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What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
If you overheard the phrase "1 in a million chance" in someone else's casual conversation, what might they be talking about?
David Aldous
I have retired from Berkeley , effective end-June 2018. I now live near Seattle and am an Affiliate Professor (a.k.a. unpaid academic ) in the UW Mathematics Department . However, I continue with light-duty research and professional activities. In particular I have been updating and expanding my open research problems…
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40k coin tosses yield ambiguous evidence for dynamical bias
However, no experiment with actual coin-tosses has been done to investigate whether the predicted effect is empirically observed. Diaconis et al noted, correctly, that to estimate the probability with a S.E. of 0.1% would require 250,000 tosses, but this seems unnecessarily precise. Let's work with numbers of tosses…
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A critique of The Black Swan
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Top Ten Things that Math Probability Says about the Real World
Talk given at Cornell University, April 14 2008. Like most scientists, I habitually just write slides and extemporize the actual spoken words. For this one talk I wrote the following script, though (being hard to break the habits of 30 years) I didn't stick closely to the script. Each link is one slide.