Clinical trials are used to establish that medicines work. But these don't take into account the genetic differences between us that can mean very different outcomes for different patients.
There are 130 billion gallons of water in Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota, and now, trillions of spiny water fleas.
Corey Coyle/Wikimedia
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.
Would you go ‘flats’ or ‘hills’?
Shutterstock/Brian A Jackson
The study of innovation in large companies and start-ups would benefit from being inspired by physics, which mobilizes different sets of laws for large masses and particles.
Most Canadians have a higher probability of dying of heart disease than winning something in the McDonald’s Monopoly game.
THE CONVERSATION CANADA/Scott White
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.
The code that could see you a winner in McDonald’s Monopoly competition.
Paul McMillan
Rand Wilcox, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Any field that collects and analyzes data relies on statistical techniques to make sense of it all. Modern, more accurate methods should supplant the old ways... but in many cases, they haven't yet.
Will he or won’t he hit the bullseye? Using Bayes’ Theorem, your prediction will be based on how the current match is going - and how he’s played in the past.
Flickr/Marjan Lazarevski
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.
When a player’s on fire, is it hot hands?
Basketball image via www.shutterstock.com.
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.
A perfect night out involves a lot of chance.
Shutterstock
People around the world were shocked when Hillary Clinton, ahead in many polls, didn't end up the U.S.' president-elect. But that doesn't mean the polls themselves were wrong.
What makes your brain go all-in on what it thinks you’re seeing?
Chips image via www.shutterstock.com.
How does your brain deal with the ambiguous and variable visual information your eyes collect? Neuroscientists think it bets on what's the most likely version of reality.
Pi is at the center of all circles.
Holger Motzkau
The first digits of numbers in a data set aren't distributed equally. And now you know more than a lot of fraudsters do – and should – when they're making up their phony numbers.