Last Uncertainty Wednesday, we started to look at the behavior of the mean of a sample by repeatedly drawing samples. We used a sample of 10 rolls of a fair die. We know that the expected value of the probability distribution is 3.5 but we saw that the sample mean can deviate substantially from that on a small sample. In particular, with 10 rolls we got sample means both close to 1 (almost every roll is a 1) and close to 6 (almost every roll is a 6). The fact that the sample mean itself is ra...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday, we started to look at the behavior of the mean of a sample by repeatedly drawing samples. We used a sample of 10 rolls of a fair die. We know that the expected value of the probability distribution is 3.5 but we saw that the sample mean can deviate substantially from that on a small sample. In particular, with 10 rolls we got sample means both close to 1 (almost every roll is a 1) and close to 6 (almost every roll is a 6). The fact that the sample mean itself is ra...

Super short Uncertainty Wednesday post today as I have a crazy busy week featuring our annual meeting (where we meet with our Limited Partners). The last few weeks we have been digging into sample means and expected values. We saw some surprising things already, such as random variables that do not have an expected value. During these posts I have sometimes used the terms random variable and probability distribution interchangeably, despite previously having given two separate definitions (se...

Super short Uncertainty Wednesday post today as I have a crazy busy week featuring our annual meeting (where we meet with our Limited Partners). The last few weeks we have been digging into sample means and expected values. We saw some surprising things already, such as random variables that do not have an expected value. During these posts I have sometimes used the terms random variable and probability distribution interchangeably, despite previously having given two separate definitions (se...

The Department of Justice earlier this week sued several large publishers and Apple over alleged collusion surrounding the agency arrangement for the sale of ebooks. The legal situation here is quite complicated as should be evident from the fact that Random House which does have agency agreements with both Apple and Amazon was *not* sued. This suggests that agency agreements in and of themselves are not the issue. Rather it would seem to be the combination of agency agreements together with ...

The Department of Justice earlier this week sued several large publishers and Apple over alleged collusion surrounding the agency arrangement for the sale of ebooks. The legal situation here is quite complicated as should be evident from the fact that Random House which does have agency agreements with both Apple and Amazon was *not* sued. This suggests that agency agreements in and of themselves are not the issue. Rather it would seem to be the combination of agency agreements together with ...