William M. Briggs, Statistician

This story has been making the rounds (I first heard of it from Roger Kimball’s blog). It’s so incredibly asinine that it deserves broad exposure.

The headline from England’s Telegraph is Toddlers who dislike spicy food ‘racist’. The article leads:

Toddlers who turn their noses up at spicy food from overseas could be branded racists by a Government-sponsored agency.

The National Children’s Bureau, which receives ?12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.

This could include a child of as young as three who says “yuk” in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.

The guide is 366 pages long! Yuk!

Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible to their local council. The guide added: “Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution. In fact, the opposite is the case.”

That is to say, nursery workers are encouraged to rat out small children to the local Party Leaders. No doubt horrific injustices like denying a love of curry will be noted on the tots’ permanent records. Can re-education day camps be far behind?

This reminds of a guy (whose name I expurgated from my memory) invited to campus when I was still at professor at Central Michigan. The topic was—what else?—diversity. This guy, who had many letters after his name, was touting a theory called micro-racism. These are racists acts that are so small that the person perpetrating them, and the person being disparaged, cannot see them. Only people specially trained could spot and analyze the atrocities.

Professors were told that when overhearing something shocking like—if you have a weak stomach, please do not read further—”Where are you from?”, we should recognize the ill intent behind the words and caution the student to modify his behavior.

That’s the only example of “micro-racism” that I can recall. Not too many examples were given. This of course makes it easy for the PC Police to label anything they want as “micro-racism.” Only an exceptionally dull person could not take any phrase whatsoever and twist it into an example of intolerance.

I don’t have the National Children’s Bureau’s guide, but I can only hope they include material on micro-racism.

Here’s the problem. You are a scientist, working on measuring the levels of aragonite in ocean water. It’s not very sexy and nobody beyond a small cadre seems to care. But it’s grant time and you and your team are “figuring out how to make the issue more potent” so that you can bring in the bucks.

How do you do it?

The first thing you should immediately consider these days is “turning up the heat on the issue through the media.” However, convening a press conference on “The Importance of Aragonite in Ocean Water” is unlikely to interest even the New York Times.

You need to be clever. Your job in “expanding awareness” has to start with a snappier moniker. You need a term that is “easy to comprehend” and, if you’re lucky, sounds “alarming.”

Renaming is thus “a critical step.”

So you ponder. Then you recall that aragonite levels are related to the amount of diffused carbon dioxide in ocean water. Some chemistry helps: when CO₂ dissolves in water it lowers that water’s pH. And what is lowering pH sometimes called? Acidification!

Success! Not only is this a fantastically frightening term, it drives “home the idea that carbon dioxide [i]s a pollutant.”

Your next step is to find a PR firm whose specialty is to “link researchers with policy-makers and the media.” The good news is that there are no shortage of such places.

Of course, you have to be honest about “the” science and the uncertainties (as you understand them). But if you’re lucky, even the possibility, no matter how small, of risk will be enough to frighten Congress into action.

I think we can agree “the acidification story provides a model of how to get science on the congressional agenda.”

A fuller account of this fascinating and inspirational story may be found here (Nature magazine, again leading the way).

The Ithaca Hours, mentioned in the previous post, quantify a barter system, trading “hours worked” at one task for equivalent “hours worked” at another. For example, you might trade one “hour” of “Cranio-sacral therapy, energy healing” for 10 hours of “Speaking & consulting on non-violent symbolic action.” Most services on offer are on the order of “Gentle Reiki energy sessions for health and growth” and ” movement coaching.” Some ordinary retail shops accept hours, but only for a small percentage of your overall bill. The Hours themselves have the logo “In Ithaca We Trust”, an expression the egotism of which I trust is obvious enough. The hours are, naturally, printed on hemp paper.

As I understand it, and here I might be off, trade, even though conducted in “Hours”, must still be ultimately accounted for in green-backs for tax purpose. “Hours” received are treated as ordinary income. Which, if true, makes the system truly worthless. But enlightened, and certainly enjoyable because, as their website says, it’s “fun to get and use something other than dollars (remember how much you enjoyed or still enjoy using monopoly money).” Thus, spending “Hours” is a form of play, though I find it odd that they would tout the game Monopoly, which is a game that teaches and celebrates capitalism.

The Ithaca Festival was this weekend on the Commons. This is a typical summer outdoor festival with arts & crafts and music. I counted not less than four booths that featured tie-dyed clothing, perhaps the ugliest form of body covering ever invented.

