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I was helping my daughter with some homework the other night. She had been asked to use a spreadsheet program to produce a bar chart. I believe the numbers were densities (g/cm 3 ) and they were something like: 92.5, 91, 93.5, 92 And here's what Excel produced: The vertical axis starts at 89.5, so the height of each bar represents the density−89.5, which means ... ?? Junk Charts quotes Naomi Robbins, author of Creating More Effective Graphs thus: "all bar charts must include zero". Indeed—otherwise what do the bar heights represent? That Excel's defaults violate this rule is, ahem, unfortunate. (I've tried this using Excel 2000 and Excel on a Mac, but perhaps it's been fixed in newer versions? Maybe?) Excel can be coerced into starting its vertical axis at 0, but it takes a fair bit of clicking and navigating. The result is: Relative to a density of zero, there's very little variation. But perhaps this hides the message in these numbers. Doesn't th...

The global price of food has risen sharply over the last 18 months. This is most acutely the case with cereals. The New York Times reports that wheat has reached its highest price in 28 years. The reasons for this phenomenon seem to be broadly accepted; see for example, Paul Krugman's column or a recent presentation (pdf) by Joachim von Braun of the International Food Policy Research Institute . Though the relative importance of the reasons is difficult to assess, the list itself seems clear (the price of oil, a growing middle class in China and India with an increasing demand for meat which requires more grain for feed, droughts likely due to climate change, Western government subsidies for biofuels like corn ethanol). But I wonder if we shouldn't consider a different aspect of this. As the New York Times points out: Even the poorest fifth of households in the United States spend only 16 percent of their budget on food. In many other countries, it is less of a given. Nigeri...

The Internet makes it possible to link a dispersed community of common interest. Now there are a number of blogs that focus entirely or in part on Statistics, but they seem not to be well connected. So I've just set up a social bookmarking website just for applied statistics, data analysis, and visualization. It's called StatLinks . It lists links that users submit, and allows other users to vote on their relevance. Links are listed in order of popularity (or in chronological order, if you prefer). I encourage people to visit StatLinks , to submit links that are likely to be of interest, and to pass the word ! I've put a few links in to get things started. (Hat tip to Slinkset whose technology made it a breeze to set this up.)

Line-ups are both eminently civilized and—really annoying! The first in first out ( FIFO ) principle is inherently egalitarian and respect for it is a sign of social order. But there's something crazy about using our bodies as place keepers in a queue , sometimes for hours on end. Inevitably, after waiting some time in a lineup, someone will need to step out for a while. Rather than lose one's priority in the sequence, the convention is to ask someone (a complete stranger if need be), "Could you keep my place in line?" The language here is metaphorical and indirect. The request is not really about keeping a place . It's about promising on the return of the person to vouch to any potential challengers that indeed this particular person was previously in line at this particular point in the sequence. The fact is, complete strangers generally do agree to "keep your place in line". And that's a further sign of civil behaviour. Maybe line ups aren't ...

The perennial nature-vs-nurture debate just won't go away. This is particularly true with regards to gender differences , a subject of broad interest. I'll acknowledge my biases up front. I have long been skeptical about biological determinism . This is partly because of its historical association with racism, sexism, classism, and the eugenics movement. But it's also because, particularly in recent years, there has been a tendency to overstate the importance of genetics in explaining human behaviour. Part of the explanation for this "genohype" may be the dramatic achievements of the Human Genome Project together with the rise of the biotechnology sector. Just as the success of Darwin's theory of natural selection led to Social Darwinism , today's molecular genetics revolution has put a new wind in the sails of biological determinism. In the scientific world, the nature-vs-nurture debate is generally accepted to be an ill-posed problem. Because the enviro...