What Pierre says, from Paris

Pierre Dragicevic (that’s his pic of a scary die!) is a super-interesting and enthusiastic researcher in HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) based at the Université Paris-Sud, an hour or so south of Paris. He is a researcher in the AVIZ Visual Analytics Project. He hosts a great page headed Bad Stats: Not What It Seems.

His page is definitely worth a browse! Here are some particular goodies:

Not one dance, but a dozen! Pierre has made a wonderful panel of a dozen dances that illustrates how successive results bounce around, simply because of sampling variability. Means, CIs, cat’s eyes, p values (bottom left), and much more. The key point, of course, is that any single CI (or, better still, cat’s eye) gives good information about the amount of dancing, whereas a single p value gives us virtually no information about the amount of sampling variability.

Scroll down a little to see details of his keynote talk at BioVis 2016. You can download his PowerPoint slides, with nice animations and a strong new-statistics message.

A little further down the page is a link to his chapter that discusses good statistical practices in the applied research field of HCI.

I’ll finish with another of Pierre’s telling pictures. This one references the front cover of the most famous book on usability, Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. Yes, estimation is way more usable for the researcher than trying to pour coffee from the NHST pot!

Geoff