Archive for category pop
Shocking research—young men prefer a jolt of electricity over doing nothing
Two-thirds of University of Virginia male students preferred a shock to doing nothing, whereas only one-quarter of the women did. This finding by psychologist Tim Wilson, which I read about in the Wall Street Journal,* does not surprise me in the least—young fellows always seek excitement that causes immediate pain or potential catastrophe for their life and limb. The more micromorts, equal to a one-in-a-million chance of death, the better, at least so far as men are concerned.
According to WSJ’s 7/18/14 article “Risk Is Never a Numbers Game,” micromorts (MM) were devised in the 1970’s by Stanford’s Ronald A. Howard to quantify the chances of death for any particular activity. Each day on average the typical American faces a 1.3 MM probability of a sudden end from external causes, that is, not a natural demise. The authors, Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter, bring up all sorts of morbid statistics. What interested me was not the murders and other deathly events brought on through little or no fault of the individual, but rather the discretionary doings such as horseback riding (~1 MM) and mountain climbing (12,000 MMs!). If you like heights but the latter sport exceeds your tolerance for risk, consider parachuting at a far safer level of 7 MMs or be really conservative by simply going on a roller coaster at 0.0015 MMs.
Whenever I see statistics like this, I wonder if one shouldn’t just strap on a helmet, grab a mattress, blanket and pillow, go down into the basement with the supplies left over from the millennium Armageddon and curl into the fetal position over in the southwest corner where tornadoes do the least damage. That being very boring, I’d first set up a battery with leads for giving myself a shock now and then.
Not the usual boring statistics conference—attendees called to duty for developing an optimal blend of beers
Earlier this month I attended the 5th European Design-of-Experiment User Meeting in Cambridge, England, which, considering the topic being statistical design of experiments, turned out not to be as dull as one might think. All the credit for the pizzazz goes to our colleagues across the Atlantic—PRISMTC; in particular Paul Nelson and Andrew Macpherson. They conjured up an in-conference experiment that developed an optimal blend of three local beers (all made by Milton Brewery and sold in bulk by Polypins (36 pints) from £56, Firkins (2 polypins) from £84), a pale ale called Cyclops (30-80%), a bitter under the label Justinian (20-70%) and a dark mild named Medusa (0-50%). Prior testing by these two boffins of stats and zymurgy (that is, the study of yeasty concoctions) led them to constrain the ranges of the three brews to the ranges shown in parentheses.
Paul and Andrew laid out a clever design that, via balanced incomplete blocking, restricted any one taster to only 4 blends, while testing enough combinations often enough to provide adequate power for discerning just the right formula. The fun bit was them asking us conference-goers to provide the necessary data prior to an atmospheric dinner at Magdalene (for some reason pronounced in English as “maudlin”) College.
This limitation on beer was one departure from a similar mixture experiment on beers that I ran* with my two sons and son-in-law as the tasters (little chance them going along with such a sensible restriction). The other wrinkle was them requiring all of us to taste a strip of paper that ferreted out about a third of the tasters being “super tasters”—those who immediately recoiled from the bitter taste (many thought it just tasted like paper).**
It turned out that the bitterest blend, in contrast to the mildest of the beer mixtures, was not greatly liked. I think this must be an acquired taste! You can see this on the triangular, 3D response surface graph of the predicted response—the lowest corner being the B:Bitter. Surprisingly, mixing in some A:Ale makes a relatively tasty brew—these two beers synergize, that is, provide much better results than either one alone. But the tastiest blend of all is the peak at the C:Mild corner, with 30% of Cyclops, 20% of Justinian and 50% of the Medusa, some blends on a ridge through the middle of the triangular mixture space look promising.
Three cheers for three beers and hats off to the brilliance of Paul and Andrew of PRISMTC for pulling off this fun, clever and informative taste test. See their full, illustrative report here.
*See Mixture Design Brews Up New Beer Cocktail—Black & Blue Moon
**Check out this BBC report and short video on testing for super tasters
Odd statistics from the United Kingdom
I’m enjoying a weekend in London prior to a conference in Cambridge next week. I was happy to see in the news that the Prime Minister David Cameron is under investigation by the UK Statistics Authority for biasing figures on in his party’s favor. Evidently the British are more vigilant than the USA on out-and-out self-promoting misstatements.
On a more frivolous note, here are some stats on people in these parts that I found in this recent news on the weird by UK’s tabloid the Express gleaned from the soon-to-be-published book Numberland by Mitchell Symons–a principal writer of early editions of Trivial Pursuit and author of That Book of Perfectly Useless Information, The Book of More Perfectly Useless Information, and Where Do Nudists Keep Their Hankies?:
- A girl reportedly called Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor (spelling TUBE) was born in 1924 on a Bakerloo line train at Elephant and Castle. (I took the Bakerloo line today while bopping around London.)
