June 22, 2009

Swine flu, black swans, and Geneva-eating dragons

External DeathThis saturday I talked at ExtroBritannia about risk, or in particular, what statistics can tell us to worry/not worry about. As promised, here are the slides as PDF (6.5M)

In particular, the micromort measures I talked about come from this very instructional lecture.

For a good overview of how to handle power laws, see Power-law distributions in empirical data by Aaron Clauset, Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, M. E. J. Newman. A good technical book about this kind of extreme distributions is Critical Phenomena in Natural Sciences: Chaos, Fractals, Selforganization and Disorder: Concepts and Tools (Springer) by Didier Sornette.

Posted by Anders3 at June 22, 2009 10:39 AM
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