Research on happiness encourages smiles
The American Society of Quality did well by bringing in Harvard researcher and best-selling author Shawn Achor in to keynote their World Congress for Quality Improvement in Nashville this May. I was happy to hear him reinforce my practice of smiling at people whenever I think of doing so—this being a great way to generate good feelings all around. Often I make a little game of this by seeing if I can get a smile back. When I am really on a roll, especially when just taking a leisurely stroll, I also give a cheery “Hello”. Of course, some curmudgeons neither smile nor reciprocate with a greeting. That gets me trying even harder the next time to get some positive feedback for my joviality.
Achor noted that top-rated hotels require their staff go by the 10-5 rule—giving their lodgers a smile at 10 feet and a greeting at 5—in the process generating far more goodwill than they would do by just going about their work. He is working to get hospitals going 10-5, thus lightening up greatly what otherwise can be a very depressing environment.
If I really need to upgrade my smiling game, I take my granddaughter Laine along with me on my walk. How can you not give a grin back to this sweet seven-month-old (or big brother Archer pictured hugging her)? If you can keep a straight face looking at Laine, then I advise you take up poker for a living.
Here are some other nuggets that I gleaned from Shawn’s presentation:
- Don’t follow the “cult of the average” by trying to rope in the positive outliers—those individuals who are exceptional performers. I’ve seen this happen in schools where a teacher (not a good one!) gradually wears down a superior student to the norm, this being the easiest course rather than making any exceptions to the curriculum. On the other hand a conference presenter from Crayola found from their statistical studies that one of the workers packing boxes did so with abnormal precision. By studying this positive outlier they were able to revise their process so it produced far less defects in inventory control.
- Seeing potential problems is not pessimism, it is “rational optimism”. Along those lines a fellow whom Achor had just pumped up with his talk about happiness decided that he needn’t wear a seat belt anymore. Perhaps it may not be right for person to be painted as a pessimist when they call out risky actions like this.
The only downer on this whole deal is that it remains obscure why some people are just naturally positive, while others tend to be gloomy. Based on a sample size of 6 for siblings and 5 for offspring, I believe that everyone has a natural set-point for happiness. However, perhaps I am being overly optimistic (for the cheery sorts) or purely pessimistic (regarding those who seem to be always out of sorts).
P.S. On the topic of happiness, I wish this aplenty for all you moms for tomorrow’s Mother’s Day. As my grandson Archer explains, “My Papa is Mark, my Nana is Karen [my wife], my daddy is Ryan, and my mommy is Mom.” That puts everyone in the proper perspective.
A helpful hierarchy for statistical analysis spells out how deep to drill on the statistics
Posted by mark in design of experiments on April 26, 2015
Fred Dombrose, a force for use of statistical design of experiment in biomedical research, alerted me to an enlightening article on statistics asking “What is the question?” in the March 20 issue of Science magazine. It lays out these 6 types of data analyses laid out by biostatistician Jeffrey Leak:
- Descriptive
- Exploratory
- Inferential
- Predictive
- Causal
- Mechanistic
For the distinguishing details going up this ladder see this Data Scientist Insight blog. However, the easiest way to determine where your study ranks is via the flowchart provided in the Science publication. There you also see four common mistakes that stem from trying to get too much information from too little data.
“Poor design of experiments is one of, if not the most, common reason for an experiment to fail.”
– Jeff Leek, “Great scientist – statistics = lots of failed experiments”, simplystats blog of 4/12/13
Too many tourists trying to occupy limited spaces
I spent the weekend in Prague attempting to relax after a stimulating two days attending the 2015 Camo User Meeting. It really was great except for the main sights of the city being so crowded with tourists like me.
The traffic patterns vary greatly by the intermittent busloads of tour groups—big bunches of Japanese or Americans and other places worldwide that come to this wonderfully historic city.
It turns out that there’s a universal power law governing pedestrian interactions according to studies led by the Director of the University of Minnesota’s Applied Motion Lab Stephen Guy. He and his collaborators have developed a novel statistical-mechanical approach to directly measure the interaction energy between pedestrians. Using this simple interaction law they can simulate crowd phenomena such as two tour groups crossing a city square or trying to push into a just-opened attraction. See these situations and others illustrated in CGI movies here.
All I can think of when viewing these simulations is how horrible it is to get caught up in a crowd. The saving grace is you needn’t think much when this happens—just let your natural collision-avoidance system take over and go on auto-pilot.
Cheers for Czech beers
This is the view of the Charles Bridge in Prague from the usual vantage point of a fellow like me who likes his beer. As reported here by Radio Prague, the Czech Republic leads the world by drinking 160 liters per person per year. With half liter cans of Urquel going for less than 35 Crowns–only about $1.50 in US dollars, I can see why this alcoholic brew has achieved such popularity in this country. Bottoms up!
A fine beer may be judged with only one sip, but it’s better to be thoroughly sure.
-Czech Proverb
When you gotta glow, you gotta glow
In my youth I enjoyed a pop ditty by Johnny Mercer about a little glow worm. This song is now stuck in my head. It is an “ear worm”! It emerged from a corner of my brain when I toured the Waitomo Caves in the North Island of New Zealand yesterday and saw the wonderful constellations of glow worms that populate its cavern ceilings.
