Back from the Philippines

Back from Manila, where I caught the opening of the Little League Philippine Series with fellow Sox fanatic George. Great to see all the kids having fun playing baseball. Also met a Bill Bennett - hope I got the name right - who was an instructor for MLB, and proceeded to talk about Wally Moon and baseball at the L.A. Coliseum. Man, hadn't realised how starved I was for baseball talk.

Anyway, the article by John Tierney on M. Keith Chen's challenges to cognitive dissonance research - saying in effect that a lot of the research's conclusions could suffer from the Monty Hall Problem - is a fascinating use of probability theory in an unexpected context. (Link to Chen's original paper.) The Monty Hall Problem is such a counter-intuitive one.

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