NPR has an interesting audio story on coin tossing. Many statistics textbooks use the coin toss to illustrate random chance. As it usually goes, the books talk about how if you toss a coin enough times, you will get heads 50 percent of the time and tails 50 percent of the time. But NPR says in reality, things are not so neat. They say the randomness, if there is any, seems to be introduced by the person tossing the coin. If the coin is mechanically tossed, that is if it is tossed the same way every time, it will land the same way every time. Thus, they are saying coin tossing may not be a random event. Extrapolating from this, you could say if a person could master tossing the coin in a particular way, they could bias the outcome.
I'm working on the draft report of the salary commission (about 75 pages, single-spaced) and hope to have it done for their review tomorrow or Monday. So I gotta go.
Aloha!
