Tag: Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector

I’ll once again begin by offering advance apologies to the good people at Dimechimes for including them in the same post as FEMA circa Baby Bush.  However, the larger topic of statistics applies here to the sampling methodology used by the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General in their examination (a term I use loosely in that context) of Katrina Wind-Water claims and to the recent salary survey article contained in Claims Magazine, a claims adjuster trade publication.

As Nowdy pointed out in her post The “F” word hits the road – finds Wall is dead end Street (Part 2 of 3) I have some experience in this area having pulled a statistical sample or two in my career.

First a warning – those without mathematical proclivities may find this post less than stimulating. However I’ll start off with a recent Nassim Taleb interview Russell recently emailed me since he has become a pop culture darling of sorts. While the 10 minute interview is really a post on it’s own Taleb distills the key concept inherent in sampling:

one single observation, OK, can destroy thousands of years of confirmation.”

Taleb, of course has risen to fame using the analogy of the Australian black swan to illustrate that point. Sampling is inherently limited like that, each time we draw a ball from the barrel of balls we learn something about the characteristics of the population of balls inside the barrel such as their relative sizes, color and the like. Projecting the results to the larger, unknown population becomes much trickier. It is there where we also enter the realm of the twisted statistic. More on that later.

So against this backdrop enters the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security which office was forced to look at this issue by Congress, specifically then Senator Trent Lott and Representative Gene Taylor: Continue reading “A Bit More About that "F Word" Part Two and a Half: Politics, Prostitution and Statistics”

I’ll once again begin by offering advance apologies to the good people at Dimechimes for including them in the same post as FEMA circa Baby Bush.  However, the larger topic of statistics applies here to the sampling methodology used by the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General in their examination (a term I use loosely in that context) of Katrina Wind-Water claims and to the recent salary survey article contained in Claims Magazine, a claims adjuster trade publication.

As Nowdy pointed out in her post The “F” word hits the road – finds Wall is dead end Street (Part 2 of 3) I have some experience in this area having pulled a statistical sample or two in my career.

First a warning – those without mathematical proclivities may find this post less than stimulating. However I’ll start off with a recent Nassim Taleb interview Russell recently emailed me since he has become a pop culture darling of sorts. While the 10 minute interview is really a post on it’s own Taleb distills the key concept inherent in sampling:

one single observation, OK, can destroy thousands of years of confirmation.”

Taleb, of course has risen to fame using the analogy of the Australian black swan to illustrate that point. Sampling is inherently limited like that, each time we draw a ball from the barrel of balls we learn something about the characteristics of the population of balls inside the barrel such as their relative sizes, color and the like. Projecting the results to the larger, unknown population becomes much trickier. It is there where we also enter the realm of the twisted statistic. More on that later.

So against this backdrop enters the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security which office was forced to look at this issue by Congress, specifically then Senator Trent Lott and Representative Gene Taylor: Continue reading “A Bit More About that “F Word” Part Two and a Half: Politics, Prostitution and Statistics”