Jessica Utts is a statistics professor at the University of California, Davis. She is noted for her work in parapsychology, including the following papers.

In 1995, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) appointed a panel consisting primarily of Dr. Jessica Utts and Dr. Ray Hyman to evaluate an SAIC, CIA, and DIA project to evaluate remote viewing for espionage applications. 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, 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 the 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 reduce if there were significant changes made to standard statistics courses.

External Links

• Jessica Utts's UC Davis page

• Parapsychology papers by Jessica Utts

Textbooks

• "Seeing Through Statistics", Jessica M. Utts, 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.