Chance News 100
Quotations
"Steve Ziliak, a critic of RCTs [randomised controlled trials], complains about one conducted in China in which some visually-impaired children were given glasses while others received nothing. The case against the trial is that we no more need a randomised trial of spectacles than we need a randomised trial of the parachute."
Submitted by Paul Alper
Forsooth
One sentence too many?
“At issue was how highly correlated the prices of various subprime mortgage bonds inside a CDO might be. Possible answers ranged from 0 percent (their prices had nothing to do with each other) to 100 percent (their prices moved in lockstep with each other). Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s judged the pools of triple-B-rated bonds to have a correlation of around 30 percent, which did not mean anything like what it sounds. It does not mean, for example, that if one goes bad, there is a 30 percent chance that the others will go bad too. It means that if one bond goes bad, the others experience very little decline at all.”
Submitted by Margaret Cibes