Nate Silver, baseball statistician turned political analyst, gained a lot of attention during the 2012 United States elections when he successfully predicted the outcome of the presidential vote in ...

SCIENCE, being a human activity, is not immune to fashion. For example, one of the first mathematicians to study the subject of probability theory was an English clergyman called Thomas Bayes, who was ...

Having a strong opinion about an issue can make it hard to take in new information about it, or to consider other options when they’re presented. Thankfully, there’s an old rule that can help us avoid ...

The Rev. Thomas Bayes was, as the honorific the Rev. suggests, a clergyman. Too bad he wasn’t a lawyer. Maybe if he had been, lawyers today wouldn’t be so reluctant to enlist his mathematical insights ...

The stock market is an ever-changing place. In fact, it’s changing every second of every day as prices go up and down, and new factors impact the trajectory of the market. It’s important for investors ...

The statistician Thomas Bayes lived in the 18th century, not the 16th as wrongly stated in an article on December 1.

In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes' theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined. ~ Nate Silver If the ...

Three perspectives worth mentioning this morning. 1) Mysterious disappearances were once the norm. A reader who runs a tech firm writes: It's interesting to remember that this sort of mysterious ...

It turns out that the old adage about statistics and damned lies wasn’t a joke. Sticks and stones may be bonebreakers, and words inflict no (physical) pain, but numbers can kill. In 2004, for instance ...