# A Candle in the Dark

A look on science, politics, religion and events

## Curve fitting

From a study published in Science1,

Can you spot the duck?

(via David Harrison)

References
[1]- Competitive Interactions Between Neotropical Pollinators and Africanized Honey Bees, Science, 15 September 1978: Vol. 201. no. 4360, pp. 1030 – 1032

Written by parseval

September 3, 2007 at 10:29 pm

Posted in fun, science

### 3 Responses

1. Hehe, nice find. I’m slightly skeptical, though. I couldn’t access the paper, and Harrison’s page just gives a very brief summary. It’s quite unbelievable that Science could publish this (as late as 1978!), perhaps there were not trying fit a curve ? It looks like something of a weighted histogram to me..

Mohan

September 5, 2007 at 6:58 pm

2. Harrison says that the caption to the figure in the published article read,

“The dashed line is a quadratic polynomial (given by $y = -0.516 + 1.08x - 0.23x^2$) which gave the best fit to the points.”

You’re right, I’ll have to check and see If I can find this particular article in the library.

parseval

September 5, 2007 at 9:02 pm