Are You Sitting Comfortably?

This article shows how consideration of seating arrangements in theatres can be used as a basis for constructing an interesting probability model.     

The Game of Tai Sai

In this article Ann-Lee Wang describes a gambling game that many Malaysians engage in. often illegally. The game is called “Tai Sai” which literally means “Big Small” in Chinese. There are two versions of the game, both of which provide interesting problems for teachers of introductory courses in probability. Both versions use three dice.     

Beyond Average: Contemporary statistical techniques for analysing student evaluations of teaching

Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) have been used to evaluate higher education teaching performance for decades. Reporting SET results often involves the extraction of an average for some set of course metrics, which facilitates the comparison of teaching teams across different organisational units. Here, we draw attention to ongoing problems with the naive application of this approach. Firstly, a specific average value may arise from data that demonstrates very different patterns of student satisfaction. Furthermore, the use of distance measures (e.g. an average) for ordinal data can be contested, and finally, issues of multiplicity increasingly plague approaches using hypothesis testing. It is time to advance the methodology of the field. We demonstrate how multinomial distributions and hierarchical Bayesian methods can be used to contextualise the SET scores of a course to different organisational units and student cohorts, and then show how this approach can be used to extract sensible information about how a distribution is changing.     

Using playing cards to differentiate probability interpretations

The aprioristic (classical, naïve and symmetric) and frequentist interpretations of probability are commonly known. Bayesian or subjective interpretation of probability is receiving increasing attention. This paper describes an activity to help students differentiate between the three types of probability interpretations.     

Retracted: On a Patrol Problem

Retraction: The following article from Teaching Statistics, ‘On a Patrol Problem’ by Mohammed Ageel, published online on 8 June 2007 on Wiley Online Library (onlinelibrary.wiley.com), has been retracted by agreement between the author, the current and immediate past journal Editors, Paul Hewson and Roger Johnson, the Trustees of Teaching Statistics and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to unacknowledged overlap with ‘A Patrol Problem’ by Alan Levine, published in Mathematics Magazine, vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 159–166 (1986).     

Bubble entrainment, spray and splashing at hydraulic jumps

INTRODUCTION A hydraulic jump is the sudden transition from a high-velocity, supercritical open channel flow into a slow-moving, sub-critical flow (Belanger, 1840; Bakhmeteff, 1932; Henderson, 1966; Chanson, 2004a). It is characterised by a sudden rise of the free-surface, with some strong energy dissipation and mixing, large-scale turbulence, air entrainment, waves and spray (Fig.1). Early experimental studies of air bubble entrainment were conducted in terms of the quantity of entrain…     

Neutrinos and our Sun — Part 3

In the concluding part of the article on Neutrinos and our Sun we discuss the detection of atmospheric neutrinos, their fluxes and zenith angle distributions. Here too one finds discrepancies with theoretical predictions. We discuss how the idea of neutrino oscillations helps resolve both the solar neutrino puzzle (discussed in Part 2) and the discrepancy observed in atmospheric neutrino fluxes. This is followed by a discussion of neutrino masses and the recent confirmation of the neutrino oscillations in the KamLAND experiment.     

谈随机事件及独立性

本文对概率统计定义给了比较深刻出的阐述,又给出了两个事件相互独立的两种等阶定义。