The Student Puzzle Corner contains one or two problems in statistics or probability. Sometimes, solving the problems may require a literature search.
Current student members of the IMS are invited to submit solutions electronically (to bulletin@imstat.org with subject “Student Puzzle Corner”). Deadline May 1, 2014.
The names and affiliations of (up to)the first 10 student members to submit correct solutions, and the answer(s) to the problem(s), will be published in the next issue of the Bulletin.
The Editor’s decision is final.
Student Puzzle Corner 3
Let
Airplanes generally travel approximately along the geodesic distance, because to take the path corresponding to the Euclidean distance, one has to go through the interior of the Earth. It is possible to find how how much larger the geodesic distance is than the Euclidean distance on the average.
Solution to the previous Student Puzzle Corner
Tengyuan Liang at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, sent the correct value of
Note that the correct value just refers to the
Let
with median
Let
over
An informal attack would be to treat it as a problem in simple data analysis, and conclude that the clocks showing the times
Both approaches lead to a value of
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