<story><title>The Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion and the O-ring</title><url>https://priceonomics.com/the-space-shuttle-challenger-explosion-and-the-o/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nemild</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m the author of this piece, happy to answer questions.&lt;p&gt;I grew up with stories of the Challenger after my father - a statistician - and 2 of his co-authors were selected by National Academy of Sciences to study if the danger could have been predicted beforehand. They showed that the likelihood of failure was 13% at the launch temperature, but would have been negligible if NASA had waited just a few hours. (His co-author, Ed Fowlkes, was dying of AIDS at the time - and considered this paper one of his life&amp;#x27;s great achievements)&lt;p&gt;Bad statistical inferences were a huge part of the launch story, and you can see more in Richard Feynman&amp;#x27;s critiques:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Rogers_Commission_Report&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Rogers_Commission_Report&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, the effect I highlight (a biased data sample) is a key issue with news&amp;#x2F;social media - and can lead us to heavily flawed inferences if we don&amp;#x27;t correct for it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll dig deep into this in future posts with a substantial amount of data and visualizations.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion and the O-ring</title><url>https://priceonomics.com/the-space-shuttle-challenger-explosion-and-the-o/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>seliopou</author><text>Tufte wrote an essay on how the data available suggested that there was a high likelihood of O-ring failure, but that the data and findings were poorly communicated. This led to the decision to launch, the subsequent failure of the O-rings and loss of life. This essay appears in the booklet &amp;quot;Visual and Statistical Thinking&amp;quot;[0], among other publications, along with an other essay on how the source of cholera was traced to contaminated drinking water in 19th century London by John Snow. He plotted cholera cases on a map, and looked at where the outbreaks were most frequent.[1] This also led to the discovery of the vector of cholera, which up until then was unknown or at least misattributed. Both are great reads.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sfu.ca&amp;#x2F;cmns&amp;#x2F;courses&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;801&amp;#x2F;1-Readings&amp;#x2F;Tufte%20Visual%20and%20Statistical%20Thinking.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sfu.ca&amp;#x2F;cmns&amp;#x2F;courses&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;801&amp;#x2F;1-Readings&amp;#x2F;Tufte%20...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak#&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;File:Snow-cholera-map-1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>