January 25, 2014
Briefly
- Warren Buffett is offering a prize of a billion dollars for correctly predicting all 63 US college Division 1 basketball games. Corey Chivers analyses the odds, and summarises as “You’re not going to win, but you’re still going to play.” (via Jie Fu Yu)
- According to the Herald, nearly one in three people (28%) admitted to the emergency room on Saturday nights had been drinking. According to the NZ Alcohol and Drug Use Survey 26% of people in New Zealand drink more than twice a week, and it would be deeply unsurprising if Saturday was one of those nights. The real statistic is that 80% of those had been drinking heavily: that’s just over 20%, almost twice the proportion of people who report drinking heavily at least once a week. There is an increased risk, but less than the story implies.
- Some researchers at Princeton have modelled Facebook as an epidemic (PDF preprint), and predict that 80% of people will recover by 2017. I’m not convinced — they aren’t modelling the heterogeneity in Facebook users, and I think the older users will hang on longer. [Update: Mike Devlin uses web and social media data to show that Princeton will also disappear]
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
There’s 63 games. I’m going to flip a coin. My odds of winning at 1 in 2^63. Calculating the odds isn’t all that difficult.
10 years ago
Yes, but most people don’t just flip a coin. They rank the teams based on the size of their stadium or some other non-flat prior distribution.
10 years ago
You need a three sided coin because there can be draws.
The problem with the 1 in 3 drinkers in ED is that they suck up resources including security resources because they and their friends tend to be loud, noisy and obnoxious. They suck up money that could be better used elsewhere.
10 years ago