poor graph of the day

Statistics may be harmful to your freedom

On Wednesday, I was reading the freshly delivered Significance and esp. the several papers therein about statisticians being indicted, fired, or otherwise sued for doing statistics. I mentioned a while ago the possible interpretations of L’Aquila verdict (where I do not know whether any of the six scientists is a statistician), but did not know about Graciela Bevacqua‘s hardship in the Argentinian National Statistics Institute, nor about David Nutt being sacked from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, nor about Peter Wilmshurst being sued by NMT (a US medical device corporation) for expressing concern about a clinical trial they conducted. What is most frightening in those stories is that those persons ended up facing those hardships without any support from their respective institutions (quite the opposite in two cases!). And then, on the way home, I further read that the former head of the Greek National Statistics Institute (Elstat) was fired and indicted for over-estimating the Greek deficit, after resisting official pressure to lower it down…  Tough job!