distribution Archives - Significance magazine

Archive

Covid-19 data: To age or not to age; to date or not to date?

Pandemic swine-flu, which emerged from Mexico in spring 2009, was a wild thing but a…

Sheila M. BirdApril 22, 2020

Archive

Probably maybe: Ice cream variation

Photo by Mark Cruz on UnsplashThe saying goes that “probabilities are counter-intuitive”. A simple problem…

Christoforos Anagnostopoulos and Spiros DoxiadisMarch 20, 2019

Archive

What is the bootstrap?

Bradley Efron (pictured) was awarded the 2018 International Prize in Statistics for the creation of…

James J. CochranNovember 23, 2018

Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and family

Archive

Betting on a royal birth: how many babies will be born the same day?

On 4 September 2017, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge – better known as “William…

Shomoita Alam and James HanleyFebruary 22, 2018

Archive

The Promise: When truth overshadows power

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is a prestigious event and a hot-spot for finding…

Levon DemirdjianDecember 11, 2017

Archive

Predicting the UK’s snap general election

https://unsplash.com/@jamie452I have decided to build a model to try to predict the results of the…

Gianluca BaioMay 30, 2017

Archive

Queen Elizabeth II – an extreme event monarch?

In 2016, Queen Elizabeth II entered the tenth decade of her life and cemented her position as…

Anastasia FrantsuzovaApril 12, 2017

Archive

Ask a statistician: A variation of the birthday problem, part 2

Our latest 'Ask a statistician' question received not one but two different solutions. We published…

Brian TarranDecember 14, 2016

Archive

Statistical dinosaurs and other creatures

Evolution is change in the heritable traits of biological populations over successive generations. Through these…

Marco Geraci and Mario Cortina BorjaAugust 23, 2016

Archive

Is ‘you know who’ dead? Predicting the future in Game of Thrones

Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/umairadeeb/The narrative cliff-hanger is a fiendish device – ramping up drama and tension only…

Richard ValeApril 21, 2016

Archive

Statistically speaking… How long can Pope Francis expect to live?

When elected pope of the Roman Catholic Church on 13 March 2013, the Argentinian priest…

Julian Stander, Luciana Dalla Valle and Mario Cortina BorjaFebruary 18, 2016

Archive

How Frank Wilcoxon helped statisticians walk the non-parametric path

Part of the job of a statistician is to make inferences about a population from…

Mario Cortina Borja & Julian StanderDecember 7, 2015

Han Solo and Bayesian priors

One of the most memorable errors in statistical analysis is a scene from The Empire…

Will KurtMarch 27, 2015

Archive

Distribution of badness

In a recent article, I mentioned the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, the aim of which is…

Mikhail SimkinMay 30, 2013