Grade A for long-term health prognosis
I took a high-school classmate out to lunch today for his birthday. Now in his late 50s, my friend has aged well – evidently as healthy as can be. Being that he graduated 6th in our class, my buddy’s exceptional fitness of body and mind fits a profile of well-being that’s characteristic of individuals who excelled academically, according to this report by the New York Times. In a nutshell, a long-term longitudinal study of over 10,000 aging students found that, by their early 60s, those near the top of their class were half as likely to report declines in health than their academically-inferior peers. It seems that the studs for studying end up being a lot heartier than the partyers.
“Academic performance is strongly linked to health in later life.”
– Pamela Herd, associate professor of public affairs and sociology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and study-author of Education and Health in Late-life among High School Graduates
KISMIF approach hits the spot for communications specialist
Posted by mark in Consumer behavior on February 3, 2011
As all of you must know by now, I like to keep it simple and make it fun (KISMIF) when explaining how use statistical tools. That made me a natural fit for joining up with our founding principal Pat Whitcomb in 1988. After all, he named the company Stat-Ease and made its slogan “Statistics Made Easy” – leaving me the “fun” part (him having already made things easy!). 🙂
Every now and then this KISMIF approach hits the spot, such as it did with Lara Marlin Hull, a Marketing and Social Media Consultant at Red Funnel Consulting. Before becoming a communications specialist, Lara worked for a number of years as a research scientist in the pharmaceutical industry – just the sort of person that we aim to please. As you can see in her January 19 blog for How to Sell Scientists (Does Your Newsletter Grab Scientists’ Attention? Here’s One that Does ), Lara and her scientist friend really liked my latest article for our newsletter, which details a fun kitchen experiment* by my son Hank. She passes along this interesting insight: “People forget that scientists are people too.”
I am reminded of a time early in the days of Stat-Ease when I put together a survey of our software users. Wanting to incent responses, I suggested to Pat and our programmer Tryg that we consider offering a free pen. They both scoffed at the idea of a technical professional being swayed by “swag” (that is, a bribe!), going so far as to say that such a gift would create insult and cause less of a return! My reaction was that “experimenters are people too!” Putting our own tools to practice, I then split up our user list at random and sent only half the offer for the free pen. Believe it or not, these lucky ones responded at a significantly higher rate with completed surveys.
If people don’t have a good sense of humor, they are not very good scientists either.
– Nobel prize-winning physicist Andre Geim
PS. Ms. Hull followed up her initial accolade for the Stat-Ease “Statistics Made Easy” approach with further praise (The Secret Product Your Customers Want) for the way our Stat-Ease home page invites browsers needing immediate help. It is wonderful to receive unsolicited third-party endorsements like this, even though it’s not for our products and services per se, but, rather, how we go about doing our business.
*”Tumbler Rumbles with a Mugger,” December 2010 Stat-Teaser
Kitchen pantry science – fun experiments to do at home
Several months ago I watched a neat demonstration by kitchen-pantry scientist Liz Heinecke on how to write secret messages. All you need are cranberries, water, baking soda and some paper as detailed here. Liz, a mother of three, provides many fun experiments (“simple recipes for real science”) to try at home. I think it’s a great way to get kids interested in science. However, be forewarned, she’s got a masters degree in bacteriology so some of her ideas might grow on you. ; )
This reminded me of a parent who worked as a microbiologist for the FDA. She did a show-and-tell for a Cub Scout den that I led 20 years ago. One of her items collected from FDA was a can of vichyssoise (leek-potato-onion soup traditionally served cold). It had been tested positive for botulism. We were told that if opened, this container of bacteria could sicken all of the inhabitants of New York City. After hearing this, I vowed to always boil canned soup.
Science can be as easy as baking. I want to encourage parents to open up their kitchen cabinets, stir up some science with their kids, and feed those hungry minds.
— Liz Heinecke, kitchen-pantry scientist
Statistics-driven scientific methods slammed again
This December 13 article published by The New Yorker adds fuel to fire for deemphasizing significance testing as the criterion for accepting purported advancements in science. It’s well worth reading for anyone with a stake in statistics, despite raking over the same coals seen in this March 27 Science News article, which I discussed in a previous blog.*
“A lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise.”
– Jonah Lehrer, author of “The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method”
Evidently much of the bad science stems from “significance-chasers” – those who hunt out findings that pass the generally-accepted p-value of 5% for hypothesis testing. Unfortunately a statistically-significant outcome from an badly-designed experiment is of no value whatsoever.
PS. I credit blogger William Briggs for bringing this article to my attention. His attitude is provided succinctly by this assertion: “Scientists are too damn certain of themselves.”
*Misuse of statistics calls into question the credibility of science March 28, 2010.
Favorite posts from three rings in the 2010 carnival of management blogs
Posted by mark in Uncategorized on January 2, 2011
For this year’s Annual Management Improvement Blog Carnival, hosted by John Hunter,* I am picking the best posts from three blogs:
- Seth Godin’s Blog (this fellow is a real character — very stimulating!)
- Lean is Good (focus on statistical guru W. Edwards Deming appeals to me)
- Flowing Data (theme is “visualization and statistics”: graphs and numbers — what a wonderful combo!)
See us hosts and the blogs we’ve chosen to review at this site coordinated by John.
Seth Godin has much to offer for entrepreneurs and professional workers trying to contend with this increasingly high-tech world. This past year Godin published the very timely book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? . The 2010 blog from Seth Grodin that stands out for me is:
- The Levy flight, which provides the mathematical-underpinning for foraging behavior by animals and humans – seeking sustenance in the form of food and information; respectively. Sharks hunt by this random method punctuated by long forays in a particular direction as reported here by Discovery News. Browsers of internet presumably behave in a similar manner – occasionally delving deeply into a given website. Knowing this, model-builders can provide more accurate simulations of consumer behavior. Grodin is astute to recognize this.
