Welcome to the Halloween edition of StatsInTheWild: Here are some interesting articles: THE PARANORMAL: THE EVIDENCE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR CONSCIOUSNESS PAPERS RELATED TO THE 1995 REVIEW OF THE GOVERNMENT STARGATE PROGRAM AN ASSESSMENT OF THE EVIDENCE FOR PSYCHIC FUNCTIONING JESSICA UTTS’ HOMEPAGE Cheers.

I met Stephen Fienberg (not to be confused with Steve Feinberg) today at the Pfizer Colloquim. This morning he met with all of the grad students, and we got to ask him questions. Somehow we got onto the topic of the flu vaccine and it’s safety, which led to him talking about the link between…

One of the things I’ve always liked about statistics is that the methods can be applied to so many interesting areas. John Tukey expressed this sentiment well, saying “The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard.” Well said, John. Well said. Today, let’s play a little bit…

AP IMPACT: Statisticians reject global cooling Cheers.

I’ve been reading a lot about vaccines lately, and I just finished a book, “Look Me in the Eyes” (highly recommended) about Asperger’s syndrome so naturally I stumbled across this article: On Parenting: Genes—Not Vaccines—Linked to Autism from 2008. In the last paragraph they say: “Earlier this week, researchers at the California Department of Public…

Here is an interesting website about the H1N1 flu with state by state data for the United States. And here is an interesting graph from the CDC about the number of hospital visits for flu like symptoms. Not a good start to this flu season. I wonder if that spike this year is influenced more…

The Shutdown Corner, a Yahoo! sports blog notes that the redskins will play their sixth consecutive game against a winless opponent. Quite impressive. In the post they note that the chances of this happening are 1 in 32,768. I have some comments: I think what they mean to say is that given the Redskins schedule…

This. Is. Awesome. Google is using aggregated counts of search terms to predict the prevalence of flu. They say: “We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate current flu activity around the world in near real-time.” Google Flu Trends. Watch the…

So I’m slowly making my way through chapters 15-18 of Probability Essentials by Jacod and Protter and the introduction to chapter 16 mentions that C.F. Gauss used to be on the old German 10 Deutche Mark along with the normal pdf. Here is a picture. Cheers.

A few days ago as I was driving to work (ok, i don’t really have a job…..school), I heard on the radio that New York health care workers were protesting in Albany about being forced to get the regular seasonal flu vacine and then the H1N1 vaccine or be fired. Their argument that the vaccine…