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Science and the Shortcomings of Statistics

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: March 18th, 2010, 12:00am EDT

Kilrah_il writes "The linked article provides a short summery of the problems scientists have with statistics. As an intern, I see it many times: Doctors do lots of research but don't have a clue when it comes to statistics... and in the social science area it's even worse. From the article: 'Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing.'"pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F17%2F2239252%2FScience-and-the-Shortcomings-of-Statistics" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Science+and+the+Shortcomings+of+Statistics%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F9kP5rT" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/03/17/2239252/Science-and-the-Shortcomings-of-Statistics?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/E7VxbKf5pWc2-Zk_19BEj-XPs_g/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/E7VxbKf5pWc2-Zk_19BEj-XPs_g/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/E7VxbKf5pWc2-Zk_19BEj-XPs_g/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/E7VxbKf5pWc2-Zk_19BEj-XPs_g/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/ndyDxBeXlL8" height="1" width="1"/

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