Pet Peeve

I was reading an article in the newspaper the other day (I think it was about Medicare fraud in New York state, but it doesn’t really matter) that presented some sort of result obtained from a “computer analysis.” A computer analysis? Regression analysis, even statistical or economic analysis, would give at least some vague notion of what was done, but the term computer analysis is about as uninformative as saying that the analysis was done inside an office building. It’s sort of like saying you analyzed data using Gibbs sampling, as opposed to saying what the model was that the Gibbs sampler was used to fit. Not untrue, but pretty uninformative.

2 thoughts on “Pet Peeve

  1. This shouldn't come as a big suprise.

    In my line of work (science) PI's mention software and bioinformatics for data processing without any real understanding of what they actually do. NIH grant budgets often contain generic provisions for software, which get spent on black box programs that analyse data.

  2. Ah, but you forget: To err is human; to really foul up requires a computer. "Computer analysis" is journalist-speak for "something too complicated for me to understand."

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