The term "data snooping" refers to the practice of choosing which statistical analyses to apply to a set of data after having first looked at those data. Data snooping contradicts a fundamental precept of applied statistics, that the scheme of analysis is to be planned in advance. In this column, the authors shall elucidate the statistical…

In this article, the authors focus on hypothesis testing--that peculiarly statistical way of deciding things. Statistical methods for testing hypotheses were developed in the 1920s and 1930s by some of the most famous statisticians, in particular Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson, who laid the foundations of almost all modern methods of…

As a branch of knowledge, Statistics is ubiquitous and its applications can be found in (almost) every field of human endeavour. In this article, the authors track down the possible source of the link between the "Siren song" and applications of Statistics. Answers to their previous five questions and five new questions on Statistics are presented.

When people speak of "the Law of Gravity" they are generally referring to what is more specifically known as "Newton's Law of Gravitation." This law states that the gravitational force (that is, the mutual attraction) between any two physical bodies is directly proportional to the product of their individual masses and inversely proportional to…

This article disproves a conjecture that the ratio of the maximum standard deviation to the range of a set of data decreases as the number of data points increases. It also provides an alternative and more general approach for examining the standard deviation as a function of the range.