This is a great article about probability theory written by Steven
Strogatz. His whole blog is good for non-mathematicians but this one has
a nice example about conditional probability.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/chances-are/
On 6/24/2010 10:13 AM, Ed Merkle wrote:
Christophe,
You may already know it, but Gelman has a book on teaching statistics
that contains many good examples. One that comes to mind (I think I
found it there, at least) involves conditional probabilities involving
being drunk and having a car accident at night. The upshot is that
P(accident at night | drunk) is low, but P(drunk | accident at night)
is high (above .5, if I recall).
There is also a contingency table example from the tv show
Mythbusters, where they study whether yawning is contagious. They do
not use statistics in the tv show and end up drawing the wrong
conclusion. See, for example,
http://www.statisticool.com/mythbusters.htm
Ed
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