- The average British adult moves home every seven years. (That seems a bit inconvenient for the parents.)
- One of ten British adults admit to wearing the same item of underwear three days in a row. (I thought it smelled somewhat musty while jammed into the steamy-hot Bakerloo.)
- In 1705 John Smith was hanged for burglary at the Tyburn Tree. After he had been hanging for 15 minutes, a reprieve arrived and he was cut down. Amazingly, he was revived and managed to recover. As a result, he became known as John ‘Half-Hanged” Smith. (This just chokes me up.)
Conqueror paper dominates in flight test
After seeing this record-breaking airplane flight I bought a ream of the Conqueror® CX22 paper used for the construction of the amazing flying machine. Would it produce the same outstanding results from weekend warriors?
I put this to the test on Sunday with my son-in-law Ryan, my son Ben and his friend Josh. Of course none of them could throw like the champion “pilot” and Arena Football League quarterback, Joe Ayoob, who vaulted the hand-folded paper aircraft 226 feet, 10 inches on Feb. 26, 2012 at McClellan Air Force Base in California. Also, the simple dart template used for making the airplanes could not compete with the design of “the paper airplane guy” John Collins. However, after blocking out the difference between throwers (Ryan being the standout), I found a significant advantage to the heavier (26.6 pound) and stiffer Conqueror paper over a standard 24-pound stock we use at Stat-Ease made by Navigator).
The picture tells the story (click it for a close-up view)–the Conqueror shown in red far exceeding the standard stock (black points), with one exception highlighted at the upper left. It turns out that Ben ‘accidentally’ spilled beer on his buddy Josh’s airplane. That’s the way things go on the weekend competitions—whatever it takes to win.
Read this as fast as you can but be prepared for a test to follow
Once upon a time I sped through Melville’s lengthy novel “Moby Dick.” If I recall correctly, it has something to do with a fellow missing one arm who goes chasing after the devilish whale that bit it off. Nowadays my eyes tire more quickly so I appreciate the advantages of electronic readers such as Kindle that serve me up columns of enlarged text with only a few words per line. Then I needn’t work too hard looking back and forth. What really works well is keeping one’s eyes fixed and moving the text along the focus. This is called rapid sequential visual presentation, or RSVP.
Recently I got the heads-up from Scientific American*about a smart-watch from Samsung that comes equipped with an RSVP app called Spritz. They claim that their “Optimal Recognition Point” (ORP) technology increases reading-speed on-average by half-again, from 220 to 330 words-per-minute. My only question is how anyone can hold their wrist steady long enough to digest much. I’d hate to run into anyone walking down the street while absorbed in a particularly fascinating book. Texting is bad enough.
Then again it’s one thing to see a lot of words and even process them through your head, but yet another thing to comprehend fully what’s been read. That’s the point of Annie Murphy Paul of The Weekly Wonk in this blog that questions the claims of Spritz. If I read her correctly (ha ha), she suggests that subject-matter expertise is the real key to effective reading—not just doing it faster, but also with greater comprehension. Excepting pulp fiction that requires little intelligence (gotta love it!), that makes a lot of sense to me.
Nevertheless, I’m anxious to see RSVP come to Kindle so I can try reading more in the short periods of time that I can free up and/or last before becoming eye-weary. Maybe then I will re-read “Moby Dick.” I have this vague recollection of the whale being white, but that just doesn’t seem right.
Minnesota town tops nation for highest median wage after cost of living adjustment (COLA)
Take a look at this intriguing report by NPR’s Planet money on How Far Your Paycheck Goes. Being a native and resident of Minnesota, our town of Rochester caught my eye atop the right side of the graphic on incomes. My guess is that the dominant employer—the Mayo Clinic–pays a lot of money for its medicos, who then get a lot of bag for their buck being in a relatively rural region.
On the other side of these “what it feels like” income-comparisons Washington DC fares very poorly after the COLA. Based on these economic statistics it seems that the optimal strategy for a job seeker would be to get a federal-government job, for example—working on HealthCare.gov–allowing the work to be done at a distance and then take up residence in Danville, Illinois where money goes a long way in comparison.
Oh, oh—sociology professors say that “most of what we do for our kids at schools doesn’t matter”
Read this New York Times essay on why Parental Involvement Is Overrated and weep for all the time you spent helping your child become well-educated. It doesn’t help that
“most parents appear to be ineffective at helping their children at homework.”
Many a time my kids asked me to help them do math, which I really dreaded—not because I could not come up with the answer, but due to the constantly-changing way schools taught it. After being told many times that I got the right answer the wrong way and thus provided absolutely no help, I began bearing down on studying the latest-and-greatest math book first before working out the problem.
