Posts

Another puzzle from the New Scientist - #134: Can you work out which keyboard to hack?. It goes as follows: James Blond edges along the corridors of the supervillain’s base, and comes to two locked doors, each with a keypad that requires a four-digit code.

Solution to #131 “The Paradise Club” puzzle from the New Scientist. This week (No 3352 - 18 September 2021) the New Scientist posted the following puzzle: Down at The Paradise Club, Gus and Bart take it in turns to roll a pair of dice.

Shall I display my data using a table or a graph? The usual answer is: it depends. Mostly, it depends on who the audience is and how the data will be used.

Attempt to solve #115 “A random robot” puzzle from the New Scientist. This week (No 3336 - 29 May 2021) the New Scientist published the following puzzle: Roman the test robot is being given one final roam before being consigned to the scrapheap where he can rust in peace.

This post is concerned with a ubiquitous problem of outliers. They are infamous for degrading the performance of many models/algorithms. As a result, ongoing attempts try to accommodate them by deriving robust estimators.

Overview Mitani and co-authors’ present a deep-learning algorithm trained with retinal images and participants’ clinical data from the UK Biobank to estimate blood-haemoglobin levels and predict the presence or absence of anaemia (Mitani et al.

It is usually taught in statistics classes that Binomial probabilities can be approximated by Poisson probabilities, which are generally easier to calculate. This approximation is valid “when \(n\) is large and \(np\) is small,” and rules of thumb are sometimes given.

I present a solution to a modification of the “hardest logic puzzle ever” using probability theory. Background “The hardest logic puzzle” was originally presented by Boolos (1996) and since then it has been amended several times in order to make it harder (see Rabern and Rabern 2008; Novozhilov 2012).

Recently, I came across this very interesting article published in Science about how plastic waste is associated with disease on coral reefs (J. B. Lamb et al. 2018). The main conclusions are

Poor quality statistical reporting in the biomedical literature is not uncommon. Here is another example by Cirio et al. (2016). The study itself is well planed, executed and reported. The aim was to assess whether heated and humidified high flow gases delivered through nasal cannula (HFNC) improve exercise performance in severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients.