A smiley-face is very expressive, statistically. By tweaking the eyes, mouth and other bits, you can literally put a meaningful face on any jumble of numbers. Herman Chernoff pointed this out in 1973 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, in a monograph called The Use of Faces to Represent Points in K-Dimensional Space […]
Tag: numbers
Numbers: A conservative estimate
Investigator Neil Gussman writes from an American military base in Iraq: Earlier I had an argument that would only happen here, at least in my life. I was walking out the latrine near our motor pool and an old sergeant in third platoon was walking in. I said hello and he launched into the latest […]
A little numbers game
Investigator William J. Maloney received the following note. It maybe be of interest as a harbinger of what scientists will be doing for the next several years: Dear William, From where I sit, small is big. In my work at Boston College, I focus on developing nanotechnology-inventions so small they are measured in nanometers: billionths […]