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Be sufficiently worried

Though Smartodds loves Statistics is in hibernation while we work out what direction it should take in the future, the current Coronavirus epidemic...

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Britain’s toughest quiz

A year ago that I wrote a post explaining that one of the traditions of the Royal Statistical Society is that every year around Christmas it...

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Just lucky

  According to world chess champion Magnus Carlsen, the secret to his success is... ... I've just been lucky. Lucky? At chess? Well, no,...

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Friday the 13th

  Friday 13th. What could possibly go wrong today? Well, according to people who suffer from Friggatriskaidekaphobia - the fear of Friday 13th...

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Cube-shaped poo

  Do you like pizza? If so, I've got good and bad news for you. The good news is that the 2019 Ig Noble prize winner in the category of...

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Monkey business

Stick a monkey on a typewriter, let him hit keys all day, and what will you get? Gibberish, probably. But what if you're prepared to wait longer...

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The China syndrome

  In a couple of earlier posts I've mentioned how statistical analyses have sometimes been used to demonstrate that results in published...

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Black Friday

  Had you heard today is Black Friday. Or have you been living as a hermit in a cave without phone or access to emails for the last couple of...

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At The Intersection

You'll remember Venn diagrams from school. They're essentially a mathematical tool for laying out the information in partially overlapping sets. And...

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One-in-a-million

  Suppose you can play on either of 2 slot machines: Slot machine A pays out with probability one in a million. Slot machine B pays out with...

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Juvenile dinosaurs

  This blog is mostly about Statistics as a science rather than statistics as numbers. But just occasionally the statistics themselves are so...

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