The negative hypergeometric distribution isn’t labeled negative because it uses negative numbers. It’s negative because we’re thinking about failure… The Hypergeometric Flower Pot Ursula Whitcher Mathematical Reviews (AMS) I spent the hottest days of summer engrossed by Balatro, a video game cross between poker and solitaire that’s catnip for probabilityRead More →
The more logic puzzles you do, the more easily you parse the clues. Tackling statistical word problems is no different... Reading to Solve Sara Stoudt Bucknell University It’s summertime, and, at least for me, it’s prime time for nostalgia. Do you remember those logic puzzles you may have played asRead More →
If we were working with low dosages and using the correlation between dosage and outcomes as our metric of assessing effectiveness, we might underestimate how well the drug is actually working... Footnote Finding When Correlation and Regression Slopes Tell (Slightly) Different Stories Sara Stoudt Bucknell University I recently read RobertRead More →
Can I use these text analyses to understand the content of the bill, without reading 400 pages? Visualizing anti-trans legislation using RStudio Bianca Thompson Westminster University While I was working with Kenan İnce on their open source active learning book, Quantitative Reasoning for Social Justice, we discussed their dream chapterRead More →
The problem is similar to search problems in theoretical computer science, where the goal is to systematically locate a hidden target (in this case, the rabbit)... Capturing the Invisible Hopping Rabbit Sunil Chebolu Illinois State University Deepayan Sarkar Indian Statistical Institute A Rabbit Hunting Problem Imagine an invisible rabbit thatRead More →
The number of comparisons is going to escalate quickly. If we have four flavors of ice cream, we go from Scenario 1 showing three significant variables in its model outputs to the rest of the scenarios only reporting one... Is this $p$-hacking? If you have to ask, it probably is.Read More →
I don't believe that responsible people should indulge in anything that can be even remotely considered ultimatums or threats. That is not the way to reach peaceful solutions.—President Eisenhower, July 8, 1959. Daniel Ellsberg and the science of extortion Bill Casselman University of British Columbia Daniel Ellsberg died just lastRead More →
Different sampling approaches exist that target different sub-populations to make sure they appear in the sample. To see these sampling approaches at work we are going to sample lines from Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself”… Sampled Poems Contain Multitudes Sara Stoudt Bucknell University The basic principle of statistical inferenceRead More →
Decoding, Gerrymanders, and Markov Chains David Austin Grand Valley State University In 2009, crypto miner James Howells of southern Wales mistakenly threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins. That’s over $100 million even in today’s sinking crypto landscape. Thirteen years later, Howells has a plan, backed by venture capital,Read More →
Social media platforms connect users into massive graphs, with accounts as vertices and friendships as edges... Predicting friendships and other fun machine learning tasks with graphs Noah Giansiracusa Bentley University Artificial intelligence (AI) breakthroughs make the news headlines with increasing frequency these days. At least for the time being, AIRead More →