Probability – The Conversation

A lottery jackpot being won by 433 people in the Phillipines has raised accusations of foul play. Then again – such outcomes usually do.

An epigenetic model of cancer that incorporates the concept of stochasticity could also explain why cancer risk increases with age and how biological development can be reversible.

Hold your breath and make sure you vote, because the result is likely to be a squeaker.

The best science is not always the best engineering when it comes to building codes. It’s also a problem across the US, as an engineer who works on disaster resilience explains.

Planners need more reliable projections of future sea-level rise to protect communities and ecosystems. A new method helps produce them.

Why haven’t people gotten upset about how our social distancing signs are fostering innumeracy?

We always want to find patterns in sequences of events – but often they aren’t really there.

The oldest person in the world, Kane Tanaka of Japan, died in April 2022 at 119 years. The record of Jeanne Calment of France, who died at 122, has stood for almost 25 years. Will it be beaten?

The new game, which is ranking highly on Steam, involves repeatedly clicking a banana in the hope of maybe – eventually – getting a rare ‘skin’ to trade for real money. And that’s it.

A mathematical simulation shows why it can take so long to collect a full set of Pokémon cards.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that you’re more likely to die in a car accident than in a plane crash. Chances are, you’re not the average person.

Buying and selling stocks – with real or play money – is a way to harness the wisdom of the crowd about questions like who is going to win a competition.

Modern survey research does face challenges from changes in technology and in how people live their increasingly busy lives.

Early writers on probability had explained how the ‘house advantage’ didn’t need to be large for a gambling enterprise to profit enormously. But gamblers and gambling operators were slow to catch on.

People tend to dislike uncertainty and risk – two things that are hard to avoid completely during a pandemic. That’s part of why it can feel especially draining to make even small decisions these days.

Climate modelling wields huge influence on governments and investors’ decisions. Yet, researchers point out a lack of precision.

We crave certainty in our weather forecasts. But that’s only possible for big weather events such as cyclones and major storms. Everything else is probability.