Pages tagged “statistics”
15 Jun 2013
Pleasing taste, some monsterism
Advice about babies comes with large error bounds. It’s reassuring, up to a point. “Oh, that? Anything between three times a day and once a month is normal, yes.” “Aha, right - OK: sometimes there are three of them.” That sort of thing. Due to the “red book”, all parents know their child’s weight, and also know which percentile that puts the little blighter on. Slightly worrying to hear, though, that a health worker told a friend of ours “mmm, well, 99th percentile is quite high.
12 Apr 2013
Be careful on your birthday
I’ve long thought that this would be the case: you are statistically more likely to die on your birthday than any other day of the year. People do unusual things on their birthdays - drink more alcohol, push their front door open and get a shock from a surprise party, parachute jumps… Idly browsing the internet, I’ve just discovered that this has been studied, and the results show “the overall death excess on the day of birth was 13.
22 Jan 2013
How many nappies to go?
Recently, wee Iris experienced a nappy surplus. We had too many of the things in size 2, and she outgrew them. In an attempt to avoid this happening again, and so as to avoid wastage and expenditure, I have developed The Nappy Predictor Module (TM). I used data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a statistical function from StackExchage. The results show that Iris is about 86th percentile (weight-for-age).
29 Oct 2012