Category Archives for "Probability & Statistics"

(Contributor Post) A Primer on Statistical Significance — Grade Comparison, Fertilizer Selection, Dice Rolling and Tire Lifespan Evaluation and More!

Statistical significance — in a nutshell — is a way of determining if an outcome occurred by random chance, or if there was something else that caused that outcome. For example, let’s say that a school had two teachers, each with approximately $30$ students in their class. Both classes take a standardized test, and it turns […]

Desmos: A Definitive Guide (How to Perform Cool Computations and Creating Great Graphs Using Online Graphing Calculator)

Think you’re fond of of graphing and computing stuffs? Great! Because you might remember this thing called the Texas Instrument TI-83 from the old days. Sure, while programmable calculators in general are still pretty much popular these days, the graphing calculators from the 21st-century are also coming in waves as we speak — potentially disrupting the market of scientific computing and educational […]

Biostatistics For Health Professionals (McGill EPIB 507) — A Review

For all our prospective med-school students (and others alike) who are currently enrolled in EPIB 507 here in McGill, you must have wondered about why you took a course such as biostatistics in the first place, and as you have already experienced, our biostats course — as opposed to courses in the regular semesters — […]

Upcoming Last-Minute McGill MATH 323 Q&A Session

Hello everyone. For the last hours just before the final, we are hosting a free-for-all Q&A session for McGill MATH 323 (Probability). This is mainly for those who want to sharpen their skills further and address finer issues. (by the way, this is not the time to learn everything from scratch — try to do […]

Given a bunch of boxes and balls, what is the chance that randomly dropping the balls will fill all the boxes?

Carl asked the following discrete-math-style probability question: $N$ balls are randomly dropped into $k$ boxes $(k \le N)$. What is the probability that all boxes are filled? Want to know the answer? Here it is!

Upcoming McGill MGCR 273 Review Session

Hi guys. There is an upcoming MGCR 273 review session coming up. Here is what we will be working on: Sample final from Winter 2012 (the 2nd half) Any fictitious question that we can come up with that might be helpful to the students The session will be held in Redpath Library RM-19C (in the Redpath […]