Comments on: Osama Bin Laden, Stockpickr, and Everything I know about Negotiation

By: Cameron

Cameron — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 06:32:00 +0000

James Altucher found Osama Bin Laden.

By: Kratoklastes

Kratoklastes — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 03:12:00 +0000

Oh boy… way to screw up a ‘gotcha’.

What you’re referring to has nothing whatsoever to do with the standard deviation, you schmendrick. It has to do with the SKEWNESS.

A distribution can have as large a variance (the square of s.d.) as you like, but if it’s SYMMETRIC (it has zero ‘excess’ SKEWNESS), it will always be the case that mean=median (=mode) and because mean=median, EXACTLY half the observations will be above the mean. (For those playing at home, it can even be fat-tailed – leptokurtic – and still be symmetric).

So for example you can parameterise a Weibull distribution (by choosing k and lambda – the scale and shape parameters) so that they approximate an asymmetric PDF.

Or you could parameterise a log-logistic (Fisk) distribution (scale and shape parameters are alpha and beta for Fisk).

Or maybe a Burr distribution – any of the ones used to model income distribution would do (since only 33% of people earn above-average incomes… because of – repeat after me – SKEWNESS, not VARIANCE).

I hate to kvetch too much, but I seriously become almost verklempt when people make such meshugge statements as yours.

By: Mibrahimkhn

Mibrahimkhn — Mon, 21 May 2012 09:04:00 +0000

No, he was killed before few years as people of the region believe, but on 2nd May 2011, it was a political stunt of Obama. After all he has to win the election and has shown that he is too, a good salesman.

By: Androidized

Androidized — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:00:00 +0000

UBL was finally fount, probably your tip was the key.

By: Booze

Booze — Sun, 08 May 2011 06:06:00 +0000

UBL DEAD!!

By: cara

cara — Wed, 04 May 2011 00:25:00 +0000

time to update the status :)

By: kastein

kastein — Mon, 02 May 2011 19:06:00 +0000

Found your blog recently via google news (and a couple degrees of kevin bacon / wikipedia effect) and happened to read this post… yeah… eight and a half years later, he HAS been found!

By: Miles

Miles — Mon, 02 May 2011 18:27:00 +0000

They found and killed him yesterday!

By: Intuitive Statistics

Intuitive Statistics — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 10:43:00 +0000

Sorry but that is not correct, lost in statistics.
Everyone on the road has to pass a driving test with no majors and under 3 minors. That means anyone called a “driver” is already above 50/100 say on a skill level. Of these drivers 1 could be a skill level of 50 and 2 could have 100 – meaning they were both above the mean. However with a sample size of millions that distribution will show a gaussian so most people will be in the middle with some outliers. by not takeing the “average” as the exact mean, but rather as a spread around the middle of the curve, most people will be in this average bracket. 5/10 will be above average and 5/10 will be below average, but all will be above the skill set of 50/100.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 09:28:00 +0000

Damn right.
I certainly have an above average number of legs.