Taking Chances on Proability

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Taking Chances Have you ever had your eye on the last piece of chocolate cake, but noticed your friend did also, or wanted to sit in the front seat, but was faced by your little brother or sister putting up a fight? At one point or another, everyone has found themselves in some form of disagreement or misunderstanding that has been solved with an easy solution, a coin toss. But how do you decide which side of the coin to chose? With that slice of cake calling your name, it would be quite helpful to know if the coin were biased to land on a particular side before you made your decision. One may not overthink the choice, since it is a common belief that there is a 50/50 chance when it comes to flipping a coin, however, this old adage may in fact be a decades old misconception. A group of graduate students from Stanford decided that they would address this problem not with logic, but with science, and conducted over 1,000 coin tosses to see what they could find. What are the Chances? So begs the question, if you were to flip a coin, by hand, 100 times, does this mean that it would he...

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