Why are three-pointer shots from the corner more efficient than the ones above the break? The answer: More than 90 percent of corner three-point shots are assisted.
Sabine Braat, The University of Melbourne et Karen Lamb, Murdoch Children's Research Institute
It’s hard to decide which treatment to choose when trying to quit smoking or lose weight. The term ‘number needed to treat’ could help you decide what is most likely to work.
Psychological phenomena like confirmation bias and the Dunning-Kruger effect make it easy for people to fall for deliberate or inadvertent lies in the news.
Number crunching the winning race time for marathon athletes can tell us when the men are likely to break the two-hour barrier. But what about a target barrier for women marathon runners?
In January, measles returned to the Pacific Northwest, while Ebola resurged in the Congo. It would take a lot more research for scientists to be able to stop threats like these in their tracks.
It’s cheaper to prevent biological invasions than to react after they happen. But it’s hard to detect invaders while there are still just a few of them. Knowing when and where to look can help.
How useful is the information you get from the measure of any thing? That depends on what you chose measure in the first place, and that’s not always clear.
Kai Zhang, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Science is in a reproducibility crisis. This is driven in part by invalid statistical analyses that happen long after the data are collected – the opposite of how things are traditionally done.
Evangeline Rose, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Kevin Omland, University of Maryland, Baltimore County et Thomas Mathew, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
A new statistical test lets researchers search for similarities between groups. Could this help keep new important findings out of the file drawer?
Police practices like stop and frisk are often criticized as racial profiling. But it can be tricky to figure out from the data which officers are the worst offenders.
Shrewd media consumers think about these three statistical pitfalls that can be the difference between a world-changing announcement and misleading hype.
McDonald’s Canada has brought back its popular Monopoly game. A statistician explains the odds of winning the top prizes and how that compares to the odds we confront in everyday life.
Professor, Future Fellow and Head of Statistics at UNSW, and a Deputy Director of the Australian Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS), UNSW Sydney