A Probability note
Leave a reply
Tag Archives: probability
What are the chances?
Figuring the odds of Earth’s global hot streak
First, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration calculates global average temperature going back to 1880. That’s 135 years. So if no other forces were in play and temperatures last year were totally at random, then the odds of 2014 being the warmest on record are 1 in 135. Not too high.
The Hipster Effect
The Mathematical Reason All Hipsters Look the Same
Citing The hipster effect: When anticonformists all look the same
When hipsters are too slow in detecting the trends, they will keep making the same choices and therefore remain correlated as time goes by, while their trend evolves in time as a periodic function.
Stoics: Myth and Reality
“Skepticism” about Climate Change
The link between atmospheric CO2 and rising global temperatures cannot be dismissed as a case of “correlation and causality.” Continue reading
Gay brains or bad statistics
Peter Coles (who is himself gay) looked at the story Gay men and heterosexual women have similarly shaped brains, research shows, going back to the actual research paper.
In Cerebral Asymmetry: is it all in the Mind? he argues that the statistics behind the conclusion are suspect:
The Meanest Man in Math
The Epic Story of Johann Bernoulli.
No profession is free from the kind of miserable jerks who ruin it for everyone else. No intelligence level is either. When great intelligence, prestige careers, and big egos come together, things get ugly. Johann Bernoulli was, as a person, very ugly.
Nature, Nurture, and Noise
Even if we can get the genes right, and somehow completely control environments, there will always be noise to make life richly unpredictable.
Political Seismology
Eric Cantor’s Loss Was Like an Earthquake
Everybody is talking how it was big and far-reaching surprise, but here Nate Silver has something more subtle in mind: The statistics of Republican primary results look a lot like those of earthquakes, and he presents the graphs to show it. Major primary upsets, like serious earthquakes, are rare but they do happen. Furthermore, they are fundamentally random and unpredictable.
Politics, Pundits, and Probabilty
Nate Silver wrote this before the fall of Eric Cantor: The Political Media Still Fall for the Hot-Hand Fallacy.
He referred to it afterwards:
