Anscombe's Quartet

I love Anscombe's Quartet. Four obviously different sets of X-Y data (so, like, on the XY plane, a graph), but with exactly the same basic statistics (descriptives). Yes, you have to know your data and graph your data. (So, from the numbers they "look" the same, but when you graph them you see they are actually quite different.)

Star Trek and the Future

Although this has been acknowledged before (Star Trek inventing the future and all that), during the recent 50th Anniversary of Star Trek where many or all of the original episodes (remastered so they look nicer on today's televisions) were shown, I was moved by the earpieces they use, since they are like clunky Bluetooth earpieces. Here's a quick (and thus blurry) photo I grabbed off my TV with Spock in the foreground with his easily observable earpiece and Uhura in the background adjusting hers. Granted for TV such technologies would need to be easily observable by the audience, especially in the mid-1960s, today not so much since we actually have these things.

Music in an MMO!

Oh this is exciting, but I don't play each and every MMO (that would be insane) so didn't know about it.

Cheng, W. (2012). Role-Playing toward a Virtual Musical Democracy in The Lord of the Rings Online. Ethnomusicology, 56(1), 31-62.

There's no abstract, but here's an early paragraph:

In an attempt to honor the rich musical lore of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Turbine implemented in LOTRO one of the most elaborate player-music systems in any MMORPG to date. This system allows a player to perform both live and pre-recorded tunes that can be heard by other nearby players in the gameworld. A player’s musical performance is visually simulated by avataric motions and strings of colorful notes that float out of a character’s equipped instrument (see Figure 2). Examples of such instruments—each of which sports a different synthesized timbre and a range of three chromatic octaves along the Western twelve-tone scale—include the bagpipes, clarinet, flute, horn, cowbell, drums, harp, lute, and theorbo.

The wiki page seems pretty informative, and there's a website repository for the ABC music notation files.

I love it when people make things and share things, and music is community-based, a form of communication, and is very old! The oldest instrument we've found, a bone flute, is about 40,000 years old and it certainly wasn't the first musical instrument, since flutes aren't that easy to make.

More Crowdsourcing Confusion

There's an article today at the NYT about the Stardust@Home project which shows some of the clouded thinking and definitions around "the crowd."

So far, they've found three of the ones they are looking for in their aerogel, and each is apparently about 1/25,000 of an inch big. Wow. Go, science!

But, there's either a lot of empty aerogel or a lot of space dust of types they aren't looking for in their aerogel (the article isn't quite clear), so they needed help finding what they were looking for. The scientists threw it out to people on the Internet, which is where the article goes a bit off the rails.

So, the scientists have...

Help from an army of amateur researchers.

Are these people the crowdsourced people, or interns? It's not clear. I think it's the crowd, but the crowd isn't "amateur researchers," although one hopes to find such people in the crowd.

The scientists turned to non-experts around the world to sift through thousands of images.

That's fine, but if all the "non-experts" are doing is looking at pictures, well, pretty much every sighted human being is an expert at that. That's one of the things we are built to do, our survival depends on it (although these days, historically speaking, blindness is not as big a drawback as it was when we were in pre-history), we are in fact experts at it. They may not have PhDs in astronomy, but to look at a picture and determine some factors about it (angle of dust particle, I believe), you don't need to have a PhD in astronomy.

But,

Interspersed test images allow the researchers to check how well the dusters [the people on the Internet who are looking for space dust] are doing.

So we have them, but we can't quite trust them, although to be clear this is probably more of a visual quality check than a moral one, and it is one that scientists often take anyway with data (speaking as a scientist, we like data checks, it makes our data and results better).

The first presumed interstellar particle — actually two distinct pieces — was found by a Canadian duster, Bruce Hudson, who retired as a carpenter and groundskeeper after a stroke. Mr. Hudson said he had looked through 25,000 images, spending as much as 5 to 10 hours a day at it.

That isn't just a guy from the crowd, that's a pretty dedicated person! Most of the crowd isn't like this. But that's the often-overlooked point about the crowd, you don't want the crowd, you want the people in the crowd who might want to help, and distinguishing them ahead of time is difficult. It's easier to let them self-identify by giving them the opportunity to do so.

The person who found the second particle said,

“Although I spend my working days in front of a computer solving problems and verifying designs, I found it was quite relaxing to look through the photos and concentrate on the visual images.”

They're looking at images. If you have a working visual system, you're an expert.

Ada Lovelace Day - Maria Mitchell

Well, it appears to be one of those new, bloggy things, but someone is trying to start an Ada Lovelace day where we honor and blog about women in science. You should all know who Ada Lovelace is anyway! Why March 24th, I am not sure, it isn't her birthday according to Wikipedia (but you never really know with Wikipedia....). 

