new significance (out)

I have just received the latest issue of significance (June 2012) and there are plenty of interesting articles in it (with no horror story as in the latest issue!). From the cover story about finding emperor penguin colonies on satellite images via guano stains (large scale!, with a terrific and terrifying extract from Mawson’s journal) to “moral maps” à la Quételet, to teaching statistics as seen by the young statisticians section (of the RSS), to Tony O’Hagan favourite formul

(where he curiously fails to mention Pythagoras, which is how I justify the formula to my students), to the inappropriateness of using hand X-rays to determine whether Indonesian smugglers are under age or not. The less convincing section is obviously the “controversy” one, where the authors make a mechanistic proposal to bypass the drawbacks of p-values and Type I error, without contemplating the ultimate uses of tests…. Very pleasant read (I could have kept for the looong flight to Australia…)