Posted inStatistics
UN: Population To Swell To 15 Billion By 2100
It took two- to three-hundred thousand years for humans to break the 7 billion mark, which it is scheduled to do sometime late this year or early in 2012. But…
Posted inCulture Statistics
Something To Be Thankful For: Climategate 2.0
Thanks to Mr, or Mrs, Anonymous, that generous individual who has graced us with a new batch of emails from the world's top climate scientists. These new missives are guaranteed…
Posted inStatistics
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.…
Posted inFun Statistics
Only 2 days left! Predictions For 2012: Submit Yours Today!
Update Predictions are closed for this year. Come back New Year's Eve to see how we've done. We'll change the rules slightly this year and ask that everybody now predict…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What A Prediction Is And What It Is Not: Part I
I say that the Detroit Tigers, the baseball team---baseball being the most sublime of all sports, and this team being the game's most stalwart representative---will beat the Boston Red Sox…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What A Prediction Is And What It Is Not: Part II
Thanks to DAV for reminding me of a clarification. See yesterday's comments. This post is mostly bookkeeping. Tomorrow we do more examples. Sometimes, in contracts as in predictions, certain "unexpected…
Posted inStatistics
What A Prediction Is And What It Is Not: Part IV
There is a technical distinction between a scenario and a prediction, though the line is fine and often disputable. Many scenarios are merely intolerably loose, and therefore useless, predictions. The…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
All Of Statistics: Part III
(B) New data It might surprise you, but in classical (both frequentist and Bayesian) practice, if we expect to see new X, the procedure is almost always no different than…
