William M. Briggs, Statistician

Hope in academia?

Thanks again to Dennis Dutton’s Arts & Letters Daily for the link to Graphs on the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and other stupid academic fads.

The author, named “agnostic”, did a text search on articles from the journals indexed at JSTOR (you have to be at a university to use it, or you can pay yourself). He searched for the number of times certain faddish words like Marxism, deconstruction, post colonialism, hegemony, and the like were used in academic prose. He found that they all peaked—some in the late 1990s, others in the early 2000s—and are on the decline.

There are a number of caveats to his analysis, which he acknowledges. The biggest is that the counts are normalized by the number of articles published nor the number of authors publishing. Plus, he didn’t check for the growth of any new fad words,

Still, it is hard not to be hopeful that some academics in the humanities are regaining their minds.

Too many kids in school?

I had never been to that blog before, so I was delighted to find a discussion of Charles Murray’s contention that there are too many kids going to college in the post College is Still the Best Payoff. The analysis presented by the blogger isn’t fully convincing and I don’t think he countered Murray’s suggestion that the best in trades earn more than the average or below average with college degrees.

Murray is well known for arguing that too many kids with “low IQs” are going to college when they should not.

On this topic was a link to the blog The Inductivist, by a gentleman who might also be a statistician. Look for the post from Wednesday, August 27, 2008, wherein he states

Every semester I get a stack of confidential letters describing all sorts of diagnosed learning disorders, along with requests to make accommodations for these students. They need extra time on exams, permission to record lectures, etc.

Educators seem to be more comfortable recognizing limits if they are understood as disorders. We are told that these students are not dumb; they are smart, but just face extra obstacles.

Maybe people don’t like “dumb” because it sounds like forever, and labeling it as a disability enhances our compassion for the person, and it gives hope that eventually we’ll discover a cure. The medicalization of IQ might be the only palatable way to confront the reality.

I left this comment:

I was a visiting professor at Central Michigan U last fall, teaching statistics courses.

I got one of these letters in each of three classes of about 30 students. My impression, after talking with colleagues, was that this was a usual number.

If these letters truly represent learning disabilities among introductory statistics students, then that is an enormous rate.

So what is more likely: (1) The rate of learning disabilities in colleges students really is about 1 in 30, or (2) Learning disabilities are being over diagnosed so that kids don’t drop out of school (and that school loses tuition dollars).

JH, what do you say?

Henry Ford Anniversary

Today was an important anniversary date for Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Strangely, they didn’t post any information about it on their site.

New Prime

Again from A&LD, a link to a story about the discovery of a new prime number. Edson Smith at UCLA lead a group to find a new Mersenne prime, which is a prime of the form 2^P-1 where P itself is a prime. Smith’s new prime has P = 43,112,609, and the new prime itself has 13 million digits!

You have to be a real geek to get excited about news like this. But if you own at least one copy of The Book of Prime Number Records by Paulo Ribenboim, then today is a happy day.

Stuff Scientists Like

A new blog that is a take off on the popular Stuff White People Like. Not too many posts yet, and what’s there is telegraphic, but my favorite is At the Movies.

You know those scientific inaccuracies that the directors miss or ignore? Explosions in space and whatnot?

Well, scientists love to gripe about them. Loudly and repeatedly. Both while in the theater and thereafter.

Later they enjoy arguing about whether said inaccuracies fundamentally undermine the quality of the film. Eventually someone gets frustrated and storms off.

Anybody who has ever watched a movie/television with me will know just what he is talking about.

“Why can’t they just pay some guy like me fifty bucks to tell them that that’s impossible! Hell, there are hundreds of geeks out there that would edit scripts for free! This makes no sense! Let me tell you exactly why what there trying can’t be done…”

Global warming doesn’t cause baldness in men. At least, I haven’t seen anybody claiming this. Yet.

No, I’m talking about the little-known theory of intelligence and hair length. For a long time, really since biblical times and the legend of Sampson, scientists thought that with hair came power. A full head of hair was associated with sophistication, creativity, and brilliance. Look at Einstein, scientists used to say, full of hair and clever ideas.

