Ed Vogue's World

It’s been a few days since my last blog when I wrote about the issues relating to using data and statistics and as a result anomalies in the patterns will always be present. Yet in the case of the statistical algorithm used to determine the exam grades the outliers were individuals with hopes, dreams and aspirations. Young influential people starting out in life not statistical anomalies.  These ‘outliers’ have made their voices clear over the last week and as they have it has become apparent to all that perhaps they were not outliers after all, instead they were the norm. It appears after analysis of the results, by people much more qualified than myself, that a significant number of students have been treated unfairly compared to other groups.  Due to the nature of how this algorithm works it appears to have favoured private selective schools due to small group sizes and stable historical results. Schools and colleges with larger teaching groups and more ‘volatile’ past coho...

Over the last months throughout the pandemic we have heard a lot about statistics and statistical modelling. Statistical results are often held up to be absolute and are often reported in the media without the levels of uncertainty that naturally accompany them.  A good example of this was the statistic being banded around that bald men were more likely to become hospitalised with Covid-19 than men with a full head of hair. This would have caused a degree of alarm for the follicly challenged members of the population. It would suggest that there is a causal link between hairloss and Covid-19. Now perhaps there is I have not accessed the original information from where this came perhaps to do with male hormones?. However it is more likely that this is just a correlation and that the cause is age. Older men are more likely to have complications with the virus and statistically more older men are bald compared to their younger counterparts. Notice that I used the term statistically in...