Chance News 63
Quotations
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
As quoted in Believing Weird Things is Dangerous, Rob Breakenridge, The Calgary Herald, April 13, 2010.
Submitted by Steve Simon
Forsooth
A survey released by researchers at George Mason University found that more than a quarter of television weathercasters agree with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” and nearly two-thirds believe that, if warming is occurring, it is caused “mostly by natural changes.” (The survey also found that more than eighty per cent of weathercasters don’t trust “mainstream news media sources,” though they are presumably included in this category.)
April 12, 2010
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
HIV patients in low socio-eonomic classes are 89 per cent more likely to die than better-off people with the infection, claims a study of 2684 adults in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved (Nov).
The Times
8 November 2005
There are now more overweight people in America than average-weight people. So overweight people are now average. Which means you've met your New Year's resolution.
Jay Leno reported in the Cork Evening Echo
8 September 2007
The following 2 forsooths are from the April 2010 RRS News
British experts studied more than 17,000 children born in 1970
for about four decades. Of the children who ate candies or chocolates
daily at age 10, 69 percent were later arrested for a violent offence by the age of 34.
Of those who didn't have any violent clashes, 42 per cent ate sweets daily.
Northern Territory News
2 October 2009
A separate opinion poll yesterday suggested that 50% of
obese people earn less than the national average income..
The Guardian
3 November 2009
Submitted by Laurie Snell
From an interview with a con man who claims he can provide a stem-cell cure for diseases such as ALS and Alzeimer's:
Interviewer: “You told these men in Houston that a cure was, in a memorable phrase, 100% possible.”
Con man: “Possible. Is that a guarantee?”
April 18, 2010
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
Of the 29,000 people who may get cancer from CT scans done in 2007, about 50 percent will die, the researchers estimated.
Nicole Ostrow, in Bloomberg.com, December 14, 2009
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
Tiger’s effect on opponents
“Superstar Effect”
by Jonah Lehrer, The Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2010
Lehrer, author of How We Decide[1], states:
While challenging competitions are supposed to bring out our best, … studies demonstrate that when people are forced to compete against a peer who seems far superior, they often don't rise to the challenge. Instead, they give up.
The article is based, for the most part, on the paper “Quitters Never Win: The (Adverse) Incentive Effects of Competing with Superstars”, by Jennifer Brown, Northwestern University, September 2008. The paper includes detailed descriptive and inferential statistics.
Brown chose to study golf mainly because of the presence of Tiger Woods, whose playing dominates the game. She looked at data from professional golfers and found that the presence of Tiger Woods in a tournament resulted in the other golfers, taking, on average, 0.2 more strokes in the initial 18 holes and 0.8 more strokes in the whole tournament. (Note that Lehrer cites the figure 0.3 instead of Brown’s figure, 0.2.)[2]
Brown’s results apply to a field called economic tournament theory that investigates competitions in which relative, instead of absolute, performance is rewarded. She feels that the superstar effect is strongest when “there is a nonlinear incentive structure,” that is, when there is an extra incentive to finish first.
Lehrer also refers to a 2009 study[3] by University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock, who examined “choking” during golf competitions, possibly due to golfers over-thinking their actions.
We bring expert golfers into our lab, we tell them to pay attention to a particular part of their swing, and they just screw up. …When you are at a high level, your skills become somewhat automated. You don't need to pay attention to every step in what you're doing. ….
Lehrer concludes:
Regardless of the precise explanation for the superstar effect—are golfers quitting on themselves or thinking too much?
A blogger commented[4]:
But even the best do not intimidate every opponent. Ali did not intimidate Frazier, Federer did not intimidate Nadal (in fact it was the other way around until Nadal was weakened by injuries). Even Michael Jordan wasn't intimidating when he played without Scottie Pippen.
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
Dribbling data
"At the Free-Throw Line, 1...2...3...4 Whoosh"
by David Biderman, The Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2010
The author reports that, of the 425 free-throw attempts in the past 10 NCAA title games, players who dribbled 1, 2, 3, or 5 or more times before shooting were successful 60%, 66%, 68%, and 68% of the time, respectively, while those who dribbled 4 times were successful 77% of the time. Also, there were more NBA all-stars in the 4-dribble group than in any other group.
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
Discussion
1. Buried in the article: The total sample size of free throws attempted was 425, with 60, 121, 191, 22 and 9 representing 1, 2, 3, 4 and 7 dribbles for a total of 403. No information is given for 5 and 6 dribbles but from the data, the inference is that the represent 22 (425-403) attempts. Given this data, how impressive does the 77% success rate for four dribbles appear?
2. Why didn’t the author choose to present a simple table of number of dribbles, free-throw attempts, free-throws made instead of dribbling the information all over the article? Is any insight provided by the following graphic from the article?
http://sg.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PT-AO308_COUNT_NS_20100402163830.gif
3. The headline in the print edition, but not in the online edition is, "At the Foul Line, Four is the Magic Number." Comment on the "magicness" of four given the actual data.
Submitted by Paul Alper
Bird brains vs. birdbrains
“Mathematicians vs. Birds vs. Monty Hall”
by Tom Bartlett, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 2010
“Pigeons Beat Humans at Solving ‘Monty Hall’ Problem”
by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science, March 3, 2010
In the February 2010 issue of the Journal of Comparative Psychology, two Whitman College researchers reported about their work comparing the success rates of 6 pigeons and 12 undergraduate student volunteers in solving the Monty Hall problem[5] by trial and error:
By day 30 of the experiment, the pigeons had “learned” to adopt the best, “switch,” strategy “96 percent of the time.” However, the students had not found the best strategy “even after 200 trials of practice each.”
See an abstract[6] of the paper “Are birds smarter than mathematicians?”
Submitted by Margaret Cibes
Odds are, it's wrong
Odds are, it's wrong
by Tom Siegfried, Science News, 27 March 2010
An essay on the limitations of significance testing. To be continued...
Submitted by Bill Peterson, based on a suggestion from Scott Pardee