Consider a human collective whose members issue opinions about an event that can only be true of false. Individual reliability is p, ranging between zero and one. It is higher than 0.5 when the individual is right more often than wrong; equals 1 when they
Scientific research is validated by reproduction of the results, but efforts to reproduce spurious claims drain resources. We focus on one cause of such failure: false positive statistical test results caused by random variability.
The history of particle physics has witnessed many experiments that could illustrate the role of statistics, but few can boast a discovery of such scientific impact and dimensions as the Higgs boson, resulting from a colossal collective and technological endeavour.
Bayes’s rule, a simple eighteenth century theory about assessing knowledge, was controversial during most of the twentieth century.
Experimental determination or detection of the physiological mechanisms underlying disease is by and large a highly complex task. This fact has turned epidemiology into the main tool for generating knowledge in the medical field.
«Statistics has a powerful and far-reaching effect on everyone», was the claim of the International Year of Statistics, 2013. Statistics is the main focus of this monograph.
In 2012, the Royal Statistical Society issued the following question to the members of the British Parliament, probably regarding the International Year of Statistics (2013): «If you toss a coin twice, what is the probability of getting heads twice? ». The correct answer is «a probability of
