1. Maths Shorts: Imagining The Impossible
2. Mathematics

Comparing the activity and calorie expenditure levels of Western office workers and African hunter-gatherers adds some surprising new data to the science of obesity.

A brewer uses this technique to monitor quality differences in multiple batches of the same beer.

Is a newly discovered poem really written by William Shakespeare? Using statistical analysis of his known word use, researchers set up null and alternative hypotheses to investigate.

A battery manufacturer tests just a sample of its product to verify its claims about battery life. A margin of error and a confidence level help quantify its accuracy.

This quality control method helped Quest Diagnostics streamline and improve their system for processing and testing lab samples so they could meet their nightly deadlines.

Heights of third graders in one class. Quality scores for circuit boards at a factory. Taking multiple samples allows us to visualise the sampling distribution of the sample mean.

Sickle cell disease is an example of binomial distribution in families with two parents who are carriers for this genetic trait.

The US counts every resident every 10 years, or at least tries to. Statisticians use sampling from a population as an alternative to a complete count, as utilised at a potato chip factory.

We move beyond observational studies, like the one of marine life in the remote Line Islands, to designing experiments that manipulate various subject groups, as in the case of a medical study about osteoarthritis treatments.

This historical story describes how researchers untangled the relationship between smoking and lung cancer.

One city surveyed the happiness of its residents. Two-way tables help organise the data and tease out relationships between happiness levels and opinions about aspects of the city itself.

Twin studies track how similar identical and fraternal twins are on various characteristics, even if they don't grow up together. Correlation lets researchers put a number on it.

Winter snowpack in the Colorado Rockies can predict spring water supply. Plotting annual measurements in a scatter plot lets resource managers draw a regression line that helps them forecast water availability.

Plotting annual numbers of Florida powerboat registrations and manatee killings suggests an uncomfortable relationship for the marine mammals.

Production at Pete and Gerry's Organic Eggs provides a number of distributions that look normal - but are they?

Visit the Boston Beanstalks club for tall people. Height is normally distributed and we can use membership cut-offs and population data to calculate Z-scores.

A nature preserve that's tracked bird migrations through New England for decades records tons of bird-related data; everything from wingspan measurements to arrival dates provides examples of normal distributions.

How can we compare sales at two franchises in the Wahoo's restaurant chain? Standard deviation helps us quantify the variability in sales.