Thanks to a resent switch from Blockbuster Online to Netflix, I was recently able to stream This Is England, a dark drama about a young boy growing up in 1980s England. Shaun, the protagonist, after the loss of his father, finds himself searching for acceptance in a world that seems to be cruel and unfair. This isolation allows him to become brainwashed by a gang of young skinheads, ultimately ending in a brutal beating of one of his friends. The cinematographic work was impeccable and truly captured Shaun’s cries for acceptance and companionship.

Overall, this film was magnificent and deserves both my 5-star rating and the particularly high IMDB rating of 8.0. I was drawn to the characters (most notably Shaun) and was really able to see how someone looking for acceptance could be sucked into a world of violence and hate.

It’s not a light film, but one worth watching.

Unfortunately, I agree.

Hi folks. Sorry to do this, but I’ll be away till next Monday (April 28, 2008).

Have a great week and see you all soon.

As of today, I have more than 100 RSS subscribers! Thanks for reading everyone…I really hope you enjoy the content. If there’s anything you’d like to see more/less of, please let me know with a comment or an email.

Continuing on in my How To Lie With Statistics series, let’s talk about “Much Ado About Practically Nothing.”

For the sake of simplicity and consistency we have many standards in this world that involve thresholds. An abortion can only happen prior to the 20th week of gestation, a person is of normal intelligence if his or her IQ is above 100, and a warrant expires after 30 days. We follow these rules as if the cut off period were determined by some all knowing entity and set in stone.

In fact, we’re missing something. That something is the standard error (or standard deviation…I won’t get into the difference right now…but there’s a big one). When we report a threshold, what we’re really reporting is the average time at which something should occur. In the case of abortions, one is termed as “late-term” if 20 weeks have passed. But the reality is that some fetuses mature faster than others and some mature slower than others. So really, we should talk about 20 weeks + or – some number of weeks. We should provide a range of possibilities based on the standard error associated with the underlying data.

Similarly, we can look at the warranty example. Firms know full well how long a product should last and often determine the length of a warranty to be somewhere in that range. What they are ostensibly saying is that their product will last approximately the length of the warranty. But what happens when your laptop break after 1 year and 2 days (assuming a 1 year warranty)? According to the firm, you’re out of luck. But really, the expectation of a 1 year life time is just an average and needs an associated standard error. The life span is really 1 year, plus or minus some number of days/weeks. Firms take advantage of this fact and customers suffer.

The point is that whenever you see an average, make sure to find out the standard error as well. This is done very frequently in political polls when you see that X is beating Y by 3% but the error on the result is also 3%. This suggests that it is very possible that the margin that X is beating Y by doesn’t actually exist in the population. Be aware of this and know you’ll be much better off when reading (and creating) statistics!

Part 1 - The Sample with the Built-in Bias
Part 2- The Well-Chosen Averge
Part 3 - The Little Figures That Are Not There