Saturday, April 04, 2009

The answer is a lemon

The Harvard Social Science Statistics blog has a nice graph in the correlation is not causation series – lemons prevent road deaths

A favourite in my undergraduate days showed the correlation between the local birth rate & the number of storks seen nesting on the rooftops in a small German town

The really interesting question in this however, is why we so readily dismiss some, accept others as perhaps providing an interesting hypothesis, while falling on others as proof of what we suspected all along