Noob with GIS: Help me get more out of my data, craft reports, etc. [more inside]
posted on Jul 23, 2008 - 5 answers

Can you recommend a statistics book which is appropriate for the stats required for basic bioscience / clinical research? [more inside]
posted on Jul 19, 2008 - 7 answers

How would you estimate the number of web servers that a country uses? According to Gartner and IDC, about 8-9 million servers are shipped in a year (2007) -- but how does that break down by country? [more inside]
posted on Jul 16, 2008 - 10 answers

SurveyResearchFilter: Creating an index when response items are on different (and somewhat non-sensical) scales. [more inside]
posted on Jul 15, 2008 - 6 answers

How stupid are these surveys about American stupidity? [more inside]
posted on Jul 8, 2008 - 30 answers

Help me convince my girlfriend that, stastically speaking, a correctly-used condom is an adequate form of birth control! [more inside]
posted on Jul 2, 2008 - 41 answers

Asking for a friend: Trying to find a book, whose central conceit is that computers (and large data sets like Google's in particular) are, in fact, smarter than people at trending probability, etc. [more inside]
posted on Jun 16, 2008 - 4 answers

I'm looking for an objectively assessed survey of websites which use css-based positioning versus tables as layout. [more inside]
posted on Jun 12, 2008 - 8 answers

Can you recommend me post-grad / continuing studies in Applied Statistics? Either at Swiss universities, or via good e-unversities. [more inside]
posted on Jun 6, 2008 - 2 answers

I'm trying to lead a crusade for government to publish it's statistics and data in a way that is mashable. Is it possible to define a standard digital format that could apply to a diverse array of data sets? [more inside]
posted on May 29, 2008 - 12 answers

What are people actually doing on the internet? [more inside]
posted on May 29, 2008 - 5 answers

How do they rank how popular a website is? Which one of the services is the most accurate between Alexa, Quantcast, Hitwise, Compete, Google, etc...?
posted on May 20, 2008 - 3 answers

I am looking for statistics on college libraries. [more inside]
posted on May 10, 2008 - 4 answers

Ok so I have this huge table of survey data - much of it numerical, much of it binary, some of it from selections from menus of text items (e.g. blue, green, orange etc). Where do I start to find the most noticeable relationships between variables? [more inside]
posted on May 7, 2008 - 13 answers

StatsFilter: I want to compare quantitatively the results of subjecting two different groups of people, A and B, to two different "programs". Which statistical test do I use to see which "program" had a greater effect? [more inside]
posted on May 7, 2008 - 5 answers

Best ways to visually explore a large survey data set? [more inside]
posted on May 7, 2008 - 9 answers

How many person-miles are flown every year by commercial airlines? [more inside]
posted on May 4, 2008 - 3 answers

Can one perform Pearson's correlation or a variant with unequal numbers of rows? [more inside]
posted on May 1, 2008 - 7 answers

Where can I get the Italian salary data that was released for less than a day? [more inside]
posted on May 1, 2008 - 3 answers

How many times would I have to roll a standard 6-sided die to get a statistically representative view of whether it was truly random or not? [more inside]
posted on Apr 30, 2008 - 8 answers

While I know there can only ever be a woolly answer to this question, can anyone point to state-of-the-web information detailing how many blogs are actively maintained, and what percentage of blogs that is? [more inside]
posted on Apr 27, 2008 - 1 answers

I'm trying to figure out what percentage of people born in 1890 were still alive in 1920 and then 1950 and so on, until we can say for certain that every person born in 1890 is 100 percent definitely dead. I've looked at the 1890 and 1920 census, but they don't have mortality tables. [more inside]
posted on Apr 22, 2008 - 12 answers

Looking for free or low cost (under $50) multiple linear regression software which ideally works with Microsoft Excel (but not critical). Any recommendations?
posted on Apr 17, 2008 - 17 answers

Suppose you take a test for a rare type of cancer that affects 0.01 percent of the population. The test is 98 percent reliable. You get a positive reading. What are the chances you have the cancer? I read this probability puzzle today and the writer said the statistical chances of you having the cancer in this scenario are less than half a percent. I don't get it. Isn't the rarity factor irrelevant compared with the test reliability? Please explain.
posted on Apr 12, 2008 - 24 answers

Is it possible to estimate the standard deviation of an investment's return after "y" years, if you know the investment's mean annual return and standard deviation? [more inside]
posted on Mar 25, 2008 - 14 answers

An acquaintance who's a university professor on the hiring committee for his department cried 'sexism!' when 50% of the candidates who were asked back for interviews were women, when only 18% of the initial applicants for the position were women. I rebutted. Who's right? [more inside]
posted on Mar 24, 2008 - 36 answers

