To do this, he and his team took a random sample from the corpus, checked what proportion were non-words and extrapolated that to the whole lot.

ECONOMIST: Science invades the humanities

Norvig pays a small team of contractors to just do random searches all day to test the Google engine, in the hope of teaching it to learn on its own.

FORBES: The Machinist

With a fresh bracket for each round, the random format means that a no-name team with some good fortune can advance deep into the tournament before having to face one of the game's behemoths.

WSJ: FA Cup's Old Habits Die Hard

If an entrant is not available after reasonable attempts by the production team, another entrant will be selected at random.

BBC: The Eavesdrop: Terms & Conditions

The News 11 team found a pattern of women who believe that there was nothing random about the way they were selected for extra screening.

CNN: TSA says it focuses on security, not good looks

Gone from last year: Lance Armstrong (our list is for active athletes only), White (now that we're a year past the 2010 Winter Games), Ohno (ditto), and NBA stars Kevin Garnett, Dwyane Wade and Kobe Bryant (probably just random, though Wade's stature decreased a tad with LeBron James joining his team, and Garnett is another year older).

FORBES

The team of physicists was investigating the possibility of using radioactive decay rates to generate random numbers, since the rate is constant but the emission of individual atoms is unpredictable, it seemed like a perfect fit.

FORBES: Radioactive Decay Rates May Not Be Constant After All