"Normal" human pregnancies last 40 weeks, right? Well, no; they can vary quite a bit by the mother's
race,
age,
number of previous children,
family history of delivering early or late,
home state,
work habits, and even
the fetus' HLA type. So where does that "40 week" thing come from?
Oh, dear. So check out this
super-nerdy pregnancy statistics website, from an engineer mom who is
collecting data from the public (see the
raw data and
auto-generated graphs, and
read the FAQ about the survey, with more cool graphs). Looking for
day-by-day probabilities on when that baby's due? This would be
your stats table with daily prediction (adjust dates at top of page as needed). Of course, you could always shut up your constantly inquiring relatives and friends
another way.
posted by Asparagirl
on Dec 16, 2010 -
45 comments
It has applications in
Economics,
Biology,
Pharmaceuticals, and
is rooted in State Space Modeling, which with
Kalman Filtering (
paper,
breakdown [warning: long]) was used in the
Apollo program.
Dynamic Linear Models are gaining in popularity. There exists an
R package, and both
a short doc and
a really great (read: worth buying) book (sorry, not a download, but
here's chapter 2) by
Giovanni Petris,
Sonia Petrone, and Patrizia Campagnoli with
its own little website.
posted by JoeXIII007
on Jul 30, 2010 -
14 comments
Raft to the Future: An article about the weirdness of physical models of the universe, how that weirdness correlates to the
inherent incompleteness of mathematical systems, and how time itself can
emerge at the fringes of these incomplete models.
posted by knave
on Nov 6, 2006 -
46 comments
