This page was maintained until December 2007 by Eunice Goldberg and Carol Blumberg. It is now a Wiki page and you may enter a reference yourself. However, we recommend that you first consult with the ISLP Director before you post it, to make sure that your reference maintains our standards of quality.

Note: If you have any good articles or reports (especially from countries other than the USA), please post your article in this wiki. Make sure to include a complete reference to where the article is located and, if possible, information on who needs to be contacted to get permission to reproduce the article on our website.

The Evidence Gap series of the New York Times. Articles in this series are exploring medical treatments used despite scant proof they work and examining steps toward medicine based on evidence.

Numeracy in the News, features 313 full-text newspaper articles from The Mercury in Hobart, and other News Limited newspapers throughout Australia are available. Most articles have linked questions for students and discussions for teachers. You can recognize these pages of content by the following icons. Newspaper Articles, Student Questions, Teacher Discussion. The articles and questions have not been designated for particular grade levels. This is because there is likely to be a wide range of literacy and numeracy skills in any given class. Many articles have associated with them both basic numeracy questions and more advanced questions for senior students. Teachers will need to peruse questions and decide which are appropriate for particular students.

ISSN 0933-2480 This is a general audience paper journal that is published 4 times a year. It regularly publishes articles that “showcase the use of statistical methods and ideas” including “statistical applications in areas from anthropology to zoology, current events that involve statistics and statistical analysis [and] primers on modern statistical topics like genomics or data mining.” But, in addition, it publishes reprints of relevant recent newspaper articles. For more information go to http://www.amstat.org/publications/chance/.

http://chance.dartmouth.edu/chancewiki/ (New version) http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance (Old version) This is a web-site that is rich in ideas using the latest news. Summaries of articles are presented often with suggestions for questions. Charts and graphs are often included. Many of the articles show errors in how people think about statistics. The breadth of the topics is large so that everyone should be able to find topics of interest. I just glanced in the latest issue and found articles about baseball, hamburgers, obesity, and slot machines. There is also an archive of past Chance News.

This section contains articles from newspapers that contain interesting statistical concepts. The compilation is getting so large that we are dedicating one full page to it, and we are trying to organize the articles by topic. Please, visit the newspaper clips page for the full collection . Here are some examples....

The BBC published for a short time a weekly article series on common statistics in news articles, and the obvious vs. the correct way to interpret them.

The articles are essentially exposés of common ways of duping the layman. If you’ve got people not interested in learning statistics per se, this is excellent material for making them more savvy.

Here are the articles: 1. Surveys 2. Estimates and counting 3. Percentages 4. Averages 5. Correlation and causation 6. Confidence Intervals This ends the series of 6 articles.

Installments appeared every Tuesday on the BBC magazine web page

The series was written by Michael Blastland, who with Andrew Dilnot wrote "The Tiger That Isn't"

(NOTE: information and description of this resource is a contribution of Denise Lievesley, August 28, 2008).

C-section Moms less likely to have Kids and the Scientific report with source of the study

A New Risk of Middle-Age: Dying on a Motorcycle and the Original report

Inferences about Testosterone Abuse Among Athletes are mixed up by incomplete information and false positives. In this article, Donald Berry and LeeAnn Chastain explain how to teach anti-doping officials about evidence-based decision making. This article was published in Chance Magazine, Vol 17, 2004. The American Statistical Association has online a selection of articles from Chance magazine, which you can access by going to the list of articles from previous issues.

The chances of rain are widely misunderstood by the general public. This article describes a survey conducted in several countries. In some of these countries, probabilities are given when referring to rain, but not in others. The authors find that the major misunderstanding is the even to which the probabilities are referring to. The authors also notice that there is no correlation between how long a country has been reporting probabilities of rain and the understanding of the public of what the probability means.

The "Bad Science" subsection of the Guardian Newspaper’s Science section is an entertaining briefing on fallacies and misinterpretations of science in the media. There are few numbers and not reference to the source articles in professional literature, but the author brings us points about study design, confounders, and many other issues that often should be taken into consideration when interpreting statistical analyses.

Behind the Screen is a good article on the occurrence of false positives and the difficulty people have in interpreting the meaning. There is a clear explanation with examples. For a nice summary of other references on false positives see http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/cblumberg/false.pdf (as a pdf file) or http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/cblumberg/false.doc (as a Word file).

The Global Sisterhood appeared in the Chicago Tribune on 2 March 2005 in anticipation of International Women’s Day. Today, one has to pay to access it. If you are interested, when you reach the page enter “global sisterhood” in the “Search for” box. The meeting took place in Chicago this year. The article gives a short synopsis of the condition of women over all in the world and then has a chart of many of the countries with a few key pieces of data for each one: Literacy rate, average number of births for each woman, life expectancy, etc. It is quite interesting and could see it used in a history or social studies class. Correlations between rates of birth and literacy or life expectancy could easily be made.

(This link will first take you to a registration page. Registration is free.) This article appeared in the New York Times on 10 April 2005 and is a review of two books that show how our privacy is being breeched through the internet. The potential for the abuse of statistics is here and worth thinking about. The powerful information gathering engines that we enjoy using can also be threatening to us if the information that is gathered is misused. This is a global problem and worth thinking about for all users and providers of information. Since statistical literacy education should include how data is used and abused, this article is extremely relevant. We always talk about anonymity when collecting data.. Can we still provide that if we use electronic methods of gathering information?

http://oakroadsystems.com/math/falsepos.htm This site uses the John Paulos example on page 136-137 from A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (Doubleday Publishing (New York, New York, USA), 224 pages. Price: US$ 12.95) to help us understand false positives. For a nice summary of other references on false positives see http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/cblumberg/false.pdf (as a pdf file) or http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/cblumberg/false.doc (as a Word file).

http://www.pbs.org/fmc/book.htm (for free electronic access to the entire book) This web-site is a wonderful resource for statistical information of the 20th century. The site has links to program material from PBS (Public Broadcasting System) and the 300 page text of The First Measured Century:An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900-2000 by Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks, and Ben Wattenberg. The book was published by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research as a complement to the PBS documentary. It can be purchased or downloaded (one copy) free of charge. A teacher’s guide is also available for purchase. The text is rich with material that can be interpreted and analyzed. Quantifying trends is an important way of looking at the past. Data analysis helps students become social scientists. This kind of information can be a starting point for asking and researching further questions. One important caution that should be overarching any study of trends is the temptation to extrapolate inappropriately.

http://www.arts.gov/pub/index.php (to access the National Endowment for the Arts publications webpage) http://www.arts.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf (to access a PDF file of the 60-page report directly) The report has many interesting pieces of information about reading habits. There is an executive summary at the beginning that shows some basic results of the study. Teachers could see if there are aspects of the study that are of interest to them and have their students do surveys to see how their results compare. There are many ways of cutting the data using demographics. Correlations are looked at for many of the variables such as amount of TV watched, level of education, internet use, with number of books read during the year.