Re: Im lovin google spam filter

[<michael.blanchard () emc com>]

Ahh, but after my study of 100 back yards I can have the Media report:

   " A new study has shown that over 95% of the land surveyed for litter, is completely without any signs of litter.  
This gives us proof positive that the litter laws are working!"

  As we all know, people in general will believe anything the media states, and only a small minority of us folks will 
even bother to question it.  :-)



Michael P. Blanchard
Senior Security Engineer, CISSP, GCIH, CCSA-NGX, MCSE
Office of Information Security & Risk Management
EMC ² Corporation
32 Coslin Drive
Southboro, MA 01772


-----Original Message-----
From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu [mailto:Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu] 
Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2011 1:11 PM
To: Blanchard, Michael (InfoSec)
Cc: rsk () gsp org; funsec () linuxbox org
Subject: Re: [funsec] Im lovin google spam filter

On Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:49:34 EDT, michael.blanchard () emc com said:

> If we take 100 people on this list, have them all look in their 
> backyards and report if there is any paper or plastic blowing around, 
> I'll bet we can come up with a fairly high percentage of us that don't 
> have any paper or plastic blowing around.  I'll further say that I'll 
> bet the number would be within a standard deviation of 4% error.  So, 
> if 96% of us don't have any paper or plastic blowing around in our yards, could we safely say that no-one litters?

No, you can safely say that the population average of litter-free backyards is has a 70% chance between 92% and 100%, 
and about 95% chance of being between 88% and 100%. (Yes, it's likely to be closer to a chi-squared curve than a 
gaussian bell curve due to the constraint of one tail).

The problem is that careful analysis is needed - I'll make a prediction that yards with chain link fences have a lot 
higher level of wind-born litter than unfenced yards.  This of course impacts your analysis of litter sources.

And incidentally, Rick *has* done the "take 100 people" type analysis, which is why he commented that (basically) the 
plural of anecdote isn't data.

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