Jessica Utts
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Jessica Utts is a statistics professor at the University of California, Davis.
In 1995, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) appointed a panel consisting primarily of Utts and Dr. Ray Hyman to evaluate a project investigating remote viewing for espionage applications, which was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency, and carried out initially by Stanford Research Institute and subsequently by SAIC. The two reports opposed each other, with the Utts report saying the evidence was strong and that future research should focus on how to apply remote viewing, gifted subjects scored 2% above chance, while the Hyman report stated that while there were definite results achieved, it was unclear what the mechanism was. Funding for the project was stopped after this report was issued.
In 2003, Utts published an article in American Statistician, a journal published by the American Statistical Association, calling for significant changes to collegiate level statistics education. In the article she argued that curricula do a fine job of covering the mathematical side of statistics, but do a poor job of teaching students the skills necessary to properly interpret statistical results in scientific studies. The argument continues that common errors found in news articles, such as the common misinterpretation that correlative studies show causation, would be reduced if there were significant changes made to standard statistics courses.
[edit] External links
[edit] Textbooks
- Seeing Through Statistics (1999) - The use of statistical methods to solve real world problems, and to gain understanding from the application of statistics in addition to simply calculating them.
