I’ve been doing a lot of traveling recently, and am increasingly disturbed by the growing surveillance society and the misplaced reassurances that are used to assuage the public, coined “security theater” by Bruce Schneier. Here we’ll look at this drama in the context of screening for drugs of abuse. In a later post we’ll look [...]

First, a confession—I’m a mathphobe, traumatized by growing up in a family skewed with an overabundance of math genes for whom math skills came as naturally as breathing.  I always got confused, and thought it was “sadistics,” not “statistics.” So it was with a bit of hesitation that I tentatively began Between the Lines (BTL), [...]

The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) college football rankings are in turmoil. For two weeks in a row, the top-ranked team has been upset by an underdog from central Texas. (Full disclosure: As a Baylor alum who is the daughter and granddaughter of Aggies, I might be just a little smug.) The BCS rankings are a [...]

Music just ain’t what it used to be. At least, that’s the stereotypical lament of each receding generation of music listeners. It’s also one way to read a new study on the evolution of pop music in the past half-century. A group of researchers undertook a quantitative analysis of nearly half a million songs to [...]

Yesterday my father-in-law asked me to buy him $100 in lottery tickets. He is ordinarily the kind of guy who would cite the quip “the lottery is a tax on people who can’t do math,” but these are not ordinary times. On Friday night the Mega Millions multi-state lottery will offer a $500 million jackpot, [...]

Cigarette maker Philip Morris spent years studying whether additives, such as menthol, added to the toxicity of their smokes. And several published studies—conducted by the company—have claimed that the additives had no impact on the danger of their products.  But thanks to lawsuits against the tobacco industry, a trove of previously secret scientific and corporate [...]

"Charles Sanders Peirce once observed that in no other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory." Thus began an article in the October 1959 Scientific American by the celebrated math columnist Martin Gardner. In fact, as John Allen Paulos observed in last January’s issue ("Animal Instincts" [Advances]), [...]

DENVER—There was substantial public outcry last year when new recommendations for mammograms came out suggesting that women could wait until age 50 to start breast cancer screening—and then only get screened every other year. Figures in support of the new policy were bandied about in the news and in doctors’ offices, regarding lives saved from [...]

March Madness always sneaks up on me. I mean, I know that March has started because my dad’s birthday and my wedding anniversary are right at the beginning of the month, but I always end up scrambling to make my NCAA basketball tournament picks the day before games start. Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg has taken the [...]

I am exited to be attending ScienceOnline in Raleigh, North Carolina later this week. And I’m even more excited to be co-moderating two sessions! One of them, at noon on Thursday, will be about Public Statistics. Hilda Bastian, my partner in crime, has written a cartoon introduction to our session, and I’ve been trying to think of what [...]

The idea behind quantifying personality is deceptively simple: personality refers to predictable differences in behavior between people. Those differences should be reasonably reliable. That is, they ought to hold constant across different types of situations. Those differences should also be reasonably stable, which means they should be consistent over time. For example, you might score [...]