When I see a lonely number in a news report, it always triggers an alarm: What should this lonely number be compared to? What was that number a year ago? Ten years ago? What is it in a comparable country or region? And what should it be divided by? What is the total of which this is a part? What would this be per person? I compare the rates, and on

In my career I have developed a bias toward indexed scores because I have found that when people know the upper and lower limits, they can more quickly internalize the data. BEI does this by using a scale of 0 to 100. All in all, the Weighted Mean methodology also helps accomplish our purpose. You can use the methodology that best suits your unique

So it is with much that you read and hear. Averages and relationships and trends and graphs are not always what they seem. There may be more in them than meets the eye, and there may be a good deal less. The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Stati

Understanding the generalizable qualities among groups of people is useful in the social sciences for predictive power, and that generality has been one legacy of “normal”: statistics are necessary to make sense of the seasonal tides of influenza or decide the optimal management of traffic patterns.