The New England Patriots have recently been very lucky. NPR's Kelly McEvers and Robert Siegel explain the probability of the football team winning the last 19 out of 25 coin tosses.

All of statistics and much of science depends on probability—an astonishing ... Imagine I flip a coin, and ask you the probability that it will come up heads. You happily say “50–50 ...

This means that for the coin toss, the theoretical probability of either heads or tails is 0.5 (or 50 percent). It gets more complicated with a six-sided die.

Coins have no memory; the third coin doesn’t know or care what happened to the second one. So Marla’s bet isn’t good or bad—the odds must be 50-50, heads or tails.

For a coin flip, heads or tails each has a probability of occurring 50% of the time (p = 0.50), so it would be plotted on a chart with a line from the y-axis at 0.50. Key Takeaways A uniform ...

Id: 008341 Credits Min: 3 Credits Max: 3 Description. Provides a one-semester course in probability and statistics with applications in the engineering sciences. Probability of events, discrete and ...

Statistics is the science of analyzing data; the use of statistics is ubiquitous in science, engineering, medicine and epidemiology, marketing, and many other application areas. Probability theory ...

For some perspective: Assuming the coin toss is a 50/50 proposition, the probability of winning it at least 19 times in 25 tries is 0.0073. That's less than three-quarters of one percent .

The p-value won’t tell you whether the coin is fair, but it will tell you the probability that you’d get at least as many heads as you did if the coin was fair. That’s it — nothing more.

Statistics and the science of probability represent the ultimate in critical thinking, because they teach us how to criticize the ways we habitually think. Read more of Slate ’s collection of ...