Are there any statistics available regarding the number of lurkers versus contributors on sites with community-generated content? [more inside]
posted on Mar 23, 2008 - 12 answers

Looking for clear, effective references of standard deviation in a marketing research project. [more inside]
posted on Mar 19, 2008 - 6 answers

What to include on my Statistics midterm cheatsheet? [more inside]
posted on Mar 18, 2008 - 4 answers

What's the chance that we're related? [more inside]
posted on Mar 16, 2008 - 17 answers

Excel help: How do I make a chart which displays my values as bars extending above and below a particular line. [more inside]
posted on Mar 9, 2008 - 12 answers

Statistics-filter: I need to establish to what extent student performance on a particular standardized test is predicted by each of the following: GPA, standardized test scores and a couple of other miscellaneous numerical factors. How do I go about this? [more inside]
posted on Mar 6, 2008 - 11 answers

I'm interested in aspects of benchmarking with the help of UNIX's time, specifically, what user, system and elapsed times correspond to, within the functional context of the system and the tested application. [more inside]
posted on Mar 4, 2008 - 4 answers

When a preference poll has a certain margin of error, what are the minimum/maximum results? [more inside]
posted on Mar 2, 2008 - 7 answers

Praying that some statistically-minded MeFites are online today! I'm trying to run a generalized raking (aka "iterative proportional fitting") algorithm on some survey data as a poststratification approach. The literature I've read suggests that this should both improve the quality of my estimates and potentially reduce my standard errors by a decent amount. Instead, my SEs are increasing by a factor of about 1.4 (ugh!!!) Can someone offer some suggestions as to why this might be happening? [more inside]
posted on Mar 1, 2008 - 2 answers

Stumped with RPy, need help badly! [more inside]
posted on Feb 25, 2008 - 4 answers

Where can I find the historical PE ratio for a given stock market sector or industry? When you get a stock quote from Yahoo Finance, the historical prices page tells you what the stock sold for on a given day. The competitors page shows the average PE ratio for that stock's industry. I am looking for something kind of in-between — namely, to find out what the PE was for a given industry/sector was on a given date. Where can I find this information online?
posted on Feb 23, 2008 - 4 answers

How would I estimate what percentage of the world dies or has died of "natural causes" or at least in a way that is not unusual? [more inside]
posted on Feb 20, 2008 - 11 answers

Where can I go on the Web to create an informal public poll to gather data for my next book, which happens to be about board games? [more inside]
posted on Feb 17, 2008 - 9 answers

Looking for recommendations for a cross-platform biostatistics program for my lab. Desired features, program-specific questions, and... [more inside]
posted on Feb 13, 2008 - 10 answers

I am looking for great books / guides for learning applied statistics and R (at the same time). Any hivemind suggestions? [more inside]
posted on Feb 12, 2008 - 12 answers

What does it mean when they "adjust" statistics? [more inside]
posted on Feb 7, 2008 - 24 answers

My husband was recently diagnosed with impaired glucose tolerance. I suspect hyperparathyroidism. I think that his blood glucose does not correlate with the amount of carbohydrate that he eats. My stats knowledge is rusty. What can I do with my Excel spreadsheet to tease any meaning out of this data? [more inside]
posted on Feb 3, 2008 - 17 answers

I'm taking statistics math this semester, and I'm wondering if there be any geeky statistics math-related podcasts that will help me wrap my head around this tricky subject matter (and maybe even enjoy it). [more inside]
posted on Jan 26, 2008 - 9 answers

It ought to be possible (though I know it's going to be inaccurate) to estimate the number of people earning above a certain level using a given country's GDP and Gini Coefficient. Can you help me work through the details? [more inside]
posted on Jan 25, 2008 - 5 answers

Can you help me find funny graphs/charts to show in my university level statistics class? They don't have to be technically correct, I just want something to put onscreen while the students are coming into class. Stuff like this is ok, but SFW is preferable.
posted on Jan 24, 2008 - 22 answers

Statistics-n-facts Filter: I have a whole bunch of queries regarding a variety topics. So far my search for answers has been fruitless, and so I was wondering if A) you happen to know the answers to the included questions and/or B) can refer me to a website that might be able to help? [more inside]
posted on Jan 24, 2008 - 5 answers

for the statisticians: what probability distribution do I want to fit to my data, and how? [more inside]
posted on Jan 18, 2008 - 17 answers

Help me hivemind: What methodology should be used to weight survey sample data, using two weighting variables (for example age and gender), to reflect an actual population? [more inside]
posted on Jan 16, 2008 - 4 answers

If I wanted to extrapolate how many years it's going to take before traffic fatalities were reduced to a statistically insignificant occurrence, how would I do that? I would use the data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System.
posted on Jan 11, 2008 - 14 answers