Leading scientists of our own time know about this theory, of course, and carefully tend to their tresses in an attempt to maintain their intellectual prowess. Think of Stephen Pinker or that guy who wrote Blink.

However, it turned out that the theory was only mostly true. It was discovered in 1982 that men who possessed a variant of the gene arylacetamide deacetylase-like 5 would lose hair as they aged and that, surprisingly, hair loss was directly associated with intelligence because of quantum physics. As pattern baldness developed in these men, their heads would, naturally, become less protected from a specific kind of cosmic radiation.

This radiation, no longer blocked from getting inside the head, seeps in and impacts synaptic junctions, breaking them down. The effect is cumulative: the more radiation you are exposed to, the dumber you get. Men with this gene literally lose their hair and their minds.

A case study is the following scientist. To preserve his anonymity we will call him “Dr. X.”

You can see that he has lost most of his protective covering. This man, when he had his hair was an eminence in his field and one mean physicist. However, with the parting of his hair, came the inevitable.

For example, one of his colleagues relates the story that he went looking for Dr X after a seminar but he couldn’t be found anywhere. The colleague admits that it was his turn to watch after Dr X and that Dr X would occasionally wander off if not supervised, but he was as shocked as everybody else when, several days later, Dr X turned up in an English courtroom! Even more bizarre was that Dr X was there to support six Greenpeace members who vandalized a building of a private company they didn’t like (many Greenpeace members are also bald).

The story doesn’t end there, unfortunately. In the courtroom, Dr X was able, by painting a bleak and apocalyptic scenario, convince the jury that the criminals, while guilty, should go free. Sadly, the jurors did not know about the relationship between hair and intelligence were frightened by Dr X’s tale of woe. They thought it better to give him what he wanted lest they upset him unduly.

This saga becomes personal because it turns out that my friend Anthony Watts knows Dr X and has publicly called for Dr X to be fired. If you know Watts, you know he is a perfectionist and wants everybody to perform at top level, so his plea is understandable.

But I think firing is too harsh. After all, what has happened to Dr X is not his fault; he is not responsible for his actions. Certainly, his colleagues should pay closer attention to where Dr X goes and what he tells outsiders, but he has done a good and long service and so should be taken care of because of this. Besides, Anthony, while you still have your hair, you might also possess arylacetamide deacetylase-like 5, so look out!

Oh yes. Those men who have another variant of the gene—about 1% of the population—might also experience male pattern baldness, but in their cases the cosmic radiation actually strengthens their brains. I think this is happening to me, but just in case, I always wear a hat.

Update: A person whom I respect chided me, as he probably should have, and asked why I was being so hard on certain people.

My friend deserves an answer. This is what I told him

Most probably [I am too harsh because of] a character flaw or some other weakness in my personality.

In this case, maybe not. Dr X testified for the defense in a criminal trial. A trial of admitted criminals, that is. He did not testify that the accused were not at the scene of the crime, or that witnesses were mistaken in their identify, or that the six were out of their minds. He instead excused their crime because the earth might get too hot.

Since Dr X believes these six should be allowed to get away with their crime, it is only natural to ask what other crimes would he excuse. Defacing private property? Destroying public or private property? Physical intimidation? Violence?

My view is that Dr X, who is aware of his celebrity status, acted inappropriately. If he wanted to use the trial as a means to promote his views without actually taking part in the proceedings, then I would not have objected—I have nowhere said that people should not express their opinion on this or any topic. But his views on global warming are absolutely irrelevant to whether the six were guilty or innocent.

Dr X opened himself to ridicule by overstepping his bounds. I have never said, and do not say, that Dr X’s theories are mistaken or outside the bounds of possibility. I do say, and often say, that he is too certain of himself, as are many other experts and scientists. Naturally, these scientists do not think themselves too certain. Ordinarily, this would not be especially harmful, but in the case of global warming, well, people are beginning not to be able to see straight.

