Boo Yahoo for breaking bad on my MAD
Posted by mark in sports, Uncategorized on November 20, 2013
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action!”
— Ian Fleming
, Goldfinger
A simple, yet effective, measure of forecasting prowess is the mean absolute deviation (MAD). Yahoo’s computer projections for fantasy football do poorly on this measure. For example, one of my teams is thus far, through the first 11 weeks of this season, at 16 points MAD from an average projection of 70 per game. That’s an error exceeding 20%! But to make matters far worse, their forecast on this team is terribly biased. Given my indignation you can guess which way Yahoo has been erring (yes, I am a loser)—consistently over-estimating how points my players actually accumulate. Enough data has come in to make this statistically significant as indicated by the confidence interval on the margin of error (MOE) being below zero. Between my fantasy team and the Vikings it’s hard to say which is doing worse at underachieving. Thank goodness for the Minnesota Gopher gridioners exceeding all expectations. That is a ray of sunshine in a gloomy Fall for a football fanatic like me.
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.
Quants and nerds bring science and reason to the dark fortress of superstition
Posted by mark in sports, Uncategorized on November 2, 2013
Alison Gopnik, The Wall Street Journal’s “Mind & Matter” columnist, goes a bit over the top today while paying homage to baseball’s statisticians. But one must be mindful that she teaches at U Cal Berkeley—less than 15 miles from the home field of the Oakland Athletics and “Moneyball” wizard Billy Beane. At the other end of the country the Boston Red Sox rule supreme in Major League Baseball in large part to calculations by their adviser Bill James—inventor of sabermetrics: the empirical analysis of baseball, especially statistics that measure in-game activity.
However, BoSox hero (one of many!) Jonny Gomes, who got a lot of disrespect for his measures—yet came through in the clutch, came back with this shot in an on-field interview with FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal after the clincher at Fenway Park:
“There’s a lot of sabermetrics, there’s a lot of numbers and stuff. The whole WAR stat. But when you go to playoffs, you want me to go to war with.”
WAR stands for Wins Above Replacement. The Red Sox led MLB on this statistic as shown here. Gomes only rated a bit over 1 on WAR. A “solid starter” should achieve a WAR of 2 or more according to this white paper by Boston’s Yawkey Report.
It’s hard to argue with success, but take that Jonny!
Feeling Fall finally–thoughts turn to Florida…but, given their gators, do we dare go?
Talk about the office this week blew with the strong northern winds to consideration of making a move to the South. When I suggested Florida, a colleague expressed concerns about alligators, such as this one that put an end to a jogger. This led me to doing some research on the relative risks of Nature down there in God’s Waiting Room.
Check out these stats that surprised me with evidence that ‘gators are worse than sharks.
Elsewhere I learned that there’s been 52 lighting deaths in Florida over the last 10 years.
Here’s a recap of these grisly stats for Florida:
- Gators—3 deaths per decade
- Sharks—1.4 killed every 10 years
- Lightning—52 fried per decade
It turns out that the latter are mainly men out fishing (>80 % of the deaths)—probably trying to catch sharks or gators.
Maybe I will just stay here in Minnesota and take my chances on either freezing to death or being eaten by wolves.
Putting the cheeriest spin on 2013 World Happiness report by the United Nations
Kudos to Bloomberg Businessweek graphics editor Evan Applegate for this breakdown showing Peru on top for achieving the biggest percent gain in happiness over the past 5 years. One of my daughters moved to Arequipa this summer and started up an organic chocolatieria and coffee shop so I’ve no doubt that this is now the nexus of burgeoning bliss. 🙂
If you squint while taking a test will it improve your score?
In a 2007 experiment, researchers at Princeton split 40 math students into two groups for a test written up in two fonts—one clear and the other difficult (italic, light gray). Counter-intuitively the latter group scored 29 percent higher. In his new book David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell, renowned for the best seller the popular Outliers, cites this as an example of how “facing overwhelming odds produces greatness,” or, as Nietzsche said “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” This works for me—being up for challenges, but perhaps it cannot be extrapolated to the people in general. As Christopher Chabris cautions in this Wall Street Journal review yestertoday, provocative results like the ones from Princeton often cannot be reproduced. He warns:
“Anyone who has followed recent developments in social science should know that small studies with startling effects must be viewed skeptically until their results are verified on a broader scale. They might hold up, but there is a good chance they will turn out to be spurious.”
If it seems too counter-intuitive to be true, perhaps it isn’t—best in these cases you await confirmation by others in adequately-powered verification experiments.
Tailgaters not put off by center high mounted stop lamps
Posted by mark in Consumer behavior, pop on September 12, 2013
According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) nearly a third of all crashes are rear-enders. So, when an experiment by psychologist John Voevodsky in 1974 found that San Francisco taxis equipped with a third brake light suffered 60.6% fewer rear-end collisions, it got the attention of the NHTSA. After replicating these results on a larger scale, they required center high mounted stop lamps (CHMSL) on all new cars in 1986. However, recent studies show a reduction in accidents of only 5%!*
I suppose drivers now are too busy texting to be deterred by CHMSL. ; ) But now Ford is experimenting on wirelessly warning those following when a driver puts the brakes on. See more details here. I suggest it set an alarm off on cell phones too—similar to wireless emergency alerts.
But the only real solution to rear-end collisions would be a system that automatically reduces speed on serial tailgaters. They are a menace to society in my opinion. Meantime let’s hope our highway patrols do what these cops did on California’s freeways.
*(Thanks to University of Minnesota Professor Sanford Weisberg of the School of Statistics for bringing this to my attention in his seminar today.)
Little correlation between pay and how meaningful you find your work
Posted by mark in Consumer behavior, pop, Uncategorized, Wellness on September 1, 2013
The August 26 issue of Business Week features this chart on median salary versus job meaning developed by salary comparison site PayScale. See if your profession is listed and, if so, how your colleagues rated their work.
I find it interesting that one of the lowest paying jobs—water treatment plant operator—came in at 100 percent self-rating of high job meaning. On the other hand, a securities trader makes twice the pay but only 14 percent felt their work meant much.
Neurosurgeons come out tops on both counts—salary and meaningfulness. That takes brains getting into a position like this. ; )
One of the least-paying jobs listed by PayScale is gas station attendant—it is also, evidently, nearly completely meaningless. It seems that a person stuck with this work would do well by becoming a dog kennel worker: The pay is about the same but carers for canines rates their job at 64% on the meaningful scale. My pet Penny (pictured sharing water with my grandson) approves. : )
Machine provides the perfect pour for Japanese beer
Awaiting a flight out of Japan’s Narita Airport, I came across this beer-pouring machine in the Delta lounge. See it in action here. It turns out that there’s a science to pouring beer as I reported in this article explaining how UK Boffins Pull Off Brilliant DOE on Beer. The only drawback of this machine is that it lacks conversational skills. I found it a bit awkward sitting there with my perfectly poured beer and no one to talk to while enjoying it. 🙁
Negativity about positivity
Every day for me is a battle to keep up the positivity and dampen down the negativity–I just feel better doing this, especially when others respond in kind. This news from The Scientist debunking the “positivity ratio” makes my goal easier–I need only aim to be on the plus side, even by a tiny little bit–not on a nearly 3 to 1 basis. 🙂
P.S. Being its now past noon on Wednesday we are over the hump on the work week. Cheers!