Streuspanne – Statistics and Its Curiosities

In this episode, our »Streuspanne« team looks at numerology, which sees numbers as mysterious symbols with energetic meanings that can influence our lives and destiny.

Today, the »Streuspanne Lexicon« continues with the entry »W wie Wurstkatastrophe« [German Term for: S for Sausage Disaster]. Our lexicon is not a regular series, but a section to refer to small explanations without having to go on and on in a separate series. The podcast team explains a term briefly and concisely in just a few minutes.

In the final episode of our mini-series on »Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Statistics«, things get deep – in the truest sense of the word. Our podcast team – consisting of Esther Packullat, Sascha Feth and Jochen Fiedler – looks at the major language models such as GPT-4, Llama and Gemini.

In the latest episode of our podcast »Streuspanne«, we take a critical look at the Harm to Benefit Ratio, a new key figure for assessing the Harm to Benefit Ratio of coronavirus vaccines. Based on a publication by Falk Mörl and colleagues, we discuss the reliability of this ratio, which provides particularly unfavorable results for the BioNTech vaccine.

The latest episode of the Streuspanne podcast is about election polls, forecasts and their uncertainties. Using Donald Trump's surprising re-election as an example, we shed light on how such forecasts are made, what sources of error there are and how we can assess their accuracy. We also discuss why polls are not forecasts, how to assess uncertainties mathematically and what Trump's election victory reveals about systematic errors.

In the third episode of our mini-series on »Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Statistics«, we look at »Shallow Learning«. In contrast to the deep and complex models of Deep Learning, these models require less data and computing power.

In the second episode of our mini-series on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and statistics, we look at Neural Networks. These models, inspired by the human brain, consist of several layers that recognize patterns and process information.

In the first episode of our mini-series on »Artificial intelligence (AI) and statistics«, we examine whether AI is just »glorified statistics«. We explain the terms AI and machine learning using concrete examples and offer an interactive task in which listeners consider how an AI can recognize a rectangle on a checkered sheet of paper.

What do Julius Caesar, Albert Einstein, Goethe, Marie Curie, Isaac Newton, Beethoven, Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe have in common? Not only were they all famous personalities, they were also left-handed. Today, August 13th, we are celebrating International Left-handed People's Day – with our new podcast episode and, of course, some curious statistics on the subject.

In the new episode of Streuspanne, we look at Benford's Law. This mathematical principle mysteriously reveals fraud in statistics. Our Streuspanne team investigates whether it puts financial investigators out of work and whether the law can disprove Bielefeld.