For each run into work I randomly chose one route or the other based on a recipe sheet produced by Design-Expert software and timed it with a stopwatch app on my smart phone.     Then I entered the results in the software and it gave me the answer I wanted.

It appears that I can save the better part of a minute by not shooting around on 694.  That is good to know!

My memorable stories about Box both relate to his way with words that cut directly to a point:

• In 1989 at the Annual Quality Congress in Toronto seeing him open his debate with competing guru Genichi Taguchi by throwing two words on an overhead projector–”Obscurity” and “Profundity”, and then after a dramatic pause, adding the not-equal sign between them.  This caused Taguchi’s son Shin to leap up from the front row and defend his father.  This cause the largest crowd I have ever seen at a technical conference to produce a collective gasp that one only rarely experiences.
• In 1996 at a DOE workshop in Madison, Wisconsin enjoying his comeback to a very irritating disciple of Taguchi who kept interrupting the lecture: “If you are going to do something, you may as well do it right.”

Lest this give the impression that Box was mean-spirited see this well-reasoned white paper that provides a fair balance of praise and criticism of Taguchi, who created a huge push forward for the cause of planned experimentation for quality improvement.

The body of work by George Box in his field is monumental.  It provides the foundation for all that we do at Stat-Ease.  Thank you George, may you rest in peace!

Given the equinox does not come until March 20 at 11:02 GMT, I remain hopeful for Spring. I am invested in warmer weather having bought tickets to opening day for the Minnesota Twins on April 1. Perhaps that was a bit foolish, but at least I will fit in with the theme for this day.  Also, I predict that our baseball team will make it to the playoffs.   Mark my words.

It is still important to report estimates and confidence intervals in addition to or instead of p-values when possible so that both statistical and scientific significance can be judged by readers.

- Leah R. Jager, Jeffrey T. Leek (“Empirical estimates suggest most published medical research is true”)

In a small shed at the top of a 100-foot-tall steel tower deep in the New Mexico desert, Donald Hornig sat next to the world’s first atomic bomb in the late evening of July 15, 1945, reading a book of humorous essays. A storm raged, and he shuddered at each lightning flash.

There is a nifty way around this—rather than gratifying your greed, do something for someone else.  It needn’t be much: Every little bit adds up to leading a happier life.

Such behavior is twice blest—good for the giver as well as the beneficiary.

“The pleasures associated with our own acts of consumption tend to be short-lived. The pleasures derived from doing something for others linger.”

- Excerpted from this 1/14/12 post on “Consumption Makes Us Sad? Science Says We Can Be Happy With Less” by Barry Schwartz of The Daily Beast.

*I dictated “hedonic adaptation blog” into my (supposedly) smart phone and it transcribed “add on a caterpillar engine block”—presumably thinking I meant to increase the horsepower in my road grader. Ha ha!

It turns out that hot Pyrex pans set directly on a wet or cool surface, such as a granite counter-top, undergo a sudden temperature change that produces some risk of it shattering.  That strikes close to home for me, having re-done our kitchen (as is the style nowadays) with granite.  Fortunately, being accustomed to plastic (Formica) countertops, I always put down cloth potholders before setting down the hot Pyrex pan.  The take-home message is being careful not to subject Pyrex to rapid increases or decreases in temperature.  See this site for safety instructions.

PS. On a lighter note (literally: too much sun) regarding heat and silica (main constituent of sand) see this New York Times news making it official that the hottest temperature ever recorded is 134 degrees F in Death Valley.  They are pyre Rex.

Things are wackier than I’d thought in regard to where one might expect to find ice nowadays.  For example, who would have thought that water could freeze on Mercury?  But that’s what NASA recently reported based on a shout out from their spacecraft Messenger, which detected polar hydrogen via neutron spectroscopy.  See the details here.  I enjoyed the quip by Sean C. Solomon, the principal investigator for Messenger, about there being enough ice to encase Washington, D.C., in a frozen block two and a half miles deep.*  That might be what’s needed to cool down all the rhetoric about the fiscal cliff. 

Meanwhile the worries about the warming climate melting Earth’s icecaps just keep coming on.  Concerned about contrails contributing to the greenhouse effect, the Washington Post is now demanding the Santa’s sleigh be grounded.  Read this 12/4/12 blog and weep. : (

*On Closest Planet to the Sun, NASA Finds Lots of Ice, 11/29/12

I came across another interesting example of the persistence of wished-for results in a review** of Samuel Arbesman’s new book on The Half-Life of Facts.  It turns out that spinach really does not delivery the amount of iron that my mother always believed would make it worth us eating this horrible food.  She was a child of the 1930’s, at which time it was widely believed that the edible (?) plant contained 35 milligrams of iron, a tremendous concentration, per serving.  However, the actual value is 3.5 mg—the chemist who first analyzed it misplaced the decimal point when transcribing the data from his notebook in 1870!  In 1937 this error was finally corrected, but my mom never got the memo, unfortunately for me and my six younger siblings. ; )

*“Real-Life DOE” presentation, posted here

** The Scientific Blind Spot by David A. Shaywitz in the 11/19/12 issue of Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch this Friday posted the data shown in this chart.  For the 11 countries shown** you can see why WSJ seconds the call by French President Hollande to ban all homework.

Students would party hearty but this laissez-faire approach will not fly with those blessed with ambitious parents.  Nevertheless the call for less homework, fueled by new data from the National Center for Education Statistics, reinforces other studies going back at least a decade.

It will be interesting to see what emerges as a consensus for a the happy medium on amount of homework assigned.   Four hours per night seems way too much, especially at the 8th grade level.

Meta-analysis of hundreds of studies done on the effects of homework shows that the evidence supporting the practice is, at best, modest. Homework seems to be most useful in high school and for subjects like math. At the elementary school level homework seems to be of marginal or no academic value.

- Malcolm Gladwell

*See the report here

**I took out Saudi Arabia, whose result of 34% below average, given 11% being assigned over 4 hours of homework per night, fell far below even these very off-putting predictions–an outlier statistically.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to Devan Govender for alerting me to this issue.