Prof. Arnold Barnett speaks with CNN reporter Jacopo Prisco about his forthcoming study examining the safety of air travel. “The main takeaway is that in the period between 2018 and 2022, the worldwide death risk per boarding was one in 13.4 million,” writes Prisco. “That means that if you picked a flight completely at random and just took it, your chance of dying in a plane crash or a terrorist act was about one in 13 million.”
Writing for Scientific American, Peter Bruce examines the usefulness of statistics in politics, citing a paper by Media Lab Visiting Scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam that examines why Nate Silver’s predictions concerning the Republican primaries were off. The researchers found that “he fell into one of the classic traps of non-statistical thinking: failure to take into account the property of dependence.”
Professor Thomas Kochan writes for Fortune about the latest job’s report from The Bureau of Labor Statistics and argues that the Federal Reserve should set an explicit wage growth target: “Without significant and steady progress on the pay front, the American dream is in peril.”
Graduate student Greg Borenstein speaks with BBC News about his efforts to make chess more appealing as a spectator sport. “There’s really something magical about the ability to use computation and statistics to take that drama and that excitement and those brilliant moments and make them visible,” Borenstein explains.