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Consider the following sentence: " You ate the blueberries because your fingers are stained." What is odd about it is that ordinarily, when we say "X because of Y" we mean "Y is the cause of X". For example, "The window broke because the baseball hit it" means that the baseball hitting the window caused it to break. But in this case, the sentence surely doesn't mean that your fingers being stained caused you to eat the blueberries. Now one might object that it's a weird sentence, and that instead it should be " I believe you ate the blueberries because your fingers are stained. " But the original version is not confusing to an English speaker, and people sometimes do speak this way. Language is a complicated business. And language about causality is particularly tricky. It is well known that correlation does not imply causation . But when scientific studies are reported in the media, this dictum is often forgotten. Professor...

In an op-ed in today's issue of the Los Angeles Times, Michael Shermer wrote about the rush "to find the deep underlying causes of shocking events", with reference to the shooting in Tucson, Arizona and the recent mass bird deaths. Shermer made some good points, but parts of his argument were flawed. For example, he cited statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health to argue that unbalanced people are not uncommon, and Given these statistics, events such as the shooting in Tucson are bound to happen, no matter how nicely politicians talk to one another on the campaign trail or in Congress, no matter how extreme tea party slogans are about killing government programs, and no matter how stiff or loose gun control laws are in this or that state. By chance — and nothing more — there will always be people who do the unthinkable. In other words, he is pointing out what he sees as an inevitability, and then attributing it to chance. But an inevitability is the opposi...

The map of the world is a familiar image. But a closer look at this one reveals that it is lacking detail. For example, a number of large islands are absent, including the British Isles, Japan, and the island where I grew up, Newfoundland. The continent of Antarctica has been omitted. Furthermore, Greenland and Ellesmere Island are joined, while North and South America are disconnected. Still, the map does give a general idea of the shape of the continents (except of course Antarctica). And it's certainly better than I could draw! The map is a simplification. But is it an oversimplification? Here I want to take a general look at oversimplification because it has broad relevance and raises some subtle questions. Maps provide a convenient example and raise some issues that turn up elsewhere. In particular, I'm going to focus on how oversimplified ideas gain traction in our society, as illustrated by three popular nonfiction books. Although the world map above simplifies a number ...

On the day the iPad was launched, Apple sold over 300,000 of the tablet computers. Since then, over 3 million iPads have been sold. Our society is infatuated with technology, and this affects us in ways both obvious and subtle. Here I want to examine how our adoration of technology influences the way we think about science, and in turn how we see our whole world. I should note that I write this as a scientist, and someone with a long-time interest in, and fascination with technology. Because the words science and technology are often paired, their meanings tend to be conflated. But science can be pursued with few technological spin-offs (as is the case with astrophysics, for example) and technology can be developed without the use of science (as was the case with the early technologies developed by trial and error in prehistory). Certainly scientific discoveries can often be used to develop new technologies, and existing technologies can be evaluated scientifically. But science itself...

My son enjoys creating Flash applications. Check this one out:

Some time ago, I wrote about missing values and how they complicate the life of an applied statistician. A particularly tricky case concerns logical variables , and I give a more detailed explanation here. Suppose X is a variable representing whether a person is at risk for developing type-2 diabetes . Two known risk factors are ( A ) being older and ( B ) being overweight. If we had a database containing the age and weight of each person in a group, we could compute X using the following logical expression : X = A OR B . ( X , A , and B are known as logical variables, and they each take values TRUE or FALSE according to whether the corresponding condition holds.) But what happens if some ages and weights are missing from the database? Fortunately statistical software packages like R and SPSS have built-in rules that will correctly evaluate the logical expression, even if A or B (or both) are missing. The complete truth table is as follows (where T means TRUE, F means FALSE, a...

I've written before about Christopher Hitchens and his penchant for overblown rhetoric. Well, he's at it again, this time with a scathing attack on none other than Prince Charles. As a longtime advocate of the dismantling of the monarchy, you might think this would be music to my ears. Well, it's not. Hitchens' diatribe is mean-spirited and intellectually flawed. The mean-spirited aspects are easily catalogued and of lesser significance. Hitchens calls Prince Charles "a very silly man", "a moral and intellectual weakling", "a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts" whose "empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant". What is of more interest to me than all this name calling is the substance of Hitchens' piece, which concerns a speech the prince gave recently at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. It turns o...