I went into a t-shirt shop (to find for my number two son a shirt emblazoned with “Ithaca Gun”, a now-defunct company that was justly famous for their shotguns) and some middle-aged ladies were discussing the upcoming election. “I’d vote for a dog before I’d vote for a republican!” said one. “I’d vote for a parakeet before I’d vote for McCain,” said another. “I can’t see why anybody would ever vote for a republican,” quipped the last.

The only thing strange about these commonplace comments is that they imply that the democrat party, lacking candidates of substance, will soon nominate animals to their tickets.

I am in Ithaca, New York, teaching a short course at Cornell University. Have you ever visited Ithaca? It was once voted the “most enlightened city in America” by the far-left magazine Utne Reader. Plenty of Volvos with “Impeach Bush” bumper stickers on them, a score of Tibetan bead shops in a desolate downtown area called the Commons, a own home-grown currency called “Hours” which is supposed to be more politically correct than greenbacks, and so on.

I was in a popular bar called the Chapter House (fantastic beer selection) and met a gentleman from England who was at Cornell taking a course from a well-known labor educator. This gentleman’s flight back home was canceled because of a thunderstorm. He is a union organizer for the Transit Workers in London. We had a nice chat over a few beers.

The bartender found out that my new friend was from England and asked him, “You must hate us over there.” By “us” he meant “Americana.” My friend said “No, we generally like Americans.” The bartender refused to accept this. “But you must hate us. Look at everything we have done!” My friend’s reply: “I was happy to come here. America is a great place.”

(By “we”, I assume the bartender did not include himself.)

This went back and forth a few times, my friend even describing a trip to Walmart to buy inexpensive jeans. The bartender lost heart and gave up. I felt sorry for him. There was nobody around to confirm his feelings of inferiority or to show him that he was not hated as he hoped he would be.

So the next time you are in Ithaca, please stop and tell somebody how much you dislike them. It will be sure to cheer them up.

Yesterday, there were several protests in New York City. The participants were “outraged” over the recent acquittal of two black cops and one Lebanese cop who shot and killed Sean Bell, who was black.

Much was made about the fact that the three cops shot at Bell’s car 50 times. This number was touted repeatedly by some as evidence that the cops had used excessive force.

Let’s look at this from the probabilistic viewpoint. It turns out that when a cop fires his weapon at a person, he only hits his target about 30% of the time. Anybody who has ever fired a weapon before, especially in an altercation, will know that this is a pretty good rate, but of course not good enough to guarantee that just one shot will be enough to stop a target.

So about how many times must a cop fire so that he is at least 99.9% sure of hitting his target?

Well, if he fired just once, he has a 30% of hitting, or a 70% chance of missing. If he fired twice, what is the chance of hitting at least once? Hitting at least once can happen in three ways: hitting with the first bullet and missing with the second; missing with the first and hitting with the second; or hitting with both. The only other possibility is missing on both. The probability of all these scenarios is 1 (something has to happen). So the chance of hitting at least once is 1 minus the chance of missing both. Or 1 - (0.7)(0.7) = 1 - 0.49 = 0.51.

This means that only firing two shots gives the officer a 50/50 chance of hitting his target. Not very good odds. He must fire more times to increase them.

It turns out that the same formula can be used for any number of shots. The probability of hitting at least once in three shots is 1 - (0.7)^3 = 1 - 0.34 = 0.66. The probability of hitting at least once in n shots is then 1 - (0.7)^n.

We want 1 - (0.7)^n to be at least 0.999. Or, written mathematically, 1 - (0.7)^n > 0.999. Now we have to recall high school algebra and solve for n. Subtract 1 from both sides and cancel the negative signs, which gives (0.7)^n > 0.001.

Now the hard part. If you don’t remember, just take my word for it, but now we use logarithms. So that we get n log(0.7) > log(0.001), or n > log(0.001)/log(0.7) = 20 (rounding to the nearest shot).

That’s right. In order for the cop to be pretty sure of hitting his target (and therefore ensuring his target does not hit him), a copy has to shoot at least 20 times.

Thus, given that three cops were firing, 50 total shots does not seem that unusal.

Note: one cop shot 31 times, on 11, and the other 8. Of course, the above analysis ignores all external evidence, such as how the probability of hitting decreases when aiming at a moving target, awareness by one cop of shots fired by another, whether the cops were well motivated, etc.

1. Repeat after me: “There are no innate biological differences between men and women…except, well, women are of course better nurturers, sympathizers, empathizers, and a score of other things.”

2. Now use the law (Title IX) designed to enforce equal numbers of girls playing sports as boys to mandate an even number of women and men in physics and math departments in universities that receive federal funding (which is all universities except one or two).

3. Then try applying for a grant with a male as PI.

Full story here. With full props to Arts & Letters Daily.

