Statistics

12 articles
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    Here’s Why Our Postwar “Long Peace” Is Fragile

    Have mechanisms like democratization really fostered an enduring trend of peaceful co-existence, or is this just a statistical fluke—a normal interlude of relative calm before another global-scale conflagration?U.S. Postal Service / National Postal Museum / Bureau of Engraving and Printing / Wikicommons Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . You […]
  • Hand_HERO-1

    The Deceptions of Luck

    Nature makes chance, humans make luck.
  • counting votes in Worcester Mass

    Why Were the UK Election Polls So Wrong? A Statistical Mystery

    Workers count votes at a polling place in Worcester, Mass.SuperStock via Getty Images Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Last Thursday the UK’s Conservative Party stomped to an electoral victory that fairly shocked the country. The Tories won a comfortable majority of seats in parliament, enabling them to govern […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    A Computer Program That Hacks Language & Exposes US Secrets

    One of the most significant effects of the ongoing NSA surveillance scandal is that it drew so much attention to the massive secret, official world that’s grown up in the US since the 9/11 attacks. These clandestine operations have undergone a dramatic recent expansion, though there is of course a long history of clandestine activity […]
  • Iowa tornado

    Why Everyone Thinks They’re Safer Than Average

    It’s an odd quirk of the human mind that we tend to think we’re less likely to be affected a particular threat—be it the flu, a car accident, or a flood—than anyone else. Like the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average, this is a patent impossibility: Everyone can’t be […]
  • Siegfried_HERO

    Science’s Significant Stats Problem

    Researchers’ rituals for assessing probability may mislead as much as they enlighten.

  • Aczel_HERO

    Chasing Coincidences

    Why it’s hard to recognize the unlikely.

  • bell curve

    The Marvelous, Bad Ideas That Are Worth $Billions

    It’s well-known that statistics is a deceptively difficult topic to understand—at least, it’s well-known among people who’ve had some training about those deceptive difficulties. One concept, though, that seems to penetrate the barriers to statistical understanding is the normal distribution, the standard bell curve. Even if people don’t have the mathematical language to describe it, […]

  • Article Image

    What Earth Tells Us About Life, Intelligence & the Universe

      Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Astrobiology, the study of life on other worlds,  is one of the coolest sciences ever.  From extremophile bacteria living miles underground and feeding off radioactivity to exoplanetary systems with bizarre head-spinning architectures, astrobiology includes some of the most amazing parts of the natural […]

  • Article Image

    Planes, Trains, & Automobiles. And Death.

    If you’ve ridden in a car piloted by a young or inexperienced driver lately, chances are you’ve had an unwelcome epiphany. When driving your own car every day, navigating familiar streets, the vehicle is an extension of your body and your home, a wee castle on wheels that protects you, obeys you, and gets you […]

  • HD 8049 white dwarf

    When a Planet Is Not Really a Planet at All

    As astronomers point their telescopes up at the sky to learn about the cosmos, they tend to push those devices’ abilities to their limits. The edge of what we can measure is, of course, where all the interesting things are happening. The downside of this ambition is that the conclusions drawn from the newest data […]

  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    The Best Evidence for Dark Matter & the Uncertainty Therein

      Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . If I told you that I was 99.81 percent certain I had made a big discovery, you might suggest it was time to break out the champagne. If I said the discovery resolved one of the biggest outstanding problems in science and […]