Posted inCulture Fun Statistics
Help Wanted With Ideas For Survey About Who Will Win Presidency
It's the start of the long, last week of summer (and since I've spent the bulk of it in San Francisco, there was no summer at all), where most of…
Posted inFun Statistics
Casino Deals Unshuffled Cards
As a break from things serious, consider this scenario: In a New Jersey casino, you walk up to an electronic slot machine, stick in a buck and punch the buttons.…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
True Value Of A Parameter
Jelle de Jong writes in to ask: Working as a quant analyst in finance I recently got interested in the Briggsian/Jaynesian/Bayesian interpretation of probability but am still struggling a bit…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Probably Isn’t: Heat Waves and Nine Feet Tall Men: Part II
McKibben's Folly Suppose it is true that we have E = "A six-sided object, just one side of which is labeled 6, and when tossed only one side will show."…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Probably Isn’t: Heat Waves and Nine Feet Tall Men: Part I
Probability is screwy, and we statisticians do a horrible, rotten job of teaching it. The first thing students learn in normal statistics classes is about "measures of central tendency" or…
Posted inStatistics
Men Nine Feet Tall And Bayes Theorem
The OFloinn put up a most readable and recommended essay When is Weather Really "Climate"? and in one of the comments a reader named Gyan in part said: Many economists…
Posted inCulture Statistics
The Decline And Increase Of Mainstream Religions In The USA: With Pictures!
The Episcopals, like many other old guard protesting religions, are in trouble. Jay Akasie tells us that at this year's annual conclave, the Episcopalian leadership had their most serious discussions…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
More On The 1 in 1.6 Million Heat Wave Chance
Yesterday we looked at NCDC's claim that the 13-month stretch of "above-normal" temperatures had only a 1 in 1.6 million chance of occurring. Let's today clarify the criticism. The NCDC…