Today you can do something that wasn’t possible for any previous generation. You can take a class from a Stanford professor without paying a dime. For the past month, I have been watching Robert Sapolsky give twenty five lectures about the biology of human behavior. As much as I’d like to ask all of you to watch them, I know that few [...]

How do you negotiate with somebody who has more money than you? Strength in numbers. It might not sound like a revolutionary idea. It sounds simple enough. But if that’s the case, why do so many people feel like they drew the short straw? The problem is twofold. Having enough people who want change isn’t enough. They need to work [...]

Self-help gurus would probably counter that I’m just afraid of self-improvement, but I find myself very skeptical of the entire movement. New-age mystics and self-proclaimed experts all claim to have the secret recipe for happiness. Whether arguing that reciting affirmations will realign the universe to do your bidding, or providing [...]

The mainstream media would have us believe that there are only two schools of thought: liberal and conservative. Conservatives are religious, they insist, and liberals are secular. Further analysis reveals that things aren’t so simple. There are hyper-liberal Christian anarchists, and even Christian atheists like Robert M. Price. While [...]

If you live in the United States, and probably anywhere else in the world, you know that America has a healthcare problem. People may disagree about whether that problem is the result of government, big business, or those people who keep getting sick, but almost all of them agree a problem exists. Most people also think there’s a quick [...]

Popular science portrays evolution as a free for all in which organisms kill each other off until there is only one left standing. In reality, natural selection creates a delicate balance in which organisms evolve to be in a state of harmony with each other. Organisms that get too greedy simply kill off their prey or hosts, and ultimately [...]

Doctor Robert Piccioni thinks deeply about the subjects he is interested in. When I heard that he had a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Caltech, and a Ph.D. in High Energy Physics from Stanford, I wondered if we would be able to have an intelligible conversation that made sense to my readers. I think he actually made more sense than I [...]

So you’ve taken a bunch of samples (or you’re borrowing somebody else’s sample data), and you want to know the overall standard deviation for the combined sample, but you don’t have the raw data? As long as you have the original sample sizes, standard deviations, and means, you can still get the combined standard deviation. It’s [...]

Most popular statistical tests are based on the assumption that your data comes from a normal distribution. These tests are unreliable when that assumption is wrong. This is a massive problem with Excel’s native testing capabilities, because Excel does not have a way to test for normality, not even in their Analysis Toolpak (which I [...]

Update: As much as I love this page of misconceptions about science, featuring quotes from experts like Carl Zimmer, Lawrence Krauss, and Cliff Pickover, Trending Sideways is moving in a new direction, with a focus on practical information for engineers and statisticians. I will leave this page as is, and I may even update it again, but [...]