Updates

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Beavering Away

Will be engaged busily this week; posts may become sporadic, confused, nonsensical. More then usually, I mean.

Now is the chance to send in a Guest Post (200 ~ 800 words) to finally show the world the Truth of some subject close to your heart. Just email me and I’ll be happy to put it up. Just think: once the world reads your words, you can find the same edifying fame as I have. This fame is so predictable that it can even be reduced to an equation:

    Fame = Obscurity – 1.

I’ll let the mathematically inclined readers figure that out.

Big Announcement!

Sports Fans: I’ll soon have a big, exciting, Oh-My-God announcement that will change your life forever. Those with weak hearts are warned.

I’m involved in a start-up which will test how good experts, bookmakers, bar flies, and civilians are at picking who wins and who loses. By “who” I mean sporting competitors.

Our goal is to be ready for the NFL season. Which, for no good reason, starts in the summer and overlaps Baseball, the only true American sport.

Spencer’s Paper

Roy Spencer has very kindly responded to some of my questions I had about his paper. So the review I promised is nearly ready. Probably later in the week than earlier, however.

Jim Enstrom

Remember the case of Jim Enstrom, UCLA research scientist? He came on the national That-Poor-Sap radar earlier this year when he identified a phony working for the California Air Resource Board. I originally wrote about him here: California Air Resources Board Uses Strange Statistics, UCLA Fires Scientist.

Enstrom discovered that CARB employee and statistician Hien Tran’s PhD came from the degree mill “Thornhill University.” This wouldn’t be interesting except Tran was the author of a report that CARB is using (in part) to make policy.

For his troubles, Enstrom is being booted from UCLA, a university, it is important to recognize, that sucks in quite a bit of moola from CARB and other California agencies.

Anyway, Enstrom has asked my help in reviewing some statistical papers the EPA and other agencies are using to prove that particulate air pollution is Worse Than We Thought. I’m doing this pro bono.

Once we have it put together, I’ll report to you what’s what.

Bad Movies

Only because we just talked about it, Kyle Smith of the New York Post reviews the new book, “Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!” by screenwriters Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon

The premise of this book is that most movies stink, and here’s why.

He said it, not I. On movies today: “They suck. It’s unbelievable how bad movies have been, right. I mean, it’s just I haven’t seen a run of this, a crop of movies

. . . It’s a very entrepreneurial world, and I think you will see that right itself with time in it. But, right now today it’s a particularly dreary moment.”

The speaker is Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks co-founder and movie mogul, earlier this month. I’ll be quoting his words next time some Hollywood person asks me why critics are so mean.

Traveling Day Quiz

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Off once again into the wild blue yonder. So today a quiz, inspired by the Cnet article whose over-stated title is “Researchers build DNA neural network that thinks.”

The piece was a review of the paper “Neural network computation with DNA strand displacement cascades” by Qian, Winfree, and Bruck.

Basic idea:

Here, building on the richness of DNA computing14 and strand displacement circuitry, we show how molecular systems can exhibit autonomous brain-like behaviours. Using a simple DNA gate architecture16 that allows experimental scale-up of multilayer digital circuits, we systematically transform arbitrary linear threshold circuits (an artificial neural network model) into DNA strand displacement cascades that function as small neural networks.

They made a brain in a bottle composed of about a hundred neurons, designed for the special purpose of playing a quiz game:

The team trained the neural network to play a memory game in which it would correctly “identify” four scientists based on specific yes or no questions–for instance whether the scientist was British.

Players dropped DNA strands representing an incomplete set of answers into a test tube. The network then provides the answer–the identity of the correct scientist–by fluorescent signals.

When presented with 27 different ways of answering the questions, the DNA “brain” responded correctly each time.

The game is thus like twenty (or twenty-seven) questions, with the focus of trying to discover whether the scientist is British.

Here’s our quiz: think of the shortest list of yes-no questions you can ask to discover whether a scientist is British. Puns are acceptable. Good luck!

My solution to the twenty-questions is below, but hidden by an HTML comment. If you open this page’s source code, look for the word “SOLUTION.” Don’t reveal what this is in the comments below; I’ll reveal it tomorrow.

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UN Nearly Makes Climate Change A Peace And Security Matter

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Sorry for the cliché but Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble! Global warming is generating an “unholy brew” of vexatious weather events that threaten “international peace and security.”

So said Secretary Herr General Ban Ki-moon in an attempt to persuade the Security Council to accept climate change under its purview. But even with his Shakespearean flourishes, he could not convince enough of the member States to accept his horrific visions. For the moment, climate change will remain a matter of science. UN

Ban Ki-moon’s usurpation would have been momentous because if the Security Council accepted global warming onto its watch lists changes in barometric pressure would have become a matter subject to intervention by UN armed forces.

If the UN changes its mind and says climate change is equivalent to genocide or rouge nations engaging in nuclear weapons research, Tim Black at Spiked suggests the UN switch from pastel blue helmets to verdant green ones. Then the nations that are invaded will know they are beset by eco-warriors.

Ki-moon did not help his cause when he said what was false: Climate change is “accelerating in a dangerous manner.”

Extreme weather events continue to grow more frequent and intense in rich and poor countries alike, not only devastating lives, but also infrastructure, institutions, and budgets — an unholy brew which can create dangerous security vacuums.

