{"id":11865,"date":"2007-03-21T15:17:58","date_gmt":"2007-03-21T14:17:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/192.220.58.236\/blog\/?p=19"},"modified":"2007-03-21T15:17:58","modified_gmt":"2007-03-21T14:17:58","slug":"a_criminal_misuse_of_statistic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/a_criminal_misuse_of_statistic.html","title":{"rendered":"A Criminal Misuse of Statistics?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favorite topics is the very human tendency to misuse and misunderstand the information that&nbsp;is provided by&nbsp;business intelligence systems.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a link to a <a href=\"http:\/\/ted.com\/tedtalks\/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=p_donnelly\">TED Talk<\/a>&nbsp;by Peter Donnelly, an Oxford statistician, pointing out some of the common errors that people make, and the serious consequences that can result. <\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a taste of the material: <\/p>\n<p>(1) Imagine you&#8217;re sequentially tossing a coin. On average, which of these sequences will take longer to achieve?:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Head-Tail-Tail\n<li>Head-Tail-Head<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>They <u>have<\/u> to be the same, right? (hint: wrong)<\/p>\n<p>(2) Imagine you take a medical test for a disease that has a 99% success rate, and you have a positive result. How likely is it that you have the disease? (hint: no, it&#8217;s not 99%)<\/p>\n<p>Peter goes on to talk about&nbsp;a case&nbsp;where a pediatrician gave statistically-invalid expert testimony at a trial that resulted in a UK mother being convicted of murdering her children (later thankfully overturned on appeal).<\/p>\n<p>We should all take account of these kinds of frightening tales when implementing business intelligence:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Just providing information doesn&#8217;t mean that it will be used effectively, and IT organizations should take responsibility for the end result of BI &#8212; better corporate performance &#8212; not just think of themselves as tools providers.\n<li>Analytic expertise and data expertise is as important as technology expertise, and should be an explicit part of any business intelligence competency center.\n<li>Sharing information widely and providing collaboration will make it more likely for mistakes to be spotted and corrected.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Does anybody else have any good stories and examples of data misuse?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favorite topics is the very human tendency to misuse and misunderstand the information that&nbsp;is provided by&nbsp;business intelligence systems. Here&#8217;s a link to a TED Talk&nbsp;by Peter Donnelly, an Oxford statistician, pointing out some of the common errors that people make, and the serious consequences that can result. Here&#8217;s a taste of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[160,204,298,579],"class_list":["post-11865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bi","tag-business-intelligence","tag-crime","tag-humor"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-35n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11865\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}