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Another example of news coverage over-stating the causal relationship between two things that research has demonstrated have some *association*. Good discussion of the particular headlines.

This is a great list of evidence based stories by FiveThirtyEight (FiveThirtyEight uses statistical analysis - hard numbers - to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, sports, science, economics) They also produced a list of some great stories from other venues: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/damn-we-wish-wed-written-these-11-stories/

Why probability and understanding statistical fallacies matters Some of our most important decisions are shaped by something as random as the order in which we make them. The gambler's fallacy, as it's known, affects loan officers, federal judges -- and probably you too. How to avoid it? The first step is to admit just how fallible we all are.

If you look at marathon times, you see most people run somewhere in the middle (4 hoursish), with a few under 3 hours (?!) and over 6 hours (very sensible). If you plot this data in a histogram, you can also see that there are spikes...people run just under 3, 3.5, 4, and 4.5 hours - you can see that people have a goal (of a nice round number) and the times are distributed accordingly.