Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

by Charles Wheelan

Regression analysis is the tool that enables researchers to isolate a relationship between two variables, such as smoking and cancer, while holding constant (or “controlling for”) the effects of other important variables, such as diet, exercise, weight, and so on.

For distributions without serious outliers, the median and the mean will be similar.

standard deviation, which is a measure of how dispersed the data are from their mean.

The standard deviation is the descriptive statistic that allows us to assign a single number to this dispersion around the mean.

Texting while driving causes crashes, but state laws banning the practice do not seem to stop drivers from doing it. In fact, such laws might even make things worse by prompting drivers to hide their phones and therefore take their eyes off the road while texting.