But if I hurt Dr X’s feelings, then I apologize.

I want to mourn, too

The man who can rightly be called the Father of Statistics, Ronald Aylmer Fisher, while an incredibly bright man, showed that all of us are imperfect when he repeatedly touted a ridiculously dull idea. Eugenics. He figured that you could breed the idiocy out of people by selectively culling the less desirable. Since Fisher also has strong claim on the title Father of Modern Genetics, others—all with advanced degrees and high education—agreed with him. We now recognize that his musing was stupid. But we can sympathize with him, can we not? For example, Fisher might have had in mind people like those in the video below, sent to us by the folks at The Chilling Effect.

Star Trek Food

Have you ever seen Star Trek, the original series I mean? Every now and then Kirk would hunger (not for flesh) and he would eat—little bright cubes of what could only be called nutrition. Food would be far too strong a word. The cubes looked like packages of solidified, neon-colored Jello. No doubt Fleet Academy scientists worked very hard at creating the optimal balanced diet to preserve health and vigor. They even gave you the choice of Soylent Green, or Soylent Orange…….no, wait, that’s another movie where scientists created nutrition for the rest of us.

Even out of television and movies, the scientists and physicians are at it. They are, even now, constantly looking out for our health. Elizabeth M. Whelan, over at the New York Post, yesterday wrote an article describing a plea from two New York City Busybody Physicians that the government regulate food consumption. The plea came in the form of a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of American Medical Association. The zealous authors Lynn Silver, MD, MPH ,and Mary T. Bassett, MD, MPH (to instill awe, note the letters after their names) open their manifesto with

[T]he most rapidly growing food-related threat to health today is not microbes, but overconsumption of calories, sugar, salt, and unhealthy fat.

According to Whelan (who runs the site HealthFactsAndFears.com)

Specifically, the doctors call on government to take immediate emergency action to force the food industry to make “healthier” food, including placing hefty taxes on fare they deem unhealthy - thus contributing to the already soaring price of food.

They reject government guidelines and education as “relatively weak interventions” and argue that “stronger actions are needed immediately to reduce obesity, hypertension, heart disease and other chronic ills.”

…They strictly divide “healthy” from “unhealthy” foods and suggest we follow Britain’s lead by placing green symbols on healthy food and red ones on the “bad” stuff….They argue that “the ubiquity of food [has become] treacherous” and that food should be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes, “putting reasonable limits on where and how [food] can be sold . . . amending zoning [to] limit the number or density of locations selling unhealthy foods in restaurants, vending machines and other outlets.” (emphasis on “treacherous” mine)

I really don’t know what Whelan is carping about. Scientists have MDs and PhDs, they have more education than you do, their peers regularly review each other’s work so they make no mistakes, they are smarter than you and they know more than you possibly could. This is all the reason we need, is it not, for them to exercise authority over us? Since I am one of these eminences, I can see no good reason why I should not be placed in charge immediately.

Lifetime Democrat and far-left advocate Linda Ronstadt threw her support behind that party’s nominee Thursday, according to the singer’s agent. Ms Ronstadt donated her Top 40 hit “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” to the campaign which immediately adopted it as its theme song.

“The lyrics to Ms Ronstadt’s song perfectly embody what the Democrat party is all about,” said campaign spokesperson Simon bar Sinister. “The line ‘Woe, woe is me!; really speaks to all Americans,” he continued.

These thoughts were echoed by The Chosen One himself, when he said, “‘Poor, poor pitiful us’ encapsulates all that is wrong with America. Sure, I’m doing OK, and most of the people I know are doing fine, but there’s a lot of hurt out there—or so I’ve heard. We want people to really feel sorry for themselves, and this song helps tremendously with that goal. The only way that people can be happy is if the government takes care of them. If I take care of them.”

Sinister agreed saying, “The ‘man’ spoken of in the song who ‘really worked me over good’ was clearly George Bush. It’s astonishing Linda would have seen Bush coming so long ago.”

