Misleading Stats
Earlier this month the BBC reported this story Second lottery win for US woman.
The woman had won the $1m jackpot on two scratch cards in the last 4 years.
The odds of winning the first card were 1 in 5.2 million, whilst the odds of winning the second card was 1 in 705,600, so experts claim that the chances of her winning both games were an incredible 1 in 3,669,120,000,000. However these experts (or BBC researchers) are wrong. Yes if she had walked in to her newsagents and said can I have one Cool Million scratch card and can I also have a Jubilee one too, then the odds would have been that high. However I pretty sure that she will have purchased more than one of each of the scratch card, and for each time she purchase another one from the same game he odd drop.
For example the odds of winning a small lottery which only has 10 outcomes is 1 in 10. However if I purchase two different tickets for the same draw my odds half to 1 in 5. If I purchased all 10 combinations I must win. And the same goes for this woman. Lets assume that she loves scratch cards and that she had purchased 200 of each before she won the jackpot. Her odds would change from 1 in 3,669,120,000,000 to 40,000 in 3,669,120,000,000 or 1 in 91,728,000 which is a slightly smaller number (but still impressive).
Hardcore cornflakes?
LibDemBlogs on your mobile
Now I noticed quite a few people (well maybe just Will and Rob) reading LibDem Blogs via their mobile. Using Opera Mini they were able to shrink the whole site so that it fitted on their small screens.
However I was using a script that I wrote some years ago. This script only loaded the posts and ignored everything else. After speaking to Will in the bar I decided to revamp the script and publicise it. So the new url is www.libdemblogs.co.uk/mobile/. It’s been tested on Opera Mobile 9 on my P990i and the built in browser on Heather’s K800i. I’ve also added some customisation using cookies, so it’s possible to show the posts from the last x hours or even the most recent y posts. You can even choose to show the MyBlogLog Stats, the full list of contributors and the news feeds which appear on the side bar.
Please give it a go, and if you have any feedback please let me know which mobile phone you used, if it was the built in browser or Opera Mini and what network you are on.
Blogging at conference
Having finally got a chance to use a real computer instead of my phone, I’ve been looking at the webstats.
On the Monday of Conference last year there were 10 posts appearing on LibDemBlogs, however this year on the Monday there were 84. Whilst I don’t think that there were many more computers available, more people seem to be taking the time out to blog, or even use their mobile phones to post whilst in the conference hall.
Looking at the hits and visitors to the site, last year saw no real increase whilst conference was happening, most likely due to the fact that the regular readers were at conference. However this year I have a nice spike on the graph, with an increase in hits of 38% compared to last week, which is nice.
And the winner is
Stephen Tall
Finally it’s arrived
After 11 months of waiting, I’ve finally got myself a P990i.
I’ve been watching the stock levels everyday for a month and when I saw that Vodafone had got their first shipment of 700 yesterday morning I was on the phone straight away.
So far so good, just need to get Blackberry Connect downloaded and installed.
Marriage ‘keeps families united’
The BBC and reporting that Marriage ‘keeps families united’
Couples with young children are five times more likely to split up if they are unmarried compared to those who have had weddings, the Tories claim.
Or is it that those who decided to get married were already in a strong relationship and more committed to each other, so already less likely to break up?
Up and down
My webhosts Dataflame have been playing with their servers, which has been causing me some troubles. The first problem affected all of my .htaccess files which in turn crashed my blog and LibDemBlogs. After getting them to fix that, I then noticed a collection of scripts were broken, CNPS and my sidebar script all stopped working, so then I got that fixed. Then tonight everything disappeared. I sent off an email, but didn’t get any reply, then I realised email to was down, so I tried live chat instead. Someone called Jamie went off and soon everything was back up again. However if you find something faulty on any of my sites please let me know as I’ll need to get those fixed too.
Brown to stand down?
Now if I was Gordon Brown, the moment Tony announces the date, I too would announce that I was standing and possibly retiring from the house at the next election. Why would you want to run the country after the mess Tony has left it in. If he’s lucky he might win one election, and even that could be with a minuet majority and whilst unlikely imagine the embarrassment if he actually lost the next leadership election, it would destroy his political career. Instead Brown’s legacy would be a great economy, one of the best chancellors the country ever had.
I’d rather leave it at that myself.