Chance News 70

Forsooth

From a novel, The Kills, by Linda Fairstein, Scribner, 2004:

“Hey, how many people do you need to have in a room to guarantee the chance that at least two of them would have the same birthday?”

“I don’t know. Three hundred sixty-four.”

“Hah! Twenty-three. At least two out of every twenty-three people will have exactly the same birthday. Statistical odds. A lot of life is coincidence.”

Submitted by Margaret Cibes

New ESP study raises ruckus

Read about a new study in which a Cornell psychologist claims to have verified "ESP":
“ESP Study Gets Published in Scientific Journal, by Ned Potter, ABC World News, January 6, 2011 (including 2-min video interview).
“Journal’s paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage”, by Benedict Carey, The New York Times, January 5, 2011.

Read the study:
“Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect”, by Daryl J. Bem, Cornell University, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010.

Read a rebuttal:
“Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data”, by Eric-Jan Wagenmakers et al., University of Amsterdam.

We reanalyze Bem’s data using a default Bayesian t-test and show that the evidence for psi ["ESP"] is weak to nonexistent. …. We conclude that Bem’s p-values do not indicate evidence in favor of precognition; instead, they indicate that experimental psychologists need to change the way they conduct their experiments and analyze their data.

Submitted by Margaret Cibes based on an ISOSTAT posting by Randall Pruim