Posts Tagged UK

“Decisions taken by statistical professionals are final”

Posted by mark in politics on June 10, 2009

I’m just catching up on the Wall Street Journal issues that accumulated while I attended a statistical conference and then co-taught a workshop on Designed Experiments for Life Sciences.  A June 3rd article by WSJs “Numbers Guy” Carl Bialik caught my eye with a graphic showing that most UK citizens distrust official statistics.  This caused their government to create a Statistics Authority that will police other agencies on the numbers they release to the public.  Here some key points as reported at this UK government web site:

  • When preparing any publication containing statistics, including those drawn from administrative or management information, you must involve statistical professionals at the earliest opportunity
  • You must not use unpublished statistics without the advice of a statistical professional
  • You must not selectively quote favourable data from any unpublished dataset
  • Decisions taken by statistical professionals are final

    • So it seems that the number nerds will rule after all — just like they always dreamed when being belittled by the bullies who thought math and stats were simply a waste of time. Statisticians rule!

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