Dennis Roberts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in sci.stat.edu:
>personally, i think it is dangerous in ANY case to say that r = cause ...
Hear, hear!
My favorite original example is the correlation between number of
annual murders in a city and number of books in its libraries.
Students have no trouble seeing that the two are going to have a
fairly high correlation coefficient(*), but murders don't make
people read and books don't make people kill.
(*) I don't have actual figures. Though obviously there's some sort
of correlation it might not be best expressed by a straight-line
model.
--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://oakroadsystems.com/
"My theory was a perfectly good one. The facts were misleading."
-- /The Lady Vanishes/ (1938)
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