The Aperiodical 

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Hunger Games survival analysis

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted April 19, 2012

Somebody has done a statistical analysis of The Hunger Games, to see how the lottery works and what factors, if any, are linked with longer survival. Yes, he describes his methodology in fine detail. Wonderfully overthought.

A comment by yellowcandy in the MetaFilter thread about this page warns us not to get too carried away:

I love statistics, but come on: The major finding here is that Suzanne Collins did a good job creating a fictional dataset that shows some significant differences between groups. Yes, that’s because statistics measures deviations from randomness, and Collins *made up the data* as part of her novel’s plot.

(via MetaFilter)

The Body Counter

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted March 4, 2012

There’s a very interesting article in Foreign Policy on a man called Patrick Ball who uses statistics as a human rights tool.

Could the movements of refugees have been random? No, Ball said. He had also plotted killings of Kosovars and found that both phenomena occurred at the same times and in the same places — flight and death, hand in hand. “I remember well the moment of astonishment that I felt when I saw the killing graph for the first time,” Ball replied to Milosevic. “I assumed I had made an error, because the correlation was so close.”

The article doesn’t just describe Ball’s conclusions – it goes into a good amount of detail about the methods he uses, and the dangers of misinterpreting non-representative data.