A smiley-face is very expressive, statistically. By tweaking the eyes, mouth and other bits, you can literally put a meaningful face on any jumble of numbers. Herman Chernoff pointed this out in 1973 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, in a monograph called The Use of Faces to Represent Points in K-Dimensional Space […]
Tag: statistics
Why commuters do not read
One of the curses of my new job is having to commute from Cambridge into London two or three (or four or five …) days a week. Commuting must be good for something. One of the things I find it good for is primate behaviour research. I have found, for example, than commuters do not […]
The dread tomato addiction
THE DREAD TOMATO ADDICTION by Mark Clifton This essay originally appeared in the February 1958 edition of Astounding. The dates in this version have been modified (all dates plus 50 years). Ninety-two point four per cent of juvenile delinquents have eaten tomatoes. Eighty-seven point one per cent of the adult criminals in penitentiaries throughout the […]
Measurement: Who’s the Most Famous of Them All?
Eric Schulman, famed author of The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less (which appeared in the January/February 1997 issue of AIR), has produced another in his continuing statistical analyses of fame (which is related, in a fashion, to celebrity). Click here to see Schulman’s new study in its entirety. Here is a […]
