Category Archives: rhetoric

Greenwashing

Painted signage on the side of a delivery truck parked outside a neighbor’s home deliverying oil made me curious about this, so I checked out their Web site. Here is what I found: (To see larger figure, click on image … Continue reading

Posted in Anthropocene, being carbon dioxide, biofuels, bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, economics, energy, environment, false advertising, fossil fuels, global warming, greenhouse gases, greenwashing, Hyper Anthropocene, regulatory capture, rhetoric, sociology, supply chains, the tragedy of our present civilization | Leave a comment

“Holy crap – an actual book!”

Originally posted on mathbabe:
Yo, everyone! The final version of my book now exists, and I have exactly one copy! Here’s my editor, Amanda Cook, holding it yesterday when we met for beers: Here’s my son holding it: He’s offered…

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, Buckminster Fuller, business, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, complex systems, confirmation bias, data science, data streams, deep recurrent neural networks, denial, economics, education, engineering, ethics, evidence, Internet, investing, life purpose, machine learning, mathematical publishing, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, moral leadership, multivariate statistics, numerical software, numerics, obfuscating data, organizational failures, politics, population biology, prediction, prediction markets, privacy, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, rationality, reason, reasonableness, rhetoric, risk, Schnabel census, smart data, sociology, statistical dependence, statistics, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the value of financial assets, transparency, UU Humanists | Leave a comment

David Spiegelhalter on `how to spot a dodgy statistic’

In this political season, it’s useful to brush up on rhetorical skills, particularly ones involving numbers and statistics, or what John Allen Paulos called numeracy. Professor David Spiegelhalter has written a guide to some of these tricks. Read the whole … Continue reading

Posted in abstraction, anemic data, Bayes, Bayesian, chance, citizenship, civilization, corruption, Daniel Kahneman, disingenuity, Donald Trump, education, games of chance, ignorance, maths, moral leadership, obfuscating data, open data, perceptions, politics, rationality, reason, reasonableness, rhetoric, risk, sampling, science, sociology, statistics, the right to know | Leave a comment