Studies on the intelligence of cats versus dogs and their owners
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on July 20, 2016
It is a demonstrable fact that dogs know calculus as reported here by The Mathematical Association of America. On the other hand, everyone knows that cats, while obviously intelligent, are too lazy to learn any tricks like all dogs do, at least until they become too old. Therefore, for these two reasons, dogs must be smarter than cats by my reckoning.
But now comes news that felines fathom physics, or at least they naturally grasp the principles of gravity. This conclusion comes from an ingenious experiment on thirty cats done by Japanese researchers. The creatures were found to be inordinately curious about magnetic balls that did not fall out of an overturned metal container. For more details, see this recap by phys.org.
Then to make matters worse for dog lovers like myself, a recent study by a Wisconsin researcher indicates that cat owners are smarter than dog owners. Read it here in Psychology Today and whimper. If it’s any consolation, the study shows that dog people are less neurotic.
“The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him, and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too.”
― Samuel Butler
Hold on a second—the lords of time elect to extend the year of 2016
The controllers of clocks at the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) decided recently that 2016 ought to leap an extra second to stay in synch with Earth’s rotation. This will create a great deal of consternation for computers, thus IERS is giving six months’ notice for IT people to prepare themselves. Despite that lead time, about 10 percent of networks around the world are expected to fail, e.g.; a worldwide airline booking system that went down in 2012 for several hours when its computers’ internal clocks could not reconcile the discrepancy with outside systems. (I suggest you stock up on water, food stuffs and toilet paper.)
Here are some stats I gleaned from reports on this astronomical happening by New Scientist and National Geographic:
- Clocks will read 23:59:60 on the 31st of December (I am doubtful this will work on my timepieces)
- 86,400 seconds tick off every day on the master atomic clock for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), however; the push and pull of the Moon causes the Earths massively heavy oceans to slosh around, which decelerates the spin between 1.5 and two milliseconds every 24 hours, on average.
- Gauging by sightlines from far off galaxies, IERS monitors changes to Earth’s spin. When it goes off by more than 0.9 seconds plus or minus, they mandate a 1 second adjustment.
- In 1972, when the adjustments began, the world got 10 extra seconds to make up for lost time. Since then 16 more seconds have been added—the last one on June 30, 2015. IERS have never removed a second. (If you are a rocket scientist, please compute how long it will it be until the Earth stops and let me know so I have plenty of time to begin packing up my things.)
Since antiquity the Earth’s rotation has provided us with our timescale – it is the Earth’s rotation that gives us our most basic unit of time, the solar day.
— Rory McEvoy, Curator of Horology, Royal Observatory Greenwich
Stand up now and then while working at your desk and do half again more than sitting the whole time
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on June 19, 2016
According to this Wall Street Journal report, call-center workers given “stand-capable” desks were 46% more productive than their peers who remained sitting. This astounding improvement in output is attributed to the benefits of moving around.
“We hope this work will show companies that although there might be some costs involved in providing stand-capable workstations, increased employee productivity over time will more than offset these initial expenses.”
-Mark Benden, Director of the Texas A&M Ergonomics Center
P.S. It seems to me from what I gather off the internet that sitting or standing all day at work may not be as healthy as varying positions, e.g., see this essay from 538 blog.
World’s longest pedestrian suspension bridge
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on May 27, 2016
While taking the scenic route back to Munich from Mad King Ludwig’s fairy-tale Neuschwanstein Castle Neuschwanstein Castle, I looked up and saw this flimsy strand several hundred feet overhead just over the Austrian border. My daughter and her husband insisted on hiking up to walk across it. Being a sucker for a dare, I could not resist joining them. (My wife wisely stayed behind.) It was awesome being up so high and swaying in the wind on the 1,322 foot journey each way above the chasm.
The Tibetan-style footbridge is called the Highline179 after the tourist route that winds through this part of the Tyrol. It supposedly can hold up to 500 people. However, I would not like to do a confirmatory test of this specification. By the way, the ruins in the background are Fort Claudia–an outpost of Ehrenberg Castle.
If you are not afraid of heights, check out this video made during construction of Highline179.
Lottomania revving up with Powerball pot approaching a half billion dollars
Despite odds of only 1 in nearly 300 million for a win, Americans are lining up to buy tickets for a chance at the ninth largest jackpot in U.S. history. Why bother? Evidently most of us, e.g., my wife,* suffer from “availability bias”. This occurs due to the diabolical way that lottery officials publicize winners, which when magnified by the media, makes is seem that these windfalls are commonplace.
Another fallacy, which tricks analytical types like me, is assuming that expected value becomes positive when the jackpot builds. That is, for every $1 invested, more than that is likely to be returned, at least on average. The flaw in this calculation is that lottomaniacs swarm on the big pots, thus making it very likely that the payoff must then be shared among multiple winners. For details, follow this thread on XKCD’s forum.
*I asked her “If you won the lottery, would you still love me?’” and she said: “Of course I would. I’d miss you, but I’d still love you.” (Credit goes Irish comedian Frank Carson for this witty comeback.)
Men who have children make more money and live longer–correlation or causation?
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on April 29, 2016
Hey guys, if you want to make more money and live longer, have kids. Anyways that seems to be the gist of two studies reported this month, at least from my perspective as a father of five. Here is the scoop:
- “Men in the top 1 percent distribution level live about 15 years longer than men in the bottom 1 percent on the income distribution in the United States.” – Raj Chetty, professor of economics at Stanford University, quoted in this report by NPR on an article in The Journal of American Medical Association on “The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014” he lead-authored.
- Working fathers enjoy 21% ‘wage bonus’ over childless colleagues according to a study by United Kingdom’s Trades Union Congress reported here
Before you run off madly making babies, that correlation may not be causation. For example, as reported in this expose by Slate, statistics indicate that eating ice cream turns people into killers. Could that really be the scoop?
American Statistical Association (ASA) defends itself against P-shooters
With the fundamental statistic of P value coming under severe attack, e.g., it being banned in early 2015 by the Basic and Applied Social Psychology (BASP) journal, the ASA has been compelled to issue an unprecedented press release with guidelines for avoiding misuse of hypothesis testing by scientists claiming significant experimental results.* “The ASA statement is intended to steer research into a ‘post p<0.05 era,’” said Ron Wasserstein, the ASA’s executive director.
“To pounce on tiny P values and ignore the larger question is to fall prey to the ‘seductive certainty of significance.’”
– Geoff Cumming, emeritus psychologist, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
The ASA statement on “Statistical Significance and P-Values” can be seen here. It includes 6 guidelines on proper use of this essential tool for assessing research data, beginning with the assertion that “P-values can indicate how incompatible the data are with a specified statistical model.”
*See, for example, this Nature article that claims P values, the ‘gold standard’ of statistical validity, are not as reliable as many scientists assume.
Big data puts an end to the reign of statistics
Posted by mark in Basic stats & math on March 3, 2016
Michael S. Malone of the Wall Street Journal proclaimed last month* that
One of the most extraordinary features of big data is that it signals the end of the reign of statistics. For 400 years, we’ve been forced to sample complex systems and extrapolate. Now, with big data, it is possible to measure everything…
Based on what I’ve gathered (admittedly only a small and probably unrepresentative sample), I think this is very unlikely. Nonetheless, if I were a statistician, I would reposition myself as a “Big Data Scientist”.
*”The Big-Data Future Has Arrived”, 2/22/16.
Colder States report sleeping more—65 degrees F evidently the ideal
Check out the Center for Disease Control (CDC) figures on sleep in the USA map in this Stat report. Note how dark it gets up in our neck of the woods of Minnesota, i.e., us being able to sleep better.
Dark is good but even better is the cold according to this new YouTube video posted by the Wall Street Journal.
There being a sweet spot on temperature makes perfect sense to me, this being based on many sleepless nights camping in the cold or hot. However the worst night I can remember was an overnight ice-fishing outing with a bunch of boy scouts. They could not stop fiddling with the space heater, which cycled us from freezing to boiling for some hours before finally stabilizing at a reasonable temperature. That is when the farting began and the giggling commenced. The whole troop deserved a merit badge for flatulence. But I digress…
A Data Sherlock’s best friend: IBM’s Watson
According to this report last week by eWeek, more than 1 million users have registered for IBM’s Watson Analytics service since it launched a little over 1 year ago. Evidently this artificially intelligent (AI) statistician-in-a-box will enable “citizen data scientists” to decipher patterns in the massive pile of information that now flow in from all quarters. Current clients featuring by eWeek range from multinational law firm using it to identify new areas of practice to a UK a care provider looking for factors that improve worker safety. IBM itself now operates an enterprise called Watson Health that deciphers medical imagery, and they bought the digital assets of the Weather Company to help businesses defend themselves against Mother Nature.*
Unfortunately for one of the early adopters of Watson—the MD Anderson Cancer Center at University of Texas (UT)—AI’s current IQ still falls far short of initial hopes.
“On Jeopardy! [Where Watson made its name 5 years ago by defeating the human champions] there’s a right answer to the question [actually the right question for the answer], but, in the medical world, there are often just informed decisions.”
— Lynda Chin, chief innovation officer for health affairs, UT
So it seems that, for the moment, at least, human statistical Sherlocks will not be replaced by AI’s overseen by amateurs at sleuthing out the culprits for cancer or other highly prized information. However, Watson might be as capable an assistant as ‘his’ literary namesake.
*1/6/16 Financial Times “Big Read” on “Artificial Intelligence”, p 5 sidebar.