Want a signed book?

JMP is giving away signed copies of Numbers Rule Your World.  See details here.

JMP is a great piece of software for those who like to point and click, drag things around, interactively build models. People I hire who are analytical but don't have proper statistical training seem to enjoy using it and produce good work from it. There are other similar software on the market; I haven't tried them out so I don't know if they are better or worse but I can say I have had a pleasant time with JMP.

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Speaking of which, if you haven't already, do subscribe to my sister blog, where I discuss graphs and charts that appear in the news.

The RSS feed: here. This twitter feed combines the two blogs.

Comments

[Antonio Rinaldi]

It seems that I am one of your lucky readers what will receive a signed copy of your book. Many thanks to you and to jmp/sas.

[John Johnston]

I've just finished your interesting book..and I understand that polygraphs are not perfect. But I wish you could calculate, or even mention that this imperfect method probably HAS caught terrorists (and probably saved lives). When there is a better method of detecting lying..I'm sure we'll employ that. We had 3000 innocent people murdered in 2 buildings, and we had to do anything possible to keep that from happening again.
Dropping bombs in Europe and Japan didn't always kill the enemy during WW II, but it was arguably necessary to achieve the outcome.
Yes, you're conclusions may be accurate, but the drawback should not be viewed as "unacceptable"..but as an unfortunate and unavoidable circumstance due to terrorism and the lack of outrage from those of a like-minded community.

[Kaiser]

John: What I encourage is a balanced view of these technologies. Most scientists will consider the tradeoff unacceptable and that's what the NAS report stated. But like many other situations I discuss in the book, there are perspectives other than science. What I hope to do is to get people to consider both sides. Thanks for your comment.