Sea otters had been absent from this Alaskan national park for at least 250 years. By marrying math and statistics, scientists map this animal’s successful comeback.
Just about everyone wants medical care, but some want it a lot more. We discovered a personality trait that explains why it’s hard to improve health care outcomes and costs.
Sometimes statistics and probability can produce unexpected or counter-intuitive results. If we’re hoping to use numbers to make good decisions, we should be wary of the traps.
We naturally overestimate the risk of rare events, like shark attacks or terrorism. But there are things you can do to think more rationally about the real risk.
For 30 years, sports fans have been told to forget about streaks because the ‘hot hand’ is a fallacy. But a reanalysis says not so fast: Statistics show players really are in the zone sometimes.
Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg said he thought that Victorians have never felt more unsafe, and that burglaries, assaults and murders are rising year-on-year. Is he right?
Census data have a real impact on the lives of Australians, from determining political representation through the distribution of electorates, to the allocation of government funding.
The numerical basis used to study African economies suffers from major knowledge gaps. This needs to improve if numbers are to inform policies that will encourage growth and push back poverty.
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