The Australian Open is upon us for another year, and the best tennis players in the world have assembled in Melbourne to compete for the right to call themselves “champion”. Much of the focus will be on…
An ambitious new project is attempting to replicate every single study published in 2008 in three leading academic psychology journals. It’s called the Reproducibility Project. As the name suggests, the…
Australians are drinking and smoking less but putting on weight like never before, a national survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics has found. Results from the ABS Australian Health Survey, the…
An article published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) today says a US charity “overstates the benefit of mammography and ignores harms altogether.” The charity’s questionable claim is that early detection…
One of the more interesting outcomes the 2011 Census produced was the figures concerning the housing market. The reason for this interest is how the results contrasted with the idea that Australia currently…
“Most patients using the new analgesia reported significantly reduced pain.” Such research findings sound exciting because the word significant suggests important and large. But researchers often use the…
Who is the greatest test batsman of all time? In a follow up to a recent paper I created a media furore by suggesting that India’s Sachin Tendulkar had eclipsed Australian great Sir Donald Bradman in terms…
Does the thought of p-values and regressions make you break out in a cold sweat? Never fear – read on for answers to some of those burning statistical questions that keep you up 87.9% of the night. What…
You might want to look up. Or maybe not. At some point between now and Saturday, a 6.5 tonne, bus-sized NASA satellite will burst through Earth’s atmosphere, breaking into fiery chunks that could land…
People who work in business and finance are obsessed with economic data releases – GDP growth figures, unemployment rates, trade statistics, and so on. Business journalists, investors, financial analysts…
Professor, Future Fellow and Head of Statistics at UNSW, and a Deputy Director of the Australian Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS), UNSW Sydney