Friday, 8 January 2010

From the department of bad statistics

I’m glad to see that some things never change; in this case, it’s the low quality of local news reporting in Laredo. Pro8News breathlessly reports that Mexican drivers are ‘less likely to be ticketed’ since less than 25% of parking tickets in Laredo are issued to Mexican-licensed vehicles.

This story just begs to be placed on a research methods final as one of those “identify all of the problems with this analysis” questions. Bonus points for invoking Bayes’ theorem.