The song is attached below for your enjoyment.

I thought it would be fun to compile a list of self-important celebrities who promise to move to Canada/England/Russia etc. when McCain wins the election. If anybody knows of any that I’ve forgotten, drop me an email at celebrity@wmbriggs.com and I’ll add them. Please include a verifiable link. More on this in a moment.

You might recall quite a few actors, actresses and sundry entertainers made similar promises to emigrate when Bush won his second term. Not one of them did what they promised they would do. I even remember getting an email from a pal of mine when Bush was elected stating that “George Bush is not my president!” He didn’t move either.

Problem is, this time I could only find two celebrities who say they’ll move when McCain wins. Just two! I even found one C-lister who promised to shift countries if Obama won (Stephen Baldwin)!

This, and other evidence, leads me to believe that McCain will win this fall. If the celebrity left can’t work up enough moral dudgeon to oppose McCain, then little stands in his way (except the press, of course).

Anyway, here’s the list (last updated 31 August 2008).

“Zombie attacks to increase due to global warming” rang the headline on this blog seven moons ago. So said eminent zombiologist and scientist Dr Harrister, BS, MS, PhD, OMGWAG.

Who would have guessed that Bob Hope was ahead of us all?

I’ll tell you who! Pepsodent! With irium!

Thanks to Rob Avrech for reminding us of Hope’s wisdom.

Quick Quiz: what do you call an exceptionally nervous busybody who perpetually overestimates risk and on whose lips are forever the phrase, “Something must be done!”

Answer: That person is an activist—activism is a manner of life which nowadays can even be proclaimed a profession.

What, then, do we call somebody who rationally attempts to quantify risk and who soberly (on most days of the week) weighs his options and sometimes proposes that the best course of action is no action at all?

That person is an inactivist.

Isn’t that a great name? I love it! But I didn’t think of it. Frank Bi, who runs a site called The Journal of Inactivism, did.

Old Frank’s intent is that the label be taken ironically. To him, an inactivist is to be despised. Let me tell you something about irony, Frank. There’s an art to it that few possess; its use requires a rare talent. I sometimes flatter myself that I can successfully wield this heavy sword, but I fail nearly every time, as regular readers of this blog can attest.

And so have you failed, Frank, but do not despair. We can rescue your neologism and put it to good use. It can lead a second life of good service.

Thus, I counsel that we adopt the moniker “climate inactivist” at once. Just look what it has going for it.

“Climate skeptic”, a term many favor, is apt to be misleading. I, for example, am not skeptical that there is a climate. Inactivist, however, neatly captures and succinctly describes the attitude of many of us.

We, who do not deny that mankind influences climate, even sometimes harmfully, but who reckon that our uncertainty in the mechanisms of the hideously complex global climate system and the imprecision its forecasts, coupled with the glut of extravagant and ridiculous claims of evils that await us, are not strong enough evidence to yet warrant government-imposed mandatory taxes and regulation. We, who do not deny that that day might come, and who do not discourage voluntary and personal actions. We propose to take no action until our certainty is much stronger.

We propose to be inactive—we are inactivists.

This proposal will be voted upon at the next secret meeting.

Incidentally, to take us on a tangent to an unexpected dimension, Scott Kurtz presents the evil Statistician Magician! (I don’t have a cape.)

(This analysis was suggested by reader Joy C., who provided a link to the medal tables.)

China, even disregarding its cheating, grabbed the most gold medals (51 to the USA’s next best 36), but the USA took the most overall (110 to China’s next best 100). Either country, then, could be argued the better one depending on whether you value just gold or all medals.

But are there better ways to compare success than raw totals? For example, tiny Jamaica won 11 total medals, while Poland which is over 10 times as populated took only 10. Obviously, countries with enormous populations have a better chance at taking more medals because they have a larger pool of athletes to draw from. China, for example, has over 1.32 billion souls, with the USA has less than their decimal point, with only 305 million. (Population data gathered from Wikipedia.)