My favorite woman in science is, and always has been, Maria Mitchell. (Sorry Madame Curie!) Quaker, Unitarian, Nantucketer, scientist (mainly an astronomer).

I am also a big fan of the Maria Mitchell Association, of course. 

Media Misattribution

Two things in the media have been rather horribly wrong, although the second one was only today but two things was one too many.

The NY Post, which is very trashy and revels in being so, had the big front page splash (pun intended) about the airplane landing safely in the Hudson. The call it the "Miracle on the Hudson." Sorry, no, that assumes that the pilots didn't know what they were doing, and that they were doomed to crash and many people were going to die, except that some unknown, invisible force (which had just moments before thrown some birds in the engines, so nice!), intervened. ("Engines Missing" is the headline, well yes, they do tend to get ripped off the plane in the event of a water landing, so, no surprise that they're not attached -- but they're not missing, they're just at the bottom of the river.)



The pilots on American commercial jetliners are heavily trained in dealing with emergencies and are highly qualified to do so. No miracle, just good training, and the good foresight to train pilots in case of emergency. Luckily there was enough open space on the Hudson, which is fairly large, but it is also full of boats. Hitting a boat is probably worse than hitting a bird.

But, the Post is trash. It's like the Boston Herald. Waste of paper.

The second, also annoying, is how in the many Bush reviews now that he is finally leaving, too many commentators are unproblematically saying that Bush has had, over his eight years, both record high and low approval ratings, with the low being current (and for a while), and the high being right after 9/11.

Except, his high approval rating after 9/11 wasn't an approval rating for him at all.

That's why we have training (like pilots!) in survey methodology. Just because you ask a question that looks simple and straightforward doesn't mean that it is. Human psychology is way too complex for it to be that easy. Of course, Bush didn't do anything after 9/11 except make some speeches, so there wasn't much to approve of. What people were responding to was showing faith in their country and patriotism. The President is, among other things, a figurehead, a human representation of the country. Expressing faith in the president is, in some cases, equivalent to expressing faith in the nation. Given that Al Qaeda had just shown us that we shouldn't have had much faith in our nation's ability to defend itself from terrorism (did you forget the first time they tried to destroy the WTC in 1993? You did? Shame on you! Didn't think they'd try again, huh? Complacency!), many people felt it was an important time to express faith in their nation. (The horribly sad story of the complete failure of the communications on that day is so depressing -- given how good the republicans are on security, you think they would have done something about that ahead of time -- oh, they didn't did they? They didn't defend us from the worst (so far) terrorist attack on US soil -- how good at security are they, you have to wonder. If they were any good, 9/11 wouldn't have happened.)

Here it is right here in the NYT today.

In surveys that began with Gallup polling in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mr. Bush has the distinction of being the president with both the highest and lowest approval ratings. The highest, 90 percent, was recorded shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

So, it is disturbing to see media talking-heads repeat this statistic which is completely incorrect. They don't understand surveys, and not even the survey people are apparently pointing this out. Lies, damned lies, and statistics indeed.

Of Surveys and Statistics

Two items today: A very bad online survey (sadly most surveys I take online have problems), and the statistical package R makes the NYTimes!

Let's start with R. You can read about R in the NYT story, or on Wikipedia, or go to R's homepage itself.

But, what I want to point you to (besides R's open source status), is the horrible quote in the NYT article from a marketing shill from SAS, a competing statistics program (along with SPSS and Stata).

...Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

If it is free, it is bad. So annoying, this is FUD. She has no facts about R to back up her claim. What we do know is that she is badmouthing a competitor. She must be concerned, which gives legitimacy to R when she was trying to do the opposite. If SAS is paying her to market for SAS, why is she marketing for R? (It's always a bad day when I can do marketing better than a marketer.)

In survey news, I took an online survey this morning -- it's fun to see what they are asking about, and (especially for me) how they do it. Often they do it badly.

Today's inbox offering turned out to not be a survey, but a pre-survey. Do you qualify to take a survey? That's annoying. Don't make your sample jump through hoops. Given that the emails only go out to people who signed up (and who have an Internet connection), the sample is already rather small and unrepresentative statistically speaking.

One question in the pre-survey (this is important for the story) was about brands of jeans, and which brands I might have heard of. There was a large list of brands, and in many cases I had heard of the brand but didn't know they made jeans (that was not important to the story, but was just something I found interesting). But, there was a list. Keep that in mind.

So, eventually after saying "no!" to the common "do you or anyone in your household work in PR, marketing, advertising, or market research" question since you know if you say yes they don't let you take the survey, I got to the real questions. One other important tidbit is that the pre-survey and the survey were by different companies.

