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Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Roman imperial history (pie chart edition)
Why did so many would-be Roman emperors refuse to update their priors? Hat tip to Flibidi via reddit (DataIsBeautiful).
The geography of love
We found this fascinating romantic census of the United States via The New York Times. (Hat tip to Marginal Revolution for the pointer.) According to Hilarie Sheets of the Times, R. Luke DuBois became obsessed with the words people use to describe themselves in their online … Continue reading
The “Paradox of the Gatecrasher” is not a paradox
There is a sizable scholarly literature discussing the so-called “Paradox of the Gatecrasher,” a simple thought experiment introduced many years ago by British philosopher L. Jonathan Cohen, an evidence problem designed to test the proper role of statistics in law. (For a … Continue reading
Shades of slavery (circa 1861)
According to Gareth Cook’s fascinating essay on the history of “infographics,” this was President’s Lincoln favorite map. Here is the opening paragraph of Mr Cook’s essay (emphasis ours): Near the end of 1861, with the American Union crumbling, President Abraham Lincoln became … Continue reading
How easy is it to fix an NFL game?
Match fixing has occurred in soccer leagues around the world, so why should the NFL (or college football, for that matter) be any different? In fact, according to this devious report by Brian “The-Fix-Is-In” Touhy, it is much easier to “fix” or … Continue reading
Posted in Deception, Economics, Law, Questions Rarely Asked, Sports
Tagged bets, Match-fixing
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All proof is probabilistic
That is the premise of our latest paper “Visualizing Probabilistic Proof.” (We’ve blogged about this paper before, but the latest draft of our paper is available on SSRN here and will be published in an upcoming volume of The Washington University Jurisprudence … Continue reading
Infinite regress, bias, and the Coase theorem
In their paper “Motive attribution asymmetry for love vs. hate drives intractable conflict,” Adam Waytz, Liane Young and Jeremy Ginge appear to extend the logic of the Coase Theorem into the domain of politics. Specifically, Waytz, Young, and Ginge study the problem of … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Law, Philosophy, Politics
Tagged Bias, Coase Theorem, Infinite Regress
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Chess piece survival rates
Someone on digg posted a variant of this question on Quora: “What are the chances of survival of individual chess pieces on average.” In reply, Oliver Brennan, a chess aficionado and computer programmer, posted this answer: Update (25 Oct. 2014): The excellent … Continue reading
prior probability 