Ahh, but after my study of 100 back yards I can have the Media report: " A new study has shown that over 95% of the land surveyed for litter, is completely without any signs of litter. This gives us proof positive that the litter laws are working!"
As we all know, people in general will believe anything the media states, and only a small minority of us folks will even bother to question it. :-) Michael P. Blanchard Senior Security Engineer, CISSP, GCIH, CCSA-NGX, MCSE Office of Information Security & Risk Management EMC ² Corporation 32 Coslin Drive Southboro, MA 01772 -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2011 1:11 PM To: Blanchard, Michael (InfoSec) Cc: [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: Re: [funsec] Im lovin google spam filter On Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:49:34 EDT, [email protected] said: > If we take 100 people on this list, have them all look in their > backyards and report if there is any paper or plastic blowing around, > I'll bet we can come up with a fairly high percentage of us that don't > have any paper or plastic blowing around. I'll further say that I'll > bet the number would be within a standard deviation of 4% error. So, > if 96% of us don't have any paper or plastic blowing around in our yards, > could we safely say that no-one litters? No, you can safely say that the population average of litter-free backyards is has a 70% chance between 92% and 100%, and about 95% chance of being between 88% and 100%. (Yes, it's likely to be closer to a chi-squared curve than a gaussian bell curve due to the constraint of one tail). The problem is that careful analysis is needed - I'll make a prediction that yards with chain link fences have a lot higher level of wind-born litter than unfenced yards. This of course impacts your analysis of litter sources. And incidentally, Rick *has* done the "take 100 people" type analysis, which is why he commented that (basically) the plural of anecdote isn't data. _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
