But paleontologists have used some clever statistics to adjust for those inconsistencies, and the latest diversity curve makes it look like there have been eight major mass extinctions rather than five.

但古生物家使用一些聪明统计法来校正差，最新物种曲线看来曾有八次大灭绝，而非五次。

If you want to make it rigorous you have  to be explicit about the error between these approximations and the true thing we care  about, the area under this curve.

如果你想使其严谨，就必须明确这些近似与我们真正关心东西——这条曲线下面积——之差。

In statistics, pi is used in the equation to calculate the area under a normal distribution curve; which comes in handy for figuring out distributions of standardized test scores, financial models, or margins of error in scientific results.

在统计中，π 可代入式中用来计算正态分布曲线下面积；在计算标准化考试分、财务模型或科结果差范围时都会用到。

We theoretically predicted and experimentally verified that we could bend these bad power laws down to much better exponentials, where adding a few more data points could reduce your error, rather than ten-xing the amount of data.

我们通过理论预测并实验验证了， 能够将这些不良幂律曲线弯曲至更优指曲线，在此情况下， 增加少量据点即可减少差，而非成倍增加据量。