Common sense would direct you to sit in the back of the plane if you were trying to increase your chance of surviving an albeit unlikely crash. Turns out that statistical analysis indicates that this is true, that is, your likelihood of survival seems to increase if you sit further back in the cabin. Nevertheless, I’d still prefer to sit in first class most of the time.
July 20, 2007
Safest Seats
January 6, 2007
Statistical Handbook
Gerard Dallal’s Little Handbook of Statistical Practice is an invaluable resource for those of us who are performing statistical analyses.
March 3, 2006
Tufte’s New Deal
Edward Tufte is taking pre-orders for his forthcoming book Beautiful Evidence. He’s also got a pretty nice deal offering all four of his books (including the new one) for only $150.
February 24, 2006
More on Benford’s Law
Essentially, Benford’s law predicts a certain distribution of numbers – violations of that distribution indicate fabricated data. Turns out Boing Boing had a post on this just a few weeks ago. The best treatment of it is on Wolfram’s Mathworld pages, which also has an extensive bibliography (always a plus.) I’m interested in studying applications of it. Fraud detection in accounting seem to be the a use, but I don’t know how commonly used it is. Another application described in the following article as a way to detect whether random numbers are truly random (or if they are merely faked.)
February 22, 2006
Benford’s Law
Kottke.org has an interesting piece on using Benford’s law to catch cheaters.