July 4, 2014 was the two year anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery. As the world was celebrating the “5 sigma!” announcement, and we were reading about the statistical aspects of this major accomplishment, I was aghast to be emailed a letter, purportedly instigated by Bayesian Dennis Lindley, through Tony O’Hagan (to the ISBA). Lindley, according […]
A straightforward Le Monde mathematical puzzle: Find a pair (a,b) of integers such that a has an odd number d of digits larger than 2 and ab is written as 10d+1+10a+1. Find the smallest possible values of a and of b. I ran the following R code which produced a=137 (and b=83) as the unique […]
Memory Lane: reblog July 11, 2012 (+ updates at the end). I suppose[ed] this was somewhat of a joke from the ISBA, prompted by Dennis Lindley, but as I [now] accord the actual extent of jokiness to be only ~10%, I’m sharing it on the blog [i]. Lindley (according to O’Hagan) wonders why scientists require […]
On August 20 I posted the start of “Discussion and Digest” by Bayesian statistician Tony O’Hagan– an oveview of responses to his letter (ISBA website) on the use of p-values in analyzing the Higgs data, prompted, in turn, by a query of subjective Bayesian Dennis Lindley. I now post the final section in which he [...]
My colleague in philosophy at Va Tech, Ben Jantzen*, sent me this piece by Steven Weinberg on the Higgs. Even though it does not deal with the statistics, it manages to clarify some of the general theorizing more clearly than most of the other things I’ve read. (See also my previous post.) Why the Higgs? [...]
This gets to a distinction I have tried to articulate, between explaining a known effect (like looking for a known object), and searching for an unknown effect (that may well not exist). In the latter, possible effects of “selection” or searching need to be taken account of. Of course, searching for the Higgs is akin [...]
Several blogs have devoted attention to reporters' treatment of the evidence for Higgs-Boson. (For example, others have posts here and here.) These posts criticize reporters who interpret p-values from the Higgs-Boson experiments as \(P(text{no Higgs-like particle } | text{ data})\).…
I suppose[ed] this was somewhat of a joke from the ISBA, prompted by Dennis Lindley, but as I [now] accord the actual extent of jokiness to be only ~10%, I’m sharing it on the blog [i]. Lindley (according to O’Hagan) wonders why scientists require so high a level of statistical significance before claiming to have [...]
Last week, scientists presented evidence for a "Higgs-like" particle, and this got science reporters really excited. Unfortunately, they got really excited about understanding the particle, but not the interpretation of the evidence for the particle.&#...
I guess we should not call Higgs Boson the “God Particle” any longer. Plenty of news have reported on this findings on July 4th, 2012. If you haven’t watched the original webcast announcement posted at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, you got to spend some time on it. A shorter version of the video summarizes the [...]
