conditional probability
It would be foolish to ignore evidence. Luckily Bayes' theorem shows us how to take it in into account.
The company 23andMe made headlines by launching its DNA testing service in the UK. But how are the risks of developing a disease calculated?
In the previous article we looked at a psychological study which claims to provide evidence that certain types of extra-sensory perception exist, using a statistical method called significance testing. But do the results of the study really justify this conclusion?
London 2012 vowed to be the cleanest Olympics ever, with more than 6,000 tests on athletes for performance enhancing drugs. But when an athlete does fail a drug test can we really conclude that they are cheating? John Haigh does the maths.
England's performance in the World Cup last summer was thankfully overshadowed by the attention given to Paul the octopus, who was reported as making an unbroken series of correct predictions of match winners. David Spiegelhalter looks at Paul's performance in an attempt to answer the question that (briefly) gripped the world: was Paul psychic?
Being killed in a peacekeeping mission apparently depends on your nationality, at least if you're a soldier in the Spanish army. On the 1st of February 2010 the Colombian soldier John Felipe Romero serving in the Spanish army was killed in a terrorist attack in Afghanistan. It was then made public that so far 43% of the Spanish troops killed in attacks by local forces in Afghanistan and Lebanon have been foreigners. This is in striking contrast to the fact that foreign nationals make up only 7% of the Spanish army as a whole.
