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Tag Archives: statistics

2010-01-30

Playing up the numbers

This week I read a USA Today story (from the first screen of Tuesday’s homepage) that made a couple common mistakes. The newspaper’s mistake is basing a story on a press release from an advocacy group, instead of doing an independant story based on the study itself. As frequently happens, the press release commits a [...]

Categories: Politics, statistics
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2009-10-04

Zipf’s Law

I’ve run across the interesting Zipfian distribution several times recently. Zipf’s law states that for many things, particularly words, the frequency is inversely proportional to the rank of the frequency. So, for example, the most common word is used twice as often as the second most common word, which is used twice as often as [...]

Categories: statistics
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2009-01-28

Car lifetime and miles driven

I’ve been doing some research into car fuel economy and how easy it would be to increase the efficiency of cars. Two things I needed to find were how long cars last and how many miles they are driven. I found an interesting Department of Transportation study with equations for this information. Car lifetimes are [...]

Categories: Cars, Climate, Energy, Politics
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2008-10-03

Gas prices and world car and bicycle production

(This is a re-post from last week. The original post disappeared in the server change.)
I saw a graph of car and bicycle production in The Economist. The article was On your bike: Obesity and high oil prices are good news for the world’s biggest bikemaker. This was one of the many recent stories on the [...]

Categories: Bike, Cars, Energy
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