Let’s control for a country’s population and re-rank. Here is a table of some of the top countries with the medal totals normalized by population—total medals divided by population in millions. The number “Medals per million” is the number of medals won per million people.

The Bahamas tops the list: they won 2 medals with a population of only 330 thousand, an amazing feat, or perhaps I should say with amazing feet since their medals were in running events. Jamaica has 2.7 million people and won 11 medals. Ranking countries this way puts the USA down at number 44, with China not coming in until 68, with Taiwan ahead of it! Incidentally, the BBC site, one of the many hosting medal count tables, fearfully lists Taiwan as “Chinese Taipei”, which is meaningless because Taipei is only one city in Taiwan. China, with the world’s biggest population, can lower their denominator and do better next time if they institute a new Cultural Revolution. Georgia can also take some comfort for coming in well ahead of Russia (15th to 37th place).

Smaller countries also, as a matter of necessity, have to be more focused. Cuba, for example, won the majority of their medals in various martial arts (boxing, judo, and so on; perhaps they’re expecting something after Castro kicks over). The larger countries have entrants in most sports: both Communist China and the USA won their medals in dozens of events.

Here’s another way to look at the same data. This is a plot of the population (note the logarithmic scale) by the total number of medals won.

Many of the names are tiny and unreadable, but the general drift can be seen: greater populations help win more medals, just as expected. But not always. India ranks in with over a billion residents, but only garnered a couple of medals. Indonesia and Russia are also hugely populated but have few medals to take home.

As always, money helps. Here is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a rough measure of economic output, by total medal count: (GDP estimated from Wikipedia.)

China looks like its GDP is just behind the USA, but it isn’t. For example, Japan is second, Germany third then China. Clearly, though, the more bucks the more bang. But as with population, not always. India’s GDP outstrips South Korea’s and Australia’s but it’s medal total is lower. One of the more interesting things about this graph is the wide range of GDPs: over 6 orders of magnitude!

The next step is to see the joint effect of increasing population and GDP. That’s what this next, more difficult, picture shows:

Each dot is a country’s Population and GDP; the number beside it is the number of medals won. Darker circles help guide the eye to higher counts. The highest dozen Populations and the lowest GDPs are highlighted for easier recognition. The double bang received from having lots of people making lots of money is easily seen, but the relationship is not perfect.

I am not trying to predict the medal counts for the next Olympics, hence this is no real statistical model. To build one would require the data from previous Olympics, summer and winter, tracking the number of events, the changes in politics and inflation and on and on. Too much work and in the end there would be too much uncertainty that the model proposed is valid. Showing the data plainly is the fairest procedure.

Just for fun, and having nothing to do with the Olympics, here are the top and bottom 10 countries of dollars made per person (GDP divided by population). You can think of this as a sort of measure of citizen efficiency.

The USA makes the list at number 12 with about 45-thousand per person. England at number 11 is just about the same, mere dollars ahead. Non-Arabic Africa is at the bottom of all of these lists.

Of course, Luxemborg and Norway, at the top of this list, have less people that live in my neighborhood, so it isn’t entirely interesting. The largest population of the top 10 goes to Netherlands, which is equal to the population of Manhattan. Oh, the well run European countries! we often hear. But they are so tiny! Zimbabwe, the very bottom of the list, has about 13 million people with a paltry 48 bucks per head. North Korea’s population is estimated at about 24 million, but that was before last year’s winter, so their total dollars per capita could increase next year in that communist paradise.

Komodo dragons have been eating a lot of people in Indonesia lately and the locals blame environmentalists, as reported by Yaroslav Trofimov at the Wall Street Journal (a subscription is required; or borrow or buy today’s paper).

Apparently, in Indonesia, people used to hunt deer and leave portions of successful hunts to the komodo dragons. They also used to tie up goats as sacrifices. All of this pleased the dragons, which left the humans alone.