Extreme weather events are not growing more frequent and intense, whether in rich or poor countries. What is true is that storms of a given magnitude cause more damage now than historically because now we have more people, and more people concentrated in small areas, all who have more expensive toys to break.

China envoy Wang Min voted against Ki-moon and said what was true, that climate change was “essentially a sustainable development issue.” Russia’s envoy Vitaly Churkin was similarly skeptical and voted no. Brazil’s envoy allowed that the UN “must take a holistic view of conflict,” but put the kibosh on Ki-moon’s grand scheme.

But France and England was on Ki-moon’s side. And so was the Obama-appointed US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who “blasted” the Security Council for not agreeing with her. She said there was “‘manifest evidence’ that climate change posed a direct threat to peace and security.”

Rice was petulant:

This is more than disappointing. It’s pathetic, it’s shortsighted, and frankly it’s a dereliction of duty.

There is no word whether she stomped her feet, but pouting remains a distinct possibility.

Perhaps the fretful Rice was influenced by Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme Achim Steiner, who, using the military vernacular, called climate change a “threat multiplier.”

In a document dizzy with empty phrases and cheap horror movie twists, Ki-moon cried that “Minimalist steps will not do.” There are also mysterious implications about a sort of climate bank, monies which would be administered by the (incorruptible, surely) UN.

There’s not much meat among the sinew of words. It will take an expert political butcher to cut out what’s useful. What to make of “The science suggested continuing, expediting and ‘tipping point’ trends linked to climate change” or “This Council needs to be prepared for the full range of crises that may be deepened or widened by climate change”?

What is obvious is that there are one or two genuine zealots like Rice and Steiner, more than a few countries with their hands out, so anxious to lay claim to the alms the UN might disperse that they will say the most outrageously false things, and a handful of stalwarts who don’t want to be the source of these alms.

It is clear that the UN through the Security Council, as all political organizations do, seeks to increase its own power. They were stopped only because China and Russia did not want to play along. A curious situation: our enemies (of a sort) taking a position against our government but which ultimately supports us. So, at least for now, thank God for China and Russia.

Obama Wants Statisticians!

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“Politics as done by Martians.” That’s Peggy Noonan’s phrase, to describe President Obama’s call for and use of statisticians and data miners in his re-election campaign.

The hiring of such as I in politics is, she says, “high-tech and bloodless.” Well! Martians, are we! Bloodless automatons, is it! Look here, Noonan, it is you who are partly responsible for electing the Ma-Who-Would-Use-Statistics. It was you and Chris Buckley and other would-be conservative Washington insiders who openly gushed about Obama’s charm and, as spoofed by Iowahawk, the cut of his jib. Obama wouldn’t be in the position to call for statisticians if it weren’t for your ill-timed interventions.

So don’t you go disparaging statistics. Statistics can disparage itself perfectly well without outside help.

Obama’s job announcement is at Kaggle (a site for data miners). In part:

Using statistical predictive modeling, the Democratic Party’s comprehensive political database, and publicly available data, modeling analysts are charged with predicting the behavior of the American electorate. These models will be instrumental in helping the campaign determine which voters to target for turnout and persuasion efforts, where to buy advertising and how to best approach digital media.

Our Modeling Analysts will dive head-first into our massive data to solve some of our most critical online and offline challenges. We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.

Statistical models can be used to determine which voters to target for turn out. But it remains an open question how useful these models are. The problem is in verifying. If you say there is a high probability that Bob will turn up to vote, you have to go to the polls and wait for Bob to show or not. Or you ask him later whether he did. But Bob might lie to you, as people often do to pollsters.

The frightening thing about the job announcement is the “Democratic Party’s comprehensive political database.” How comprehensive is “comprehensive”? I’d be curious to see if my name is in there as a Enemy of the People.

What Obama is looking for is different than a pollster. These are folks who are used to test language that is most harmonious to certain voting segments. The Democrats are currently using the phrase “balanced approach” as a euphemism for “raise taxes” in the budget debate because some pollster found that this phrase was better than others. We don’t know what these other phrases are presumably because they tested badly.

Republicans use these same strategies, of course, proving that politicians of every stripe often say what isn’t so in an effort beguile the public.

I searched for current Republican candidates who are as aggressive as Mr Obama appears to be in his use of statistics. All I could dig up was an old article by a data guy who thought he had the key to George Bush’s re-election.

The guy is Andrew Gage. He built the same kind of “microtargeting” models the Obama camp wants to build.

When the election was over, the Republican National Committee commissioned a poll to figure out whether Gage’s suppositions about why people voted were accurate. Gage’s models predicted voters’ tendencies with 90 percent accuracy, according to Dowd, and Gage was hired to microtarget the 16 or so battleground states in the 2004 election.

Gage claims that microtargeting is akin to unraveling your “political DNA.” But ninety-percent accuracy? That is so phenomenal a number that something is not right. If the model predicts merely who will as opposed to who won’t vote, then perhaps that accuracy can be had, but I doubt it. If the model is said to predict why a person voted the way they did, then I can’t believe the ninety-percent accuracy.

Note that model accuracy was assessed by a poll. Meaning they called a small sample of the people who Gage modeled and asked them questions. How easy it is to ask, “Did you vote because of why we said you would?”

The WSJ article said that Mitt Romney used Gage for his failed campaign for the Republican nomination last time around. Evidently he didn’t hit that ninety-percent mark a second time in a row. No idea whether Romney will engage him again.