The survey asked about purchasing habits and jeans. The survey authors made lots of bad assumptions. One was that they assume I remember how much I paid for my recent jean purchases. I have no idea. None. Seriously, if I like them (and price is a factor), I buy them (assuming I am actually shopping for jeans, that is). Once I notice that the price is acceptable, I don't need to know the price anymore or ever again. It is completely irrelevant. This is a serious error in a lot of online surveys.

Another problem is that they assume I know where I purchased the jeans. I know I bought Gap jeans at the Gap, but couldn't remember where I bought Levi's (there are a million stores here in NYC). Oh, wait, I got them at the Levi's Store, maybe. I think so. I don't know exactly, it isn't important. (War in Iraq, global economic meltdown, those are important, where I bought some pants, not a big deal really.)

Another problem (am I using that phrase too much?) was when the real survey asked me what brands of jeans I had heard of. This was the exact same question I had seen in the pre-survey. Yes, two different survey companies, but the list seemed identical and the two companies are co-ordinating anyways because of the pre-survey. Technically I had heard of all of them just a minute previously! When you create a survey, you need to be aware of question ordering, and you need to be aware of what facts (or not) you prime the respondent with (so if you mention to respondents that Gerald Ford was photographed falling down the steps of an airplane, some respondents might think he was clumsy while others might feel sympathy for him, or if you mention how he went to UM, people who are pro-UM might feel more positively about him, while OSU and MSU people might feel more negatively about him -- might).

The other issue with the second question was that the HTML layout was terrible compared to the first version. For the first question, you could click a "yes" box if you had heard of the jeans, but otherwise ignore the entry. For the actual survey, there was a yes and a no button for every entry. There were about 30 brands. I don't want to click yes or no 30 times, how about I just click yes for the 7 I know? Don't make it difficult on your respondents to answer your questions.

What really irritated me, from a methodological point of view, was this question. Let me first point out they (whoever it was) made the survey so you couldn't copy and paste (way too complex HTML), but luckily there is always the "view source" option.

Q: Which two of the following categories are most important to you, meaning you would not be willing to cut your spending if you needed to spend less on something?

The categories were mundane, such as apparel, personal electronics, dining out, home improvement, sports, and the like. The problem is that they assume that their categories include two things in which you the respondent would not be willing to reduce your spending. That is a horrible assumption and it is flat out wrong. With incorrect questions and incorrect answer sets you end up with incorrect data. If the economy is bad enough, and it is, I'll cut spending across the board! What they think they are doing by forcing the answer set on you is forcing you to reveal your deeply-hidden inner truths. In some survey circumstances (which are far removed from this type of question), that may be appropriate -- for instance, asking a 4-point question (very yes, somewhat yes, somewhat no, very no) and not mentioning "not sure" but actually having it as an option (usually in face to face or over the phone interviews, this doesn't work with fixed online surveys).

"Most important" does not equal "not be willing to cut your spending."

And why two?

Update: About forcing answers/opinions... From Bennett and Iyengar, in the Journal of Communication, 58(4). They mention "...news-driven polling that pushes people with no basis for having opinions into opinion expression..." That's what I'm talking about.

Science! CERN!

Awesome. The Large Hadron Collider! Between this graphic at the NYT and a five-part series of PhD Comics, we've got it covered.

Science Artifact Auction

Difficult to summarize the article in question, since it starts of with scientific artifacts then slides over into considerations and other thoughts, but it's fun with good wow! factor. Here is one of my favorite parts:

In fact this book, published in 1543, was the revolution. It was here that the Polish astronomer [Copernicus] laid out his theory that the Earth and other planets go around the Sun, contravening a millennium of church dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe and launching a frenzy of free thought and scientific inquiry.

The party, known as the Enlightenment, is still going strong.
....
... Galileo, who was tried for heresy in 1633 and sentenced to house arrest for his admiration of Copernicus...

Mmm, the lovely days when saying that the Earth goes around the Sun was enough to have you burned at the stake!

Judson on Extinction

I hope you are all reading Olivia Judson's biology blog over at the NYTimes. I found her recent insights on evolution and extinction particularly noteworthy: apparently for quite some time until the 19th century it was generally thought that extinction was impossible. Amazing! I think the blogs are the best thing the NYT has going currently.

The Platypus!

A nice article about our favorite, the platypus, over at the NYT. Genetics, physical features, evolution. Has words like "diurnal" and "vinculum" (which I admit I had to look up using the handy OSX dictionary feature -- and although it is in the look-up dictionary, I now see it is not in the spellcheck dictionary, strange).

More Numbers!

From the NYT, as usual:

There are some 200 billion stars in the galaxy.... The first thing Dr. Shostak and his colleagues plan to do with the newly operational 42-antenna array is to survey a strip across the center of the galaxy. There will be several billion stars in the field of view, but they will be very far away, 10,000 to 50,000 light years...

Wow!