Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-27-2009

[andrewducker]

• A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
  (tags: security cryptography encryption tutorial comic algorithms aes)
• What's wrong with significance tests?
  Quite a lot, by the looks of things.
  (tags: math statistics)
• 8 Racist Words You Use Every Day
  Well, maybe not _every_ day.
  (tags: language racism funny interesting)
• The dark secrets of the trillion-dollar oil trade
  Well, not that dark. Or surprising when you think about it. Still. Not nice.
  (tags: oil business africa)
• MyLifeIsAverage
  Small victories over life. Just heartwarmingly nice. And intermittently hilarious.
  (tags: funny life average stories)

Comments

[ipslore.livejournal.com]

I feel that, to an extent, 'douche' is moving in the same direction as those 'racist' words-- it's derived from a sexist comparison, but it itself is not sexist, and indeed the original meaning has become the secondary one.

Also, note that even though they're not racist anymore, all of them [except 'hip hip hooray' (and, obviously, 'picnic')] are still unfavorable terms.

[andrewducker]

It is fascinating to see the changes in what's acceptable and what's not.

The joy of stats

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Statisticians are remarkably passionate about their particular viewpoint/paradigm/theory of inference.

I'd blog about it if I thought anyone was remotely interested.

Likeliehood ratios (might be the wrong term) seem to be the best waybto evaluate how much you should trust evidence.

Although a lot of classical statistical work is veering towards using confidence intervals an other measures of effect size which is a marked improvement on the erroneous interpretation of statistical signifcance.