By the way, I made the student go through the materials with me—that made this an effective approach for parental mentoring, or so I thought. Now I wonder if I should’ve even bothered.
However, one time one of my daughters did say that my way of explaining a puzzling math problem made a lot more sense the either the teacher or the book. That’s one time out of hundred other times that my good deeds did not go unpunished, but like the single outstanding golf shot out of hundred bad ones in any-given round, I remember this fondly. 🙂
Fun trivia on how many people it takes before chances are good that some or all share birthdays
Birthdays are in the news this month as the last of the Baby Boomers hit age 50—most notably Michelle Obama, but also my youngest sibling—brother Paul. A little game I’ve played with my larger statistics classes is to poll them for their birthday—month and day (one mustn’t dare to ask for the year). It turns out that with 23 people coming together at random the odds tilt in favor of at least two sharing this special date. Somehow that just does not seem likely but all one needs to do for working this out is calculate the probability of all having different birthdays, and then subtract the answer from 1.
By the way, it takes 88 people to achieve a good chance of 3 sharing a birthday.
This last statistic (88 for 3) comes from statistician Mario Cortina Borja in an article he wrote for the latest issue of Significance detailing “The strong birthday problem,” that is, not just one person but everybody in a group sharing a birthday with at least one other. By assuming that the birthdays follow a uniform distribution,* Borja worked out this complex problem. His results are somewhat counter-intuitive in the way probabilities decrease from 2 to 365 and rise thereafter—quickly gaining at 2000 and beyond. (Of course if only “me, myself and I” are gathered, that is, one person, the probability is technically 100 percent of a birthday match.) The answer to this strong birthday problem is 3064. At 4800 people there’s a 99% chance that everyone will share a birthday with another.
Borja suggests that it might be fun for a large celebration to award a prize to anyone with a lone birthday. If one won such a contest, it would really be a lonely experience.
*P.S. Borja provides the math for birthdays being distributed non-uniformly, but leaves it at that because the computational cost of solving it is “fiendish.” That’s OK because other statisticians who studied this problem found that the results change very little with deviations from the uniform distribution.
Another round of three deaths now underway—triggered by the Professor
My favorite character in Gilligan’s Island–the Professor (aka Dr. Roy Hinkley)—passed away recently. 🙁 Who else will die, I wonder, because these always come in threes, or so it seems.
According to this newly-published study explaining “When Three Charms…, people gravitate to number 3. Being business school profs (Suzanne B. Shu of UCLA and Kurt A. Carlson of Georgetown U.), the authors focused on how to exploit this phenomenon for marketing purposes—their experiments pointing to the power of persuasion being optimized at three claims and no more—the fourth one pushes consumers over to being over-sold.
So be on guard from now on whenever someone tries to sell you on something by touting three reasons. 😉
Getting back to the morbid fascination with celebrity deaths, it may just be that this occurs from the natural tendency to conclude that three events in a row cannot happen just due to chance.
“You reach maximum streakiness at three events.”
– Kurt Carlson quoted by New York Times in 1/3/14 article about The Power of Three
Being somewhat savvy on statistics and generally a rational thinker, I know this is immensely overblown, but I cannot help but succumb to it, in particular when bad things come in bunches. My trick to put a halt to being unlucky is to resolve that whenever I’m hit by three unpleasant events then I watch for three good things to come. I suppose this is just the power of positive thinking overcoming the depressive impact of cursed karma, but this works for me—I encourage you to give it a try.
When the bunch of bad reaches three, that’s it for me–make that your mantra. 🙂
Statistics for good (per year-long celebration) or bad (as many still feel)
“As with a knife in a surgeon’s hands, it can save a life, but it could also kill someone, in the hands of a crook.”
— Sastry Pantula, Dean of the College of Science, Oregon State University
This quote caught my eye in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article on “About 88% Through Year, 100% of Statisticians Find Field ‘Sexy’”—a recap of Statistics2013, which pays homage to the 300th anniversary of Jacob Bernoulli’s landmark book The Art of Conjecturing.*
My interest in statistics stems from a belief that one should live by what you see, not what supposedly should be. In other words, let the data speak. I have little patience for speculation based only on personal opinion, unless it comes from one who clearly possesses great subject matter knowledge—even then I would like to see peer-reviewed research supporting the contentions. The converse of this is being greatly off-put by people who obviously do not know what they are talking about using statistics as a weapon. This is crooked (as noted by Prof Pantula).
But never mind this dark side of statistics, it’s time to celebrate them as Gianluca Massimo and his Italian friends (including students in Statistical Sciences at the University of Padua) did in this ‘bromantical’ music video.
*For a scholarly review and historical context, see “The Significance of Jacob Bernoulli’s Ars Conjectandi for the Philosophy of Probability Today” by Glenn Shafer of Rutgers University.