Chance News 95: Difference between revisions
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Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 1995</div> | Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 1995</div> | ||
Submitted by Margaret Cibes | |||
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“In my own field of flood risks, a talented statistician declared: ‘It is also true that for extremely rare events, correct uncertainty estimates may lead us to conclude that we know virtually nothing. This is not such a bad thing. If we really know nothing we should say so!’” | |||
<div align=right>Letter to editor, <i>Significance</i> magazine, June 2013</div> | |||
Submitted by Margaret Cibes | Submitted by Margaret Cibes | ||
Revision as of 13:58, 31 August 2013
Quotations
“It is worth dwelling for a moment on Egon [son of Karl] Pearson’s first-year lecture course …. [H]e was an inspirational teacher …. What was the reason for his success? [H]e was not a teacher who ladled out cookery-book recipes; rather he always seemed in his lectures to be working through and exploring problems with the class. He would wander down enticing dead-ends, but return to seek alternatives again and again until a satisfactory approach had been established. The result was that students acquired a questioning approach, not a compartmentalized approach whereby one problem was allocated to a 2 x 2 table, the next to multiple linear regression, etc.”
(1994 presidential address to the RSS)
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
“In my own field of flood risks, a talented statistician declared: ‘It is also true that for extremely rare events, correct uncertainty estimates may lead us to conclude that we know virtually nothing. This is not such a bad thing. If we really know nothing we should say so!’”
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
Forsooth
from “Ethnicity and Human Genetic Linkage Maps”, American Journal of Human Genetics, February 2005
The New York Times, August 24, 2013
Submitted by Margaret Cibes and James Greenwood
Weeding wedding invitation lists
“GUESTimation: Breaking the deadlock on wedding guest lists”
by Damjan Vukcevic, Significance, August 2013
Winner of the second annual Young Writers Competition, this article describes the process the author used to narrow his initial wedding guest list down to a number that his venue could accommodate. The process included grouping potential invitees (e.g., families), ranking them for their probabilities of attending if invited (to Australia), and using a probability distribution of the number of attendees to get a confidence interval of attendees. He also discusses his independence assumption and the consequence of using or not using it.
Submitted by Margaret Cibes