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.
Academic rigor, journalistic flair
Articles on Probability
Displaying 1 - 20 of 29 articles
Whether it's a toss of the coin or a flip of the bat, can any method to decide who plays first in cricket be unbiased?
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.
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.
With some big prizes are on offer in the latest competition from the fast food giant, best to see what the numbers say.
Cheating at dice games is possible – but it does require some skills.
Never mind three more years – some people think just one might be a tall order.
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.
The decisions we make in life often come down to Bayes' Theorem, but most of us don't even realise what it is. So how does it work?
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.
Things tend to revert back to their typical state over time, so we should be careful not to mistake that for some other trend.
When is a pack of cards truly random?
Fixed odds betting terminals attract all the attention, but something alarming is being overlooked.
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.
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.
We know pi appears when we talk about circles. But it appears in many other places, too. Why, pi, why?
A mathematician looks at the odds.
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.
Preventing crime before it happens, while saving resources, sounds like a great use of big data. But these calculated probabilities raise big questions about civil liberties.
Top contributors
-
Professor of Cognitive Psychology, UNSW
-
PhD Candidate, Australian National University
-
Professor of Computer Science and Provost/CEO/PVC, University of Nottingham
-
Adrian Barnett is a Friend of The Conversation.
Professor of Statistics; President of the Statistical Society of Australia, Queensland University of Technology
-
ARC DECRA Fellow, School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University
-
Professor in Evolutionary Biology (jointly appointed with South Australian Museum), Flinders University
-
Associate Professor, Social Innovation, CQUniversity Australia
-
ARC DECRA Fellow, UNSW
-
Professor of Autonomous Systems, University of Liverpool
-
Senior NCAS Research Fellow, University of Oxford
-
Royal Society Research Professor, University of Oxford
-
Director, Economic Modelling, The Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford
-
Emeritus Professor of Econometrics, University of Southampton
-
Senior Lecturer in Mathematics, University of Technology Sydney
-
Professor of Mathematics, University of Florida
