Archive for April, 2017
Statistics to make distracted drivers more aware this month
Posted by mark in Uncategorized, Wellness on April 24, 2017
April is now the Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month (formerly it was just math–no stats). It also is Distracted Driving Awareness Month.
Putting these two themes together brings us to data published this month by Zendrive, a San Francisco-based startup that uses smartphone sensors to measure drivers’ behavior. They claim that 90% of collisions are due to human error, of which 1 in 4 stem from phone use while driving.
These statistics are very worrying to start off with. But, according to this blog, it gets far worse when you drill down on Zendrive’s 3-month analysis of 3-million anonymous drivers, who made 570-million trips and covered 5.6-billion miles:
- Drivers used their phones on 88-percent of the trips
- They spent 3.5 minutes per hour on calls (an enormous amount of time considering that even a few seconds of distraction can create dire consequences)
About a third of US states prohibit use of hand-held phones while driving. Does this reduce distraction? The stats posted by Zendrive are not definitive.
It seems to me that that hands-free must be far safer. However, this ranking of driving distractions* (benchmarked to plain driving—rating of 1) does not provide much support for what is seemingly obvious:
- Listening to the radio — 1.21
- Listening to a book on tape — 1.75
- Talking on a hands-free cellphone — 2.27
- Talking with a passenger in the front seat — 2.33
- Talking on a hand-held cellphone — 2.45
- Interacting with a speech recognition e-mail or text system — 3.06
For all the fuss about talking on the phone, whether hands-free or not, it does not cause any more distraction than chatting with a passenger.
This list does not include texting, which Consumer Reports figures is 23 times more distracting than talking on your cell phone while driving.**
Please avoid any distractions when you drive, especially texting.
*Source: This 10/16/15 Boston Globe OpEd
**Posted here
Slackers rule by a nerd’s law
The of and to a “in” is that it, for you, was with “on”. Profound? No. These are the top 14 most commonly used words according to this Vsauce video by Michael Stevens. He goes on to reveal a “bizarre” pattern where the second word (“of”) appears one-half as often, the third (“and”) one-third as frequently, and so on, that is, proportionally to one over its rank. This phenomenon is known as Zipf’s law after the author of Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort published in 1949.
“The” leads the list at 6% for being most used by the reckoning of Stevens. Another study of 743 billion words found on Google books by their director of research came up with “the” occurring 7.14 percent of the time. See this Abacaba video for entertaining and informative bubble charts on word frequencies by use, length and gender.
By the way, I learned a new term from Stevens: “hapax legomenon”—a word that only appears once in a book, that is, at the extreme end of the frequency chart ruled by Zipf’s law. I am now on the lookout for these rarities so I can stop a casual conversation in its tracks by announcing my discovery of a hapax legomenon. ; )
Zipf’s law does not just apply to words, for example, this mysterious rule governs the size of cities as explained by this post on Gixmodo .
The driving force for this regularity in frequency distributions is the tendency for people to put in as little effort as they can, that is, slacking off for the most part.
That is it.
*For bringing this to my attention, I credit Nathaniel Chapman, an undergraduate researcher going for a Master’s degree in chemical engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
National Beer Day–A fine time for fun facts and paying homage to a wickedly smart brewer from Guinness
Yesterday marked the end of American prohibition of beer in 1933, albeit only up to 3.2% alcohol by weight. This date every year in the USA has become a day to endorse President Roosevelt’s observation at the time that “I think this would be a good time for a beer.”
It’s also a great time to pay homage to master brewer William S. Gossett of Guinness–the “student” of the Student’s T-Test, a method for extracting the essence of discovery from small samples of data, such as that he generated from his experiments on dry stout. For the whole story, see this wonderful writeup by Priceonomics on The Guinness Brewer Who Revolutionized Statistics.
“He possessed a wickedly fertile imagination and more energy and focus than a St. Bernard in a snowstorm. An obsessive observer, counter, cyclist, and cricket nut, the self-styled brewer had a sizzle for invention, experiment, and the great outdoors.”
– Stephen Ziliak
Glory to Gossett—a brilliant boffin of beer! Beyond recognizing him, here are other fun facts and figures that I gleaned from the International Business Times from their post yesterday on National Beer Day :
- If an empty beer glass makes you fearful, you suffer from Cenosillicaphobia. Say that after having a few.
- Women “brewsters” pioneered beer making 5,000 years ago. Let’s tip our caps to these wonderful ladies.
- Guinness estimated that at one time about 93,000 liters of beer was lost in the beards of Englishmen every year. Gross! Along those lines a brewmaster in Oregon developed a brew using yeast collected from his own beard. Yuk!
- In ancient Babylon if a person brewed a bad batch, he was drowned. Come on, lighten up!
Cheers for beers!