Nadia Rahim is a RECATOOLS editorial persona focused on statistics and data literacy: what confidence intervals, averages, correlations and margins of error actually mean, and how they are misquoted. Articles under this byline trace each claim to the primary statistical literature and show the working, so readers can check a number rather than take it on trust.

About this byline

Nadia Rahim is a RECATOOLS editorial persona for statistics and data-literacy coverage. Articles are produced and reviewed under RECATOOLS editorial supervision.

9
Articles
Statistics
Primary beat
Jul 2026
Writing since
~116 min
Total reading
All 9 Statistics 7 AI & ML 1 Sustainability 1

Articles Showing 1–9 of 9

High-voltage transmission pylons silhouetted against an orange and blue dusk sky.
Sustainability

Malaysia Says Data Centres Will Take 31% of Its Electricity by 2035

A written parliamentary reply puts data-centre electricity use at 31 per cent of national consumption by 2035, against 7 per cent today.

5 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
A researcher at a laboratory bench, back to the camera, surrounded by rows of identical glassware — the shape of a controlled comparison, where only one thing is allowed to differ.
AI & ML

We Tested the Prompting Folklore — 474 Answers Later, Nothing Had Changed

Tell the model it is an expert. Offer it a $200 tip. Threaten it. Say please. Add "let's think step by step". We ran all seven of those against a plain instruction, 480 times across two models, and scored every answer with a script rather than an AI judge. All 474 scored answers were correct, in every condition — because the plain instruction was already at 100%, and no trick can improve on that. Getting there took eleven task variants that all hit the ceiling, and a harness bug that briefly showed shouting at the model made it the only thing that worked. Our own prompt builder, meanwhile, was claiming a 30-60% accuracy gain on the authority of internal benchmarks we had never run.

2 Aug 2026 · 12 min read
Overhead view of a student writing on an exam paper at a desk.
Statistics

Grades, GPAs and What They Convert To

NUS publishes separate grade profiles for A-level and polytechnic applicants, and none at all for IB — because, it says, the sample is too small to be accurate. Malaysia's UPU puts STPM, Matrikulasi, Asasi and STAM into one category with one calculator. Two systems, opposite answers, same unanswerable question. Plus the reason our own converter told a first-class Malaysian student they had 33%.

1 Aug 2026 · 9 min read
A close-up image showcasing uncooked rice grains in a wooden scoop on a textured dark surface.
Statistics

Kati, Tahil, Cups and Grams

Ask for a catty of pork and you get 500 g in Guangzhou, 600 g in Taipei and 604.8 g in Singapore — all three legally correct. A recipe's "1 cup" spans 180 ml to 284 ml depending on who wrote it. Here is what the units in an ASEAN kitchen actually equal, why cup measures betray you, and why the knuckle trick for rice works when a ratio does not.

1 Aug 2026 · 12 min read
Three tall monoliths rising above a vast field of small pebbles — illustrating how three incidents outweighed eighteen hundred others in this dataset.
Statistics

Three Breaches Caused Eighty Per Cent of the Half-Year's Victim Notices. The Other 1,800 Shared the Rest

The Identity Theft Resource Center counted 471 million victim notices in six months, more than all of last year. Take out the single largest incident and the total falls below 2025 again.

1 Aug 2026 · 6 min read
Dense Kuala Lumpur housing at blue hour, lit windows against a deep navy sky.
Statistics

Mean, Median, Mode: The Average Is a Choice, Not a Fact

Three different numbers are all correctly called "the average", and which one gets published changes what a reader concludes. Singapore's DOS reports a mean of S$16,159 against a median of S$12,446 for 2025; Malaysia's DOSM reports RM9,155 against RM7,017 for 2024 — the same 1.30× gap from two separate surveys, and both agencies lead with the median. Plus the US Census Bureau's written rule, what one outlier does to each average, and the currency-column bug that made our own calculator report a mean of zero until today.

26 Jul 2026 · 15 min read
Graph paper under a desk lamp with a hand-inked cloud of dots and a brass magnifier, no axes or numbers.
Statistics

A High R² Does Not Mean the Model Is Right

Anscombe printed one regression summary for four data sets in 1973 and said the features that matter are "invisible if we see only the usual quadratic summaries". Reproducing his table at full precision shows the collision is at print precision, not to the last digit — 0.66654, 0.66624, 0.66632, 0.66671 — and he never printed the correlation everyone attributes to him. Plus the mirror image (thirteen published data sets at R² ≈ 0.004, one of them a dinosaur), a noiseless parabola whose R² walks from 0.9985 to 0.0000 as the sampling window widens, and the morning our own calculator called a perfectly vertical line "essentially random".

26 Jul 2026 · 20 min read
Dozens of identical freshly machined brass flanged parts stand in rows on a workbench.
Statistics

Standard Deviation vs Standard Error: Two Numbers, Two Questions

Mean ± 4.36 and mean ± 0.97 are not two ways of saying the same thing. Altman and Bland assigned each to a different question in a single BMJ sentence in 2005 — spread of measurements versus uncertainty around an estimated mean — and the √n between them changes the printed figure without changing the data. Plus the figure that settles it: one dataset drawn three ways, where the 95% confidence intervals overlap and the Welch test still returns p = 0.036361.

26 Jul 2026 · 17 min read
A survey interviewer with a clipboard stands at a lit doorway at the end of a dim corridor.
Statistics

What a 95% Confidence Interval Actually Means

Nearly everyone reads a confidence interval as "there is a 95% probability the true value is in here" — including 59% of the working researchers Hoekstra and colleagues surveyed in 2014. Neyman posed that exact question in the 1937 paper that defined the confidence interval and answered it "in the negative": for one computed interval the only available probabilities are zero and one. We walk the primary source, run 100,000 simulated intervals (95,081 contained the true mean), and disclose what our own calculator was printing until this morning.

26 Jul 2026 · 17 min read
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