I have no clue how to eliminate an ear worm, but it turns out that glow worms are susceptible to increases in carbon dioxide according a poster presentation of this scientific study that kept me occupied while awaiting our Maori guide at the cave mouth. Not surprisingly the half million tourists get the most blame. It’d be far worse if not for the glowworms providing such a breathtaking sight.
No worries, Mate!
My wife and I enjoyed a fine day in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney the other day, led by a happy-go-lucky Aussie named Justin (“think Timberlake, not Bieber” he admonished). All went well until we went to pick up another American couple who took the option of a walk-about along the Grand Canyon (not quite like the one in USA, this one being a bit shallower and filled with gum trees, but impressive nonetheless). They’d been set off with a “no worries, Mate” when the fellow asked for directions. “Just follow the one-and-only trail until you get to the trail-point labelled ‘Leap’,” said Justin. When the intrepid trekkers failed to show, our guide sang a different tune. “I’m going to have to fill out an awful lot of paperwork,” he kept lamenting as we sat around for some hours hoping to hear from the missing hikers.
Eventually they were located, having taken a wrong turn on the supposedly forkless path.
At times like this I am happy to have my worry stone to roll around my fingers. I picked up a new one this trip at an aboriginal culture center. It is a river rock picked up as a “dreaming stone” by a native Australian whose wife painted it with a colorful kangaroo—a symbol of strength. That’s just what I need in times when things go kerflooey such as the Bieberesque moment that Justin endured.
“The hand can operate as a director of consciousness—a tool or agent for the mind in achieving a mental state in which people will be able to get the outcome they want.”
– Frank R. Wilson, neurologist (quote reported by Sue Shellenbarger of Wall Street Journal in a report this week on the mental value of “clicking, stretching, twirling, flipping, squeezing or fiddling with everyday objects”).
So long as I have a worry (or dream) stone there can be no great worries, other than one big one–it going missing. I worry about that night and day.
Null hypothesis significance testing procedure (NHTSP) psyched out
My colleague Brooks Henderson alerted me to this new policy by the editors of the Basic and Applied Psychology (BASP) journal to ban the NHSTP. According to the editorial in their Feb 2015 issue, authors must remove all p-values and the like and not refer to “significant” differences. They also banned confidence intervals, which really makes this new policy onerous, in my opinion.
I do see the sense of focusing on effect sizes and allowing the readers, presumably subject matter experts, to judge their importance. However, although they do “encourage the the use of larger sample sizes”, it makes no sense, I feel, to disregard the impact of small studies on the uncertainty of the results.
Blaming the misuse of NHTSP and p-values in particular for bad science is like letting a bad guy go by saying the gun is at fault.
Are dogs right-pawed or left?
Last week I judged a number of entrants in a 7th grade science fair. The one I liked the best investigated a number of dogs to see which paw they favored. This depended on which hand the student held out. When he held out his left hand, all dogs offered up their right paw. But when he held out his right hand, half of the canines shook it with their left paw. I conclude from this that far more dogs are lefties than humans, who favor their right hand by a ratio of 9-to-1. Based on what I read here in the Washington Post and see published on the internet, my guess is that dogs are split 50/50 left versus right. The same may be true for cats, although they might be slightly more likely to right-pawed according a study noted in the Post article.
Just for fun, test your pet by putting a snack just barely within their reach. Which paw do they put out? Make a note. Do it again a number of times. If you see what seems to be a significant bias to left or right, let me know.
Lightening up the load on birds and bees
My former neighbor Phil–a bee-keeper–told me he loaded up too many hives in his truck on a run to California and it went over-weight for the regulations on the road home. However, Phil beat the highway inspectors by banging on the side with a hammer as he drove onto the scale. The bees flew up in the air and took down the measurement just enough for a pass–avoiding a hefty fine.
I always wondered if Phil was ‘bee-essing’ me, but a recent study by a Stanford scientist, reported here by NewScientist, indicates that this trick might be bang on. The only catches are that the flyers (in this case Pacific parrotlets, must flap in synch and the weight must be taken on the upstroke. This whole idea would backfire badly on the downstroke when the weight of the flyers comes back double.
Bee-leave it or not.
Picking on P in these times of measles
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on February 3, 2015
Randall Munroe takes a poke at over-valuers of p in this XKCD cartoon
Nature weighed in with their shots against scientists who misuse P values in this February 2014 article by statistics professor Regina Nuzzo. She bemoans the data dredgers who come up with attention-getting counterintuitive results using the widely-accepted 0.05 P filter on long-shot hypotheses. A prime example is the finding by three University of Virginia finding that moderates literally perceived the shades of gray more accurately than extremists on the left and right (P=0.01). As they admirably admitted in this follow up report on Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth Over Publishability, this controversial effect evaporated upon replication. This chart on probable cause reveals that these significance chasers produce results with a false-positive rate of near 90%!
Nuzzo lays out a number of proposals to put a damper on overly-confident reports on purported scientific studies. I like the preregistered replication standard developed by Andrew Gelman of Columbia University, which he noted in this article on The Statistical Crisis in Science in the November-December issue of American Scientist. This leaves scientists free to pursue potential breakthroughs at early stages when data remain sketchy, while subjecting them to rigorous standards further on—prior to publication.
“The irony is that when UK statistician Ronald Fisher introduced the P value in the 1920s, he did not mean it to be a definitive test. He intended it simply as an informal way to judge whether evidence was significant in the old-fashioned sense: worthy of a second look.”