Then entered the Environmentalists from the Nature Conservancy, who sought and were awarded a ban on deer hunting. They also had dogs declared an “alien species”, thus outlawing them. Naturally, being sympathetic souls, they also got a ban on goat offerings. The reason they did all this, according to Widodo Ramono, the policy director of the environmentalist organization, was because he feared the komodo was becoming “domesticated.”

But, even though all the people in this group were no doubt armed with many letters after their names, each with multiple “studies” in hand, they forgot that the dragons had to eat.

So the dragons started wandering down to the villages and learned how tasty villagers and the villagers’ livestock were. “[T]oday the dragons are angry with us,” says villager Hajji Faisal, “and see us an enemies.” A man named Jamain, whose son was eaten, said “I don’t blame the dragons for my boy’s death. I blame those who forbade us from following custom and feeding them. If it weren’t for them, my boy would still be alive.”

Nature Conservancy officials think Jamain’s and other villagers’ arguments that the environmentalist policies are to blame are based on “superstition.” They instead accuse Jamain’s son for looking too delicious (no, my dear readers, I am not kidding). In words I believe he has never himself heeded, environmentalist Putri Naga Komodo said of the connection, “You’ve got to be very careful about extrapolating and drawing any conclusions.”

In banning age old practices, I can only ask, wither multiculturalism?

Be sure and read Trofimov’s full story, from which all the quotes were taken.

I stole that title from WNBC’s web site, where they have a similarly titled story. The only reason I bring this to your attention—the story itself is ludicrous on its face—is that it is another piece of evidence that either (A) reporters care more about their hair than the organ under it, or (B) reporters are willing to say anything to gain viewers.

Of course, both (A) and (B) might be true.

It’s Friday afternoon; we might as well have a laugh. Here’s the story

Verlyn and Judith Adamson of Mount Horeb each claimed a $350,000 jackpot this week for having the winning numbers in the state SuperCash drawing last Saturday.

But they didn’t mention at the time that they also held two more of the winning tickets.

They claimed two more $350,000 jackpots Thursday. All four were purchased at different locations, but with the same numbers and for the same drawing…Verlyn Adamson, an accountant, said earlier in the week that he’s a big fan of math puzzles. He claims he developed a formula for lottery picks, but his winnings have been small until now.

[Their lawyer] said the Adamsons are “exploring patent protection” for the equation.

OK, I’ll bite. Why mention that they bought the tickers at different locations? It’s the same set of numbers on each ticket for the same drawing! It makes no difference where you bought them. The “reporter” obviously didn’t bother to look up the fact that the SuperCash drawing is a standard ball draw: “Choose 6 different numbers from 1 through 39″ (it took me nearly 30 seconds to find this; time I could have spent combing my hair).

You can, in this lottery, increase your winnings by buying multiple tickets, a practice which must be exceedingly common. But note that the Adamson’s didn’t win four different draws, just the same draw with four tickets with the same numbers. I feel stupid for harping on that observation, but apparently it wasn’t obvious to the “reporter.” It’s also not clear how many winning tickets they had: according to the SuperCash rules, you get two plays per ticket, so if they had four tickets they would have won eight jackpots, not four. Well, who cares about details?

Poor Adamson is now going to dump a substantial portion of his winnings (those not confiscated by the government) on a patent application for a formula for winning the lottery. I doubt his lawyer, who will of course be paid a fee, will discourage them. But I fear (and hope) the Patent Office won’t oblige them in the end.

If I were a cynic, I’d guess Adamson and his lawyer don’t care about the patent. It’s likely that they will be willingly persuaded to part with the formula for a fee, perhaps several times. How else did the “reporter” get the story in the first place?

I wonder how many people who pay for access to his formula will wonder why he’s selling it, because Adamson could make a boatload more by just using it himself.

Oh, yes. The reporter, as he must have learned in J School, provided balance by quoting a mathematician saying (in politer language than this) that Adamson was crazy.

If, and I know the odds of this are vanishingly small, any reader wants to know why such a formula is impossible, just ask and I’ll create a post explaining it.