planetwater

ground- water, geo- statistics, environmental- engineering, earth- science

What is the Probability

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I would like to point you to a fairly new webpage: The book of odds.

It’s fairly easy to guess [sic!], what this page is about:

Book of Odds is the world’s first reference on the odds of everyday life. It is a destination where people come to learn about the things that worry or excite them, to read engaging and thoughtful articles, and to participate in a community of users that share their interests and ambitions.

The founders of this page collected information for a couple of years, evaluated that data, and put the resulting statistics on their webpage. Some of them are funny, some are interesting, some are a little old. For sure, the page is interesting to check out!

It remains to remember what odds are: the odds of an event is the ratio of the event’s probability to occur to the complementary probability. An example:

The odds that a wildfire will be started by humans are 1 in 1.18 (85%). This means that about 85% of wildfires are started, intentionally or accidentally, by people

This means, 85% is the ratio of the numbers of wildfires started by humans and the number of total wildfires (in a given area over a given time, none of which is unfortunately directly mentioned in this article at the book of odds) is 100/118.

Written by Claus

October 25th, 2009 at 11:32 am

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