The main aim of the Handbook is to provide builders of composite indicators with a set of recommendations on how to design, develop and disseminate a composite indicator. In fact, methodological issues need to be addressed transparently prior to the construction and use of composite indicators in order to avoid data manipulation and misrepresentation. In […]
One thing researchers should keep in mind is that graphs in research reports or articles, and even those shown in verbal presentations, are not meant for the author, but for the reader or the seminar audience. The line chart that a researcher uses in the data exploration phase—with default gridlines, tick marks, and colors—may not […]
In the opening chapter of Picturing the Uncertain World: How to Understand, Communicate, and Control Uncertainty through Graphical Display, Howard Wainer writes about what he calls The Most Dangerous Equation: the equation for the standard error of the mean which he refers to as DeMoivre’s equation. Wainer’s general point is that there is greater variability […]
Coding categorical data (such as male/female or geographic region) as dummy variables is probably the most common way of incorporating qualitative data into a regression equation. Under dummy variable coding, the coefficient on a dummy variable in a regression equation is the difference between the average value of the outcome variable for the category that is […]
If you’re looking for data sets for testing purposes, you may find the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository useful. It has over 200 data sets available for download.
From the Wikipedia article on Brooks’ law: Brooks’ law is a principle in software development which says that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”. It was coined by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. The corollary of Brooks’ Law is that there is an incremental person who, when […]
Welcome to my new website! I’ve been meaning to set up a site for a very long time, but just have never gotten around to it. The inspiration for creating this site comes from the Whole Earth Catalog (Wikipedia entry). For those not familiar with the Whole Earth Catalog, it wasn’t just a single catalog, but a […]
