Paul Kaplan: Quoting Benjamin Disraeli, Mark Twain famously quipped, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." In the field of investments, in which we rely heavily on ...

Causation and correlation may sound alike but are very different. The former means the root of subsequent events, while the latter refers to an actual or apparent relationship between trends in which ...

If you read a lot, like me, you might notice almost daily there’s a new study that contradicts some earlier research. Something causes cancer — then it’s good for you. You know the drill. What’s going ...

One hundred fifty world leaders, with President Barack Obama as the prime mover, and hundreds of their aides and hangers-on, gathered in Paris for an event called the "2014 United Nations Climate ...

Data purists would rap my knuckles for asking this question and reply, "Never". On the other hand, "data sophists" who're accustomed to lying with Big Data in even more crude ways would wonder, “Duh, ...

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten. – T. Sowell Correlations are often mistaken for ...

There are a lot of SEO studies out there, but not all of them are made equal. Here's how to decide if X is really affected by Y, or merely a coincidence. Every so often the SEO community will erupt ...

A California federal district court denied certification of two nationwide classes, each asserting a price-fixing conspiracy for optical disk drives (“ODD”), because the plaintiffs’ experts failed to ...