What Are the Chances?

I spent the last week vacationing in South Carolina, where my parent's house seems to have Atlantic Monthly's and Harper's from the dawn of time. What luck, then, that one of the most int...

The nice thing about politicians and the newspaper columnists that write about them is that they lie a lot about statistics. That makes writing a blog that points out the errors easy to c...

Those of us who grew up with the show Let’s Make a Deal can understand the gyst of the let’s make a deal problem right away. For those of you too young (or old) to remember, here is a summary....

For a long time now, the ratio of males to females in China has been increasing. In fact, one of the most recent articles I could find on it was from 2004, where the ratio stood at around 120 boys to...

Everyday probability barely shows up in weather forecasts these days. For example, Yahoo's weather will say something like "a few showers" to mean that there is a chance of showers. However, if you ar...

A couple of posts ago, I talked about the question of whether to rent or buy (the answer: in the long run, buy; in the s...

A recent commenter asked whether the following is true: "ETAERIO is the most likely seven-letter word to get in scrabble."   As all scrabble players know, if you use all 7 of yo...

The answer to the age-old question, according to every grandmother out there, is "buy." But do the data really support this?   Housing as an Investment...

A recent article in the New York times touts: "Seawater Seems to Beat Medicine in Fighting Colds." The article g...

So my guess was wrong. Clinton won. The question is, was it the various selection biases and undecided voters, the measurement error (polls were on Saturday and Sunday but th...

Today's CNN headline screams out "Obama opens double-digit lead over Clinton." When you read the article, you find that the poll,...

If you figure out where to live by the crime rate, many of the safest places to live are outside the United States, where crime, though lower than it

It is often quipped that the lottery is a tax on stupidity (google "lottery: tax on stupidity" and you will see what I mean). I've always been bothered by this for two reasons: 1) one of the first peo...

For those of us with aging parents, visits to the hospital can become somewhat routine, unfortunately. An overnight stay for minor surgery, as my father recently had, isn't particularly worrisome--exc...

I had some role in coming up with these statistics in the New York Times, though I thought it was more li...