An "Exciting Guide to Probability Distributions" from the University of Oxford:
part 1,
part 2. (Two links to PDFs)
posted by JoeXIII007
on Dec 15, 2011 -
17 comments
"So, if the probability of finding an egg with two yolks is 1/1000 - then to find the likelihood of discovering four in a row you simply multiply the probabilities together four times. One thousand to the power of four brings us to the grand total of one trillion...
If true that would mean the event that occurred in Jen's kitchen was a trillion-to-one event. But is it true? No is the short answer."
posted by Petrot
on Dec 10, 2011 -
38 comments
Measure-theoretic probability: Why it should be learnt and how to get started. The
clickable chart of distribution relationships. Just two of the interesting and informative probability resources I've learned about, along with countless other tidbits of information, from statistician
John D. Cook's
blog and his probability fact-of-the-day Twitter feed
ProbFact. John also has daily tip and fact Twitter feeds for
Windows keyboard shortcuts,
regular expressions,
TeX and LaTeX,
algebra and number theory,
topology and geometry,
real and complex analysis, and beginning tomorrow,
computer science and
statistics.
posted by grouse
on Dec 5, 2010 -
17 comments
THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. "In the following Edge original essay, Taleb continues his examination of
Black Swans, the highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. He claims that those who are putting society at risk are "no true statisticians", merely people using statistics either without understanding them, or in a self-serving manner.
posted by vronsky
on Sep 16, 2008 -
41 comments
Experts can suck at predicting the future. Their intuitive sense of probability is no more developed than lay-people's. A classic experiment is to present two indistinguishable choices are presented, but with unequal probability of reward. Humans look for complex patterns, which don't exist, and preform quite poorly. Rats quickly recognize the choice with higher probability, and preform optimally.
posted by jeffburdges
on Dec 11, 2005 -
34 comments
Incredible -- but true coincidences are fascinating, and pleasing, to the psyche. I tend to agree with John Littlewood (a University of Cambridge mathematician) that "...in the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month." In other words, statistically speaking, unusual coincidences are to be expected in a world teeming with billions of humans. Still, I find such coincidences stangely inspiring. More can be found
here.
posted by ember
on Jul 7, 2005 -
97 comments
The Logic of Diversity "A new book,
The Wisdom of Crowds [
..:] by
The New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki, has recently popularized the idea that groups can, in some ways, be smarter than their members, which is superficially similar to
Page's results. While Surowiecki gives many examples of what one might call collective cognition, where groups out-perform isolated individuals, he really has only one explanation for this phenomenon, based on one of his examples: jelly beans [
...] averaging together many independent, unbiased guesses gives a result that is probably closer to the truth than any one guess. While true — it's the
central limit theorem of statistics — it's far from being the only way in which
diversity can be beneficial in problem solving."
(Three-Toed Sloth)
posted by kliuless
on Jun 20, 2005 -
6 comments
Expect a miracle? Freeman Dyson on Littlewood's Law of Miracles: "...the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. ...The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month." From his review of book debunking the paranormal (whose views he isn't entirely willing to accept).
Via
Marginal Revolution
posted by Jos Bleau
on Jul 14, 2004 -
33 comments
