? What if averages in the past were computed differently? Could you make comparisons?
Average seems like such an easy concept – but it often is quite tricky. To say nothing about trying to understand the variability of temperatures (do they compute standard deviations?)
For example, the fifteen day record could occur in a season where the other one hundred and thirty five days were pretty cold…
Something a bit different
Most of the posts here are about what I do in the classroom, mostly geek stuff. But I am also a Christian who believes God plays an active role in my life. I have experienced too much to doubt this.
But it is also true that as a professor, there is a dynamic that I have to be careful about with students. Since I have the rights to assign grades, I try to be careful not to make students feel that their beliefs might impact their grades. I work with students from too many different backgrounds and I never want them to worry that their faith will be an issue with me.
On the other hand, I also try not to hide my Christian beliefs, and the way that affects how I live my life and treat others.
The dust-up over Brit Hume’s comments about Tiger Woods at first seemed to be the kind of thing I sometimes worry about: how can a Christian tell a Buddhist what to do?
This article from Michael Gerson in the Washington Post is a great way of thinking about this (I think). In the absence of coercive power, why wouldn’t someone offer a life preserver that worked for them to another person in pain?
UPDATE: Brit’s comments.