2026-10-22
In 1943, Abraham Wald of Columbia University's Statistical Research Group (SRG) wrote a set of memoranda on how to estimate, using only the bullet holes on returning aircraft, the probability that a plane would be shot down after being hit in each of its parts. The popular story reduces this to a one-line quip: “reinforce wherever there are no holes.” Checked against the original memoranda and Mangel and Samaniego's 1984 interpretation, the actual reasoning was more subtle.
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In October 1884, Peirce and his student Jastrow reported a set of weight-perception experiments to the US National Academy of Sciences: the experimenter used the color of cards from a shuffled pack to decide whether the pressure would be “first increased, then decreased” or “first decreased, then increased,” while the subject made judgments from behind a screen. Even when the subjects believed they had no confidence at all, their judgments were still clearly better than guessing. The experiment is often regarded as one of the earliest to use an explicit randomization scheme, but what it randomized was the order of trials, not group assignment.
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On October 20, 2026, Wedgewood Polls, an emerging American polling outfit, admitted on the social platform X that the vast majority of the polls it had published had no real survey data behind them. The admission was prompted by an investigation by the election-data site FiftyPlusOne: after obtaining its raw data, reporters found the sample was abnormally “clean.”
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