Posted By: Dovella | Jul 3rd @ 7:15 AM
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Apple and '30 years that sells PCs and we talk about success with sales to 4.6% (at least with regard to where it is most portable' strong that the Desktop).
Microsoft enters on a nearly saturated market such as MP3 players and acquires 4% of the market with ZUNE in a couple of years and it will be flop???

To you the conclusions
I like to play with numbers/digits too...
They are so funny...

All statistics are lies!

I worked at a research company where high-end stuff was made by really really smart people. They made me (not so smart) attend the meetings where they discussed their research results. They had all sorts of graphs displaying stuff they actually didnt intend their experiment to do. But when they made certain assumptions, the graphs tilted in their favour.

That's when I lost all credibility in statistics. If you put a pair of pink tinted glasses on, everything looks pink.

Indeed! It's not a secret for me. Never trust "average" and "we asked N people"...
Same with those weather statistics they keep bothering us with;

This day was hotter then the avarage 3-7-2008,..

Ofcourse it was! When is a day avarage?! That's impossible!

Problem with this is your only looking at percentage points. The real test is in looking at the profit to loss. Did it cost more to produce the product than it made in sales? There you will find if the product is a failure or not.

Ofcourse it was!

How so? It could've been colder than the average too. Or even the same.

Anyone that's taken any higher level statistics could tell you that with the right premise and choices you could make any bit of data support your claim. That is why you're supposed to gather your data and make a conclusion about it (which is a bit backwards from the scientific way of make your claim then test). Doing it in reverse order will allow you to model your results to support your claim. Even then, it's so easy to lie about the same thing ten different ways for it to say what you want it to say, even after the data is collected. Multiple scale axes, truncation, defining correlations where there really is none, extrapolating from a specific to a general, etc. Of course you can high-brow a lot of this so that your average Joe would not be able to understand it.

I almost never trust a "questionnaire poll" because if the poll wasn't developed without a bias, then who knows how the questions were phrased? The way a question is phrased could make all the difference in the answers.
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Comments: 7 | Views: 460