Including Bayesian concepts in introductory statistics teaching
30 June 2023 13h00 Lisbon time
This is the pre-course seminar for the course "Modern statistical thinking for biologists". We discuss why learning statistics is so hard, why including Bayesian concepts could make it easier, and also more practical aspects of the course.
To Walk a Mile through Another Brain
4 Dec 2022
In school, I was always terrible at maths. I quite enjoyed the classes – but just seemed not to have any talent whatsoever for the subject. When I graduated from secondary school, the idea of studying a scientific discipline never even occurred to me as I was so convinced that I would be badly suited to it. Nowadays, I spend my time applying and teaching concepts of biostatistics – a type of applied maths. Of all the weird and wonderful areas that I have worked in since finishing school, this is the one that I feel comes most naturally to me. So how do you square this with my memories of maths class from school? Read more...
The Uncommon Sense of Statistics
27 Nov 2022
A recent article in the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education reports on a study where a cohort of students from a high-ranking Japanese university were asked to solve a series of problems relating to probability and statistics. The catch: the problems were chosen so that the most obvious common sense answer would diverge from the correct solution provided by probability theory and statistics. Over and over, these highly intelligent, highly educated students were misled by their intuition and gave the wrong answer. Read more...
How to tell lies using data: a free webinar.
26 Sep 2022 14h00 Lisbon time.
Data is a mischievous thing. It can be marvellously useful but it must be handled with care, lest it mislead us instead. In this webinar, we will put our intuitions to the test to see how they fare against three common pitfalls in data interpretation.
See recording here: