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.
Sea turtles nesting now—only 1 out of 1000 will make it to maturity
Walking the beach yesterday on the beach by our condo on Florida’s West Coast I came across this sea turtle nest. Most likely it’s a loggerhead, but it could be a rare Kemp’s ridley according to biologists at Mote’s Sea Turtle Conservation and Research Program.
As you can see in this news report —including video of the female digging in, somewhere on this beach they recorded a nest made by this most uncommon of all sea turtles. Unfortunately, the odds of any one baby living to an age when they can reproduce, which might take up to 30 years, are only 1 out of 1000.* It does not help to be sharing their nesting ground with all the people along the coast, but, with the admonitions of biologists and concerned citizens to not disturb the eggs and keep the lights down, perhaps their chances will improve.
*One of the hazards, of particular concern for the Kemp’s ridley turtle, is toxins from Florida’s red tides based on this new research by Mote scientists.
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, snow–but it was ice out
Walking the dog to the park on a decent day yesterday (today being terribly cold and rainy) I came across this remnant of the mountain of snow piled up in the cul de sac. Yuk! On the other hand, many of the area’s lakes enjoyed ice-out this week. Nearby White Bear Lake was declared open on Wednesday morning (it’s a bit of a judgement call, evidently). According to records that go back 86 years this year’s ice-out fell nine days later than the median date but well ahead of the record of May 4, 1950.
I am looking forward to the dirty-snow-out coming soon. Then I feel it really will be Spring.
P.S. I noticed the postal-deliverer wearing the USPS summer-shorts uniform, so that’s a good sign. : )
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. 🙂
My Minnesota Twins fail on fantasy front
Supposedly hope springs eternal at the start of every baseball season, no matter how miserable the prospects for your home team. Sadly the statisticians at the Wall Street Journal burst that bubble by skewering my squad—saying yesterday that It’s Not a Fantasy, the Minnesota Twins Are Bad. Their “Roster Reality” ranking leaves the hapless Twinkies last. Fantasy team owners figured only 3 players rated a position in the first 276 drafted. That is bad.
Being a homer, when I did my draft I filled my last position with Byron Buxton—the number 1 prospect in all of Major League Baseball. Unfortunately if BB does make it up to Minnesota this year it will be after the Twins get eliminated from contention. On the bright side I expect that will again happen with plenty of games remaining to let the up-and-comers get in some good playing time.
By the way, the Twins rallied this afternoon with 2 runs in the 9th to win out over the hated White Sox and prevent them from a 3 game sweep. That’s a 1 game winning streak! Woohoo!
Experiments by Incan agronomists
Earlier this week I visited Machu Picchu in Peru, which features extensive terracing for crop-growing. Five-hundred years ago the Incans took full advantage of a uniquely temperate microclimate on sites like this along the border of the Amazon. First of all they engineered a drainage system out of rocks brought up from the river below. Then they covered it with dirt laboriously hauled from fertile plains at lower elevations. Next they evidently experimented on different crops at different levels to get the best interaction with varying temperatures each step of the way down from the peak. According to a team of agronomists and archeologists 
from U Penn who reproduced the Incan farming conditions, yields of potatoes came in at two or even four times what would be expected. All this is quite impressive—building a self-sustaining city at nearly 8000 feet on a peak with only a few, small flat areas.