Friday 28 February 2014

Lecture 19

The fictional example in Section 19.2 about the heights of UK and Netherlands basketball players showed something striking. Can you think of any real life instances of this sort of effect?

The graphs on page 7 of this report on climate change are interesting in respect of showing how a small change in the mean can give rise to an amplified impact in the tail of a normal distribution. See Full SREX report: Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In this graph we see "hot weather" increasing by a factor of 2. 
But "extreme hot weather" increases even more, by a factor of 3