Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Here are my overall results and a nice picture of Uncle Sam for you.


I love Excel. Well except for the fact that there doesn't seem to be any good way of displaying an excel table in a blog. Unfortunately this means i'm going to have to PrintScreen and copy-paste everything. I didn't realize but I don't think anybody who has come actually was able to see the results i'm posting....I'll fix the old posts when I get a chance. Ok, the results.

Basically I accurately predicted the scores of 9 of 29 movies. Statistically I had a 10.84% chance of doing this by pure luck (specifically that is the chance of predicting 9 or more correctly, not just 9 which would be something like 5%); that means the result does not yet fall into that much coveted category of "statistically significant". Did you know that every time you say "statistically significant" a social scientist somewhere orgasms? It doesn't matter if the correlation is meaningless, it's statistically significant! I digress....

So Uncle Sam is giving you attitude up there because we want to be at least 95% sure that all this is not just a big, 5-sided die flipping fluke. We'll see if the score improves as the sample size gets larger.

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