Linear Digressions

Sometimes numbers are... weird. Benford's Law is a favorite example of this for us--it's a law that governs the distribution of the first digit in certain types of numbers. As it turns out, if you'r...

16 Okt 201517min

Not to oversell it, but the student's t-test has got to have the most interesting history of any statistical test. Which is saying a lot, right? Add some boozy statistical trivia to your arsenal in ...

7 Okt 201514min

Doing some science, and want to know if you might have found something? Or maybe you've just accomplished the scientific equivalent of going fishing and reeling in an old boot? Frequentist p-values ...

2 Sep 201517min

This machine learning algorithm beat the human champions at Jeopardy. What is... Watson?

25 Aug 201515min

Come get a little "out there" with us this week, as we use a meta-study of extrasensory perception (or ESP, often used in the same sentence as "psychics") to chat about Bayesian vs. frequentist statis...

18 Aug 201511min

Ever found yourself wasting time reading online comments from trolls? Of course you have; we've all been there (it's 4 AM but I can't turn off the computer and go to sleep--someone on the internet is...

7 Aug 201512min

Imagine a language that is mostly spoken rather than written, contains many words in other languages, and has relatively little written overlap with English. Now imagine writing a machine-learning-ba...

3 Aug 201512min

In a fun historical journey, Katie and Ben explore the history of the Manhattan Project, discuss the difficulties in modeling particle movement in atomic bombs with only punch-card computers and ingen...

6 Juli 201515min