Statistics – Page 245 – William M. Briggs

Top 10 Sure Things: Which NFL Games Were The Easiest To Pick?

Today's post is over at Edgehogs. I wanted to see how extreme bookies would go in making NFL picks, as judged by the probabilities of home-team wins as derived from…

Fun Statistics

How To Find True Love: The Marriage Problem

MEB + ARK, a.k.a. the Haystack Hunters, wrote the following: As fans of your work in real life probability and breaking the law of averages, we were hoping you could…

Statistics

Hurricane Predictors Admit They Can’t Predict Hurricanes

My heart soared like a hawk1 after learning that Messieurs Philip Klotzbach and William Gray have admitted in print the hardest thing scientists can ever confess. That they were wrong.…

Statistics

CARB Misinterprets Statistics, Calls For Elimination Of Dust

The California Air Resources Board, or CARB, has issued a press release that shows how easy it is to misunderstand statistics. That most do---fail to comprehend what statistical results are…

Fun Statistics

Are Moneylines Useful In Predicting NFL Games?

Today's post is over at Edgehogs. I wanted to know how good moneylines were at predicting wins and loses. Since Las Vegas is still in business, it was a good…

Statistics

Increasing Replication Of Un-Reproducibility In Science

Best science picture of the year, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal (and thanks to reader Dan Hughes): In just the last decade---ten mere years---the number of "peer-reviewed" journal articles…

Statistics

Geo-engineering The Climate: Durban Global Warming Conference

A group of scientists, funded generously by Big Green, which includes the Environmental Defense Fund, have released a report to coincide with the efforts of the Durban Global Warming Conference,…

Fun Statistics

Are Experts Better At Predicting Sports Than Ordinary Fans?

Today's post is over at the new and, yes, improved Edgehogs.com. Our launch was a couple of months ago. Since that time we've got a good chunk of games and…

Hagfish Bagpipe on Reader Opinion Requested: What Science Do You Find Sketchy, Exaggerated Or Wrong?July 15, 2025
The earth is a spinning ball orbiting the sun in a limitless vacuum. Maybe. But maybe not. After seeing how…
hudbwu on Jung’s Synchronicity & CoincidenceJuly 15, 2025
> you have posited that nothing has become a cause, and it is impossible the absence of anything can become…
Phil R on Reader Opinion Requested: What Science Do You Find Sketchy, Exaggerated Or Wrong?July 15, 2025
My earlier post was longish and probably wasn't that clear. I think two of the problems are a lack of…
Polybius on Reader Opinion Requested: What Science Do You Find Sketchy, Exaggerated Or Wrong?July 15, 2025
Now that I have thought more about this I think one of our biggest problems in all fields from climate…
C. P. Benischek on Reader Opinion Requested: What Science Do You Find Sketchy, Exaggerated Or Wrong?July 15, 2025
Evolution. As Stephen Jay Gould once sort of said, the lack of a single example in the fossil record of…