Ghosts, ESP, telekinesis, astrology, and other assorted oddities are back in view. One of the “SyFy” channel’s most popular series is a show about hunting apparitions. The movie Men Who Stare at […]
Randomness isn’t in charge of anything: the “hot hand” in basketball
The Wall Street Journal is helping Leonard Mlodinow tout his book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Among other things, Mlodinow, like academics Tversky, Kahneman, and Gilovich before him, wants […]
Decision Calculator
This is just a rough prototype meant to be easy to play with inside a post. READ the help and guidebook! Suggestions for new canned examples welcome—the hard part is deriving historical […]
Climate Skeptic Conspiracy Strikes!
I have never been part of a conspiracy before—there was never the opportunity—so you can imagine how excited I am about finally joining one. It’s true that, in 1978, I, my sister, […]
Randomized Trials Are Not Needed
I promised this article a long time ago: I hope these well known calculations are enough to give the gist. Randomized controlled trials are supposed to be the gold standard of experimental […]
Lesson Two Redux: More Mysticism
Is it written into sport announcers’ contract that they shall speak in nothing but cliché? Since there is always great confusion about why premises about “fairness” or “randomness” are not needed, we […]
Statistics as Beauty; Global Warming Miscellany; SATs Biased?; More
Statistics is Beautiful? From reader Yeah, Yeah comes a link to a Wired article which assures us we should “Learn the Language of Data.” It’s not a pretty language, but it can […]
Newcomb’s Paradox And Probability
This article was suggested by reader JH who saw it discussed at Massimo Pigliucci’s site. When he was at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, William Newcomb devised the following puzzle, which some say […]
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