April 2026
February 2026
December 2025
- Dec 24, 2025TechnologyCausation vs Correlation: Key DistinctionsCorrelation can reflect genuine causation, reverse causation, a common cause, coincidence, or a tangle of causal paths, and the article works through each before laying out the Bradford Hill criteria. The sharpest case is hormone replacement therapy: Nurses' Health Study observational data linked it to less coronary heart disease for decades, until the 2002 Women's Health Initiative trial found it raised the risk of heart disease, stroke, and breast cancer.
- Dec 23, 2025TechnologyCommon Analytics Mistakes and Their ImplicationsHewlett-Packard found employees living far from headquarters quit more in their first year, strongly and significantly, and changed recruiting to favor nearby candidates. The confound was compensation: those campuses paid below local market, so staff both commuted from cheaper suburbs and left for better-paying competitors. Proximity had nothing to do with it. Correlation misleads through confounding, reverse causation, and spurious matches that are inevitable at scale.
- Dec 19, 2025TechnologyData Interpretation: Avoiding Common PitfallsTufte later rebuilt the analysis with every previous launch included, and the relationship between temperature and damage was unmistakable, with the 31 degree launch far outside anything observed. Absence of a pattern in incomplete data is not evidence of no pattern. The page covers confounding, reverse causation and selection effects, what a p-value does and does not mean, the multiple comparison problem, survivorship bias, and Simpson's paradox.
March 2025
February 2025
November 2024
August 2024
- Aug 27, 2024ExplainersExploring the Fallibility of Published Research FindingsThese were the highest-impact papers, cited hundreds of times, used to decide which drugs to develop. Eleven percent reproduced. The page pairs that with the demonstration that made the mechanism undeniable, in which researchers used four ordinary analysis choices to push the false positive rate from 5 percent to over 60 and published an impossible finding at p = 0.040 to prove the point.
- Aug 11, 2024ExplainersWhat Is Statistics? The Science of Learning From DataThe Literary Digest mailed ten million ballots and got more than two million replies, predicting Alf Landon over Franklin Roosevelt by 57 to 43 percent. Its lists came from automobile registrations and telephone directories, which in Depression-era America skewed toward the affluent. It was wrong by 19 percentage points. George Gallup used a quota sample of roughly 50,000 stratified to match the electorate and called Roosevelt correctly.
April 2024
- Apr 20, 2024ExplainersScreen Time Statistics 2026: Overview of Users and TrendsWhat the measured numbers show and which findings hold. Common Sense Media's 2023 census put recreational screen time for US tweens aged 8 to 12 at 4 hours 44 minutes daily, against 2 hours 19 minutes in their 2011 benchmark, with teens at roughly 7 hours 22 minutes. Hale and Guan's review of 67 studies found screen use within an hour of bedtime cut sleep by about 28 minutes on average.
- Apr 13, 2024ExplainersRemote Work Statistics 2026: Hybrid, Fully Remote, and RTO TrendsStanford's tracking puts 28% of US full-time workers remote in some form, split about 13% fully remote and 15% hybrid, against roughly 23% fully remote and 9% hybrid in May 2021. The productivity research cuts both ways honestly. Bloom found call center workers 13% more productive at home, while Barrero, Bloom and Davis found fully remote work cut output about 10% in collaboration-heavy roles, worst for new hires.
March 2024
- Mar 24, 2024Explainers2026 Mental Health Statistics OverviewWhat the prevalence and access numbers show. CDC data has the share of US high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness rising from 28 percent in 2011 to 42 percent in 2023, reaching 57 percent among adolescent girls and 69 percent among LGBTQ+ youth. WHO estimates more than 75 percent of people with mental health conditions in low- and middle-income countries receive no care at all.
- Mar 23, 2024ExplainersFreelance Economy Insights for 2026That International Labour Organization number counts non-standard work broadly, including agricultural laborers, street vendors and domestic workers, and McKinsey researchers note most non-standard workers in developing economies would prefer stable employment. The narrower US picture is firmer: Upwork and Freelancers Union found about 64 million Americans freelanced in some capacity, with a median skilled rate near $28 an hour.
- Mar 19, 2024ExplainersE-Commerce Statistics 2026: A Mobile-Dominated MarketBaymard benchmarks show desktop converting at 3.65% against roughly 2.1% on mobile, a gap of about 42% that reflects checkout friction and shoppers who browse on a phone and buy on a laptop. Global ecommerce is around $6.9 trillion a year and 22% of all retail, with growth near 9% since 2022, far below the 27% surge of 2020 but still roughly double pre-pandemic rates.
January 2024
September 2023
July 2023
February 2023
October 2022
July 2022
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