My pick from last year’s Lean is Good blog is this one written by Bryan Zeigler:
- Goalpost Quality – Taguchi Losses and SPC provides a simple, but compelling vision for improving quality – think of your specification range as “V” – not a goal post. From my years working on manufacturing improvement, I can attest to the corrosive nature of settling for output that squeaks by the customer requirements.
Of the three blogs featured here, my favorite by far is Flowing Data, written by UCLA Statistics graduate student Nathan Yau. The charts it presents can be truly amazing, such as this one that details the extremely-fascinating 2010 movie Inception. However, here’s my favorite chart presented by Flowing Data this past year:
- Where Bars Trump Grocery Stores highlights Wisconsin as the place to party hearty. Being just over the border in a State that’s bonkers against beer,** I say thank goodness for more liberality about liquor. The graphic tells the story.
That’s it for this year’s best of the Carnival of management blogs that I sampled. Take a Levy Flight for yourself and see if you can hunt out one that strikes your fancy.
*For background on John Hunter and his Carnival, see this post from last year
** See this blog by Andrew Zimmern about Stupid Beer Laws in Minnesota
Smooth sliding for 2011
Posted by mark in Uncategorized on January 1, 2011
Here’s hoping you enjoy smooth sliding in 2011 like I did recently outside my front door.
Happy New Year!
– Mark
PS. Kudos for my daughter Emily for this production.
A fruit fly by any other name is still a fruit fly
A good example of what South Korean educational system produces (see my previous blog) is their first astronaut, bioengineer Yi So-yeon, who was featured in this article Tuesday by The Korea Herald . During her mission at the International Space Station she completed a number of experiments, including one that involved the assistance of 1000 fruit flies.
If I were an astronaut going up with so many flies, I’d shake the container just before lift-off to get them up in the air and lighten the load. I heard about this trick from my next-door neighbor – a bee-keeper. He loaded up too many hives in his truck and it went over-weight, but he beat the inspectors by banging on the side with a hammer as he drove onto the scale.
Having segued to bees, here’s a heads-up about a study done by a group of 8- to 10-year-old British school children from Blackawton Primary School. They trained a bunch of bees to go to specific-colored and/or patterned targets by selectively rewarding them with sugar. This experiment met the standards of the Royal Society, which published the results in this Biology Letter. Also see these kind comments. Wired Science provides a ‘dumbed-down’ version with photos, that is, an executive summary 😉 here.
“We discovered that bumble-bees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from. We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”
– Children from Blackawton
PS. Some folks think that drosophila melanogaster is a misnomer for this little critter that mysteriously spring up from discarded apples and the like. “The fruit fly’s name is likely to change to Sophophora melanogaster if results of a new evolutionary analysis are accepted” according to this April 2010 bulletin from the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. Who made them lords of the fruit fly?
South Korea achieves top ranking for education
Posted by mark in Basic stats & math on December 21, 2010
Based on testing of nearly half a million 15-year-old students worldwide, South Korea ranks as the number 1 country overall for education. It’s laid out beautifully in the graphical illustration by Paul Scruton for this article by UK’s Guardian on which country does best at reading, science and maths. This breaking news is timely for me because I will be in Seoul Thursday giving a presentation hosted by the Department of Statistics at Chung-Ang University. The USA fell far down the list in math, so I suppose I am a bit out of line trying to explain new tools of design of experiments to anyone in this country. ; )
I spoke today to a resident of Busan with a daughter in high school. She said the school runs from 8 in the morning to 8 at night Monday through Friday and a half day every other Saturday. No wonder South Korean teenagers test so highly relative to the USA!
Happy holidays!
The recent collapse of our Hubert H. Hump-free (ha ha) Metrodome makes it seem like we Minnesotans must be completely deflated (pun intended) from the extraordinary snowfall this month. However, there is an upside to this weather – excellent cross-country skiing conditions. As you can see, this has brightened up my disposition. I like nothing better than a ski through the woods near my home in Stillwater, where I often find myself all alone except for a startled deer — I almost literally ran across a doe (the female ungulate, not a design-of-experiment ) yesterday, for example.
Being in good spirits myself, I wish the same for you this holiday season. Enjoy!
“He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.”
– Excerpt from “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
PS. The shot from ground-level provides the perspective of one of our indigenous snow fleas, which I often see in late winter when it warms up a bit. It’s fun to watch them jump around at random.
Fishing for giant snakes with a boy as bait
Posted by mark in Uncategorized on November 28, 2010
The statistics are:
- Prey: Length 26 feet, weight 320 pounds
- Predator: Length 4 feet (?), weight 90 pounds.
Here in Minnesota we love to tell fishing stories that can be real whoppers, but this one told by Everglades Outpost founder Bob Freer beats all. I heard the story yestesterday on National Public Radio’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me” show.* Freer and his crew were confounded by a very large snake lurking under a house – the hole would not admit a full-grown adult. Luckily a kid watching the proceedings stepped up to help. The snake hunters tied a rope to his leg and handed him a stick with a napkin tied to it. With the 90-pound boy (brave or foolhardy?) as bait, they fished out a 26-foot long, 320 pound reptile – a python, I presume.**
“We told him to make sure not to tell his mother.”
– Bob Freer
PS. Pictured here in my hand is a Ball python – a popular pet due to being so small (several feet in length and a few pounds at most) in addition to their endearing eponymous tendency to curl up into a comfortable coil.
* See the transcript of “Animal Expert Bob Freer Plays Not My Job” here
** The National Park Service just released their latest statistics on the proliferation of Burmese pythons in the Everglades – see the year-by-year count here.