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https://www.sharonlohr.com/blog
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As described in Part 1, September 2026 marked the 100th anniversary of Arizona’s entry into the federal registration areas for vital statistics. The woman who piloted Arizona to this milestone was Ruby Loy Jacquemin, a Prescott native who, after early widowhood, became the statistician for the State Board of Health. Who was Ruby Jacquemin, and what did she do?Ruby Loy in PrescottRuby May Loy was born in Prescott on September 16, 1889, a few months after territorial capital had been moved (or…
Figure 1. Reproduction of Arizona Republican article from September 21, 1926, page 8.¹ September, 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of Arizona’s admission into the federal birth and death registration areas. The last step needed for admission was a survey that, according to the Census Bureau, demonstrated that Arizona’s system of collecting vital statistics captured at least 90 percent of the state’s births and deaths (see FIgure 1). But did the survey really demonstrate that level of…
My favorite statistical podcast is actually about virology. The hosts of This Week in Virology (TWiV) are superb data communicators, and they often highlight statistical virtues or shortcomings of the virology and infectious disease papers they discuss. In TWiV 1352, recorded on August 26, 2026, Dr. Daniel Griffin used a statistical term that was new to me, saying that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had “bluewashed” COVID-19 heat maps. Heat maps indicate activity level by…
The NOVA episode “Athens: Birthplace of Democracy,” which aired on Arizona PBS on July 1, 2026, stated: “For the ancient Greeks, true democracy only worked through the extensive use of random selection.”The candidate selection process in Isaac Asimov’s classic short story “Franchise” represents the opposite extreme, with no randomness (and perhaps no human input). Let’s look at some aspects of random selection as it relates to democracy through these examples. This post contains questions and…
In June 1826, Thomas Jefferson was too ill to accept the Washington DC mayor’s invitation to participate in the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence. In his polite letter declining the invitation, Jefferson wrote of his hopes for the document he had authored:May it [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which…
My previous post discussed the performance of the artificial intelligence (AI) interface Gemini on undergraduate statistics problems. Now let’s look at how Gemini answers some of the problems in my sampling textbook (Lohr, 2022), and talk about how Gemini could help students learn sampling.Evaluate a Survey QuestionQuery: Evaluate the following survey question for the purpose of estimating the number of American adults who have seen the movie Citizen Kane: "According to the American Film…
I submitted some of my undergraduate class assignments to Gemini. How did it do?
