Hand writing
Contributing Editor David Hand, Imperial College London, explains how a US state lottery was gamed:
We statisticians all know that buying lottery tickets is a fool’s game. Unless, that is, you regard the warm glow from dreaming about what you would do if you did win as worth the cost…
Contributing Editor David J. Hand (Imperial College London) counters the argument that the numbers speak for themselves: indeed they can, but they can also lie…
In 2008, in an article in Wired magazine, Chris Anderson famously wrote that “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.” This was in the…
Contributing Editor David J. Hand (Imperial College London) has been thinking about the ethical, social and policy challenges associated with the rise and rise of “big data”:
Data ethics seem to be the flavour of the month. In the UK alone, the establishment of the National Statistician’s Data Ethics Advisory…
Contributing Editor David Hand, Imperial College London, examines some of the pitfalls of administrative data (information collected primarily for business or organizational, not research, purposes):
A great deal of statistical analysis is aimed at making inferences from a sample to a population. This might be with a view to predicting…
Contributing Editor David Hand explains that while statistics as a field is not impossible, it is often misunderstood:
The importance of public understanding of science, and of outreach activities more generally, is now widely accepted. Much research funding comes from public sources, so there’s an obligation to ensure that the…