Some hilarity from the article:

For one thing, the Title IX compliance reviews are already underway. In the spring of 2007, the Department of Education evaluated the Columbia University physics department. Cosmology professor Amber Miller, talking to Science magazine, described the process as a ?waste of time.? She was required to make an inventory of all the equipment in the lab and indicate whether women were allowed to use various items. ?I wanted to say, leave me alone, and let me get my work done.? But Miller and her fellow scientists are not going to be left alone.

“Say, are women allowed to use this slide rule?”

All this is fair enough, of course, because as we certainly must believe, “There are no innate biological…”. As for me, I cannot wait, if this law is passed, for the comedic opportunities when the first male sues a woman’s studies department, or English, or etc., to force them to hire more men. And naturally, lawyers will be brought in to judge the merit of promotions. Who better than a lawyer to judge differences in papers on string theory?

Today, another brief (in the sense of intellectual content) essay, as I’m still working on the Madrid talk, the Heartland conference is this weekend, and I have to, believe it or not, do some work my masters want.

William F. Buckley, Jr. has died, God rest his soul. He famously said, “I’d rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the dons of Harvard.” I can’t usefully add to the praise of this great man that has begun appearing since his death two days ago, but I can say something interesting about this statement.

There are several grades of pine “2 by 4’s”, the studs that make up the walls and ceilings of your house. Superior grades are made for exterior walls, lesser grades are useful for external projects, such as temporary bracing. A carpenter would never think of using a lesser grade to build your roof’s trusses, for example. Now, if you were run into a Home Depot and grab the first pine studs you came to (along with the book How to Build a Wall), thinking you could construct a sturdy structure on your own, you might be right. But you’re more likely to be wrong. So you would not hesitate to call in an expert, like my old dad, to either advise you of the proper materials or to build the thing himself.

Building an entire house, or even just one wall, is not easy. It is a complicated task requiring familiarity with a great number of tools, knowledge of various building techniques and materials, and near memorization of the local building codes. But however intricate a carpenter’s task is, we can see that it is manageable. Taken step by step, we can predict to great accuracy exactly what will happen when we, say, cut a board a certain way and nail it to another. In this sense, carpentry is a simple system.

There is no shortage of activities like this: for example baking, auto mechanics, surgery, accounting, electronic engineering, and even statistics. Each of these diverse occupations are similar in the sense that when we are plying that trade, we can pull a lever and we usually or even certainly know which cog will engage and therefore what output to expect. That is, once one has become an expert in that field. If we are not an expert and we need the services of one of these trades, we reach for phone book and find somebody who knows what he’s doing.

But there are other areas which are not so predictable. One of these is governance, which is concerned with controlling and forecasting the activity and behavior of humans. As everybody knows, it is impossible to reliably project what even one person will do on a consistent basis, let alone say what a city or country full of people will be like in five years. Human interactions are horribly, unimaginably complex and chaotic, and impossible to consistently predict.

Of course, not everyone thinks so. There is an empirically-observed relationship that says the more institutionalized formal education a person has, the more likely it is that that person believes he can predict human behavior. We call these persons academics. These are the people who make statements (usually in peer-reviewed journals) like, “If we eliminate private property, then there will be exact income equality” and “We can’t let WalMart build a store in our town because WalMart is a corporation.” (I cleaned up the language a bit, since this is a PG-rated blog.)

It is true, and it is good, that everybody has opinions on political matters, but most people, those without the massive institutionalized formal education, are smart enough to realize the true value of their opinions. Not so the academics, who are usually in thrall to a theory whose tenets dictate that if you pull this one lever, this exact result will always obtain. Two examples, “If we impose a carbon tax, global warming will cease” and “If the U.S.A. dismantles its nuclear weapons, so too will the rest of the world, which will then be a safer place.”

Political and economic theories are strong stuff and even the worst of them is indestructible. No amount of evidence or argument can kill them because they can always find refuge among the tenured. The academics believe in these theories ardently and often argue that they should be given the chance—because they are so educated and we are not—to implement them. They think that—quite modestly of course–because they are so smart and expert, that they can decide what is best for those not as smart and expert. Their hero is Plato who desired a country run by philosophers, the best of the best thinkers. In other words, people like them.

The ordinary, uneducated man is more likely to just want to be left alone in most matters and would design his laws accordingly. He would in general opt for freedom over guardianship. He is street-smart enough to know that his decisions often have unanticipated outcomes, and is therefore less lofty in his goals. And this is why Buckley would choose people from the phone book rather the from the campus.

CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF CLIMATE CHANGE PREDICTIONS FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

The Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, F?sicas y Naturales of Spain and the Fundaci?n Ram?n Areces are sponsoring that conference in Madrid on 2-3 April. The symposium will begin with the IPCC assessment and then move to “Critical assessment taking into consideration past (Pleistocene to historical) climate change and the nature of chemical forcing, as well as the characteristics of physical and numerical models used, their potentials, limitations and uncertainties.”

I’ve been asked to speak on the “Robustness and uncertainties of climate change predictions.” I have a deadline of this Saturday to hand in my abstract, and a couple of weeks to hand in a paper and presentation. I’m trying to walk a line between showing too much statistics and too little. By that I mean math. I keep going back and forth on this, trying to decide the best way to present. I haven’t decided, but, hey, I have three days left, right? Whatever I come up with will eventually be posted here. In a day or two–after my abstract is finished–I’ll post the conference program.

Reporters at the New York Times

A copy of Monday’s Times was given to me. I don’t subscribe, by the way, since I have learned from that august publication that because I am a veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces, I might explode at any moment and start murdering anybody in sight. I’m not disagreeing with this, of course; I just don’t want to be reminded of it.

Anyway, a lead story in the Business section, written by somebody called Noam Cohen, started thusly, “Of the many landmarks along a journalist’s career, two are among those that stand out: winning an award and making the government back down” (emphasis mine).

And people wonder where journalist’s cynicism comes from?

Stuff White People Like

This site, written by someone called Clander, has been making the rounds and is hilarious. Some examples. “#75 Threatening to Move to Canada” (a friend of mine did this after Bush “stole” his first election), “#65 Co-Ed Sports” (one of my favorites), and “#62 Knowing what?s best for poor people“.

That post tells us

White people spend a lot of time of worrying about poor people….They feel guilty and sad that poor people shop at Wal*Mart instead of Whole Foods, that they vote Republican instead of Democratic, that they go to Community College/get a job instead of studying art at a University…It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things…But it is ESSENTIAL that you reassert that poor people do not make decisions based on free will. That news could crush white people and their hope for the future.

The accompanying picture is priceless. What’s even better are the reader’s comments, particularly those, presumably white, people who take exception to Clander’s observations.

“The most vehement attack on the wartime press came not from Richard Nixon, but from William Tecumseh Sherman. ‘If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world,’ he sighed, ‘but I am sure we would be getting reports from hell before breakfast.’”

Outstanding article (originally linked at the indispensable Arts & Letters Daily) by who else but Victor David Hanson. This article essential reading for all those who expect wars to proceed with Hollywood timing and flawless precision.

I’m a veteran and haven’t killed anybody in years. But if you read the New York Times you’d be right to worry that I might.

The Sunday, 13 January 2008, edition of the Times spent four pages! detailing that, in the four and three-quarter years since the Iraq war began, returning soldiers, sailors, and airmen came home horribly scared—mentally, of course—and committed 121 murders. Which is a big number, no question; and probably some, or even most, of the people killed didn’t even have it coming to them.

Military writer Ralph Peters, in today’s column for the New York Post, shows that about 350,000 soldiers have come back from both the Iraqi and Afghanistani wars. That makes the per-year murder rate equal to about 7.3 per 100,000.

Time to seriously fret about the mental health of soldiers? Perhaps we should lock them down for a cooling off period until they loose their aggressiveness.

It was at this point that Peters did what any good statistician would have done: he refused to look at the statistic in isolation. He asked: is 7.3 a lot, or is it a little? How can you find out? It’s easy: by going to the Bureau of Justice web site and looking at the murder rates per 100,000 in a demographic most similar to that of GIs, which are 18-24 year-olds:

The civilian murder rate is 26.5 per 100,000

which is more than 3.5 times higher than for GIs! Incidentally, the murder rate for 14-17 year-olds is 9.3; and for those 25-34 it is 13.5, both higher rates than for GIs. It isn’t until you reach the the 35-49 year-olds do you find a lower rate at 5.1 per 100,000. As Peters says the Times

unwittingly makes the case that military service reduces the likelihood of a young man or woman committing a murder.

But his best work comes when he notes

In 2005 alone, 8,718 young Americans from the same age group [as GIs] were murdered in this country. That’s well over twice as many as the number of troops killed in all our foreign missions since 2001. Maybe military service not only prevents you from committing crimes, but also keeps you alive?

Peters has called on the Time’s “public editor” Clark Hoyt (who is in charge of correcting errors) to acknowledge the paper’s purposeful character assassination of our veterans. Add your voice to Peters’s: Hoyt’s email is public@nytimes.com.

Update: 16 January 2008.? Good thing I bought a bigger hat. NYPost.com