Not a statistician, but I'm trying to understand a probability theory paper on capture/recapture studies in field biology. The idea is that field biologists might want to know how many deer are in a particular area. Maybe every day for a month they go out into area and look for deer. If they see one, they make a note. Some deer may be observed 15 times in the one month period. Other deer, only once. Some, not at all. Given this kind of sample, can you estimate how many deer are in the area.
This same kind of analysis might be applied to people being asked to describe concepts. A particular concept, like "bonfire", will have an unknown number of properties associated with it. Asking 100 people to list properties of bonfire, you might get "hot" 50 times, "burns" 30 times, "party" 15 times etc. Just like the biologist saw the same deer 15 times, the psychologist saw the same concept, "hot", 50 times.
The same math that the biologists use to estimate the number of deer can be used by the psychologist to estimate the number of properties associated with the concept "bonfire" found in the universe of study participants. This number can be useful in some of the linguistic analysis that I'm working on.
Anyway, as I mentioned, I'm not a statistician, but I did teach a course in probability theory once. I've been slowly dredging up that stuff over the past several days. It's been fun. I feel like I'm getting a better understanding of probability as I re-learn it.
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I did a timelapse of the ocean this morning. At first, I did it because there was some kind of navy ship out there doing exercises, but when I looked at it afterwards, the ship was the least interesting part. If you look at the video, you can see the usual waves crashing into the shore, but you can also see the reflected waves that head back out into the ocean. In theory, I knew that there would be reflected waves, but I don't think I've ever seen them so clearly as in the video.
The ocean is endlessly fascinating.
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Obligatory sunset photo.
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