Archive for category history
Enlightenment by an accidental statistician under the Great Comet of 1996
Posted by mark in design of experiments, history on October 21, 2019
A small, but select, group of people came Friday to University of Wisconsin, Madison for the celebration George E. P. Box’s 100th birthday, including his second wife Joan Fisher, whose father Ronald invented modern-day design of experiments (DOE) and the whole field of industrial statistics. Box, who doubled down on Fisher by his development of response surface methods (RSM), went by the name “Pel”. This nickname stemmed from the second of his middle names “Edward Pelham” (E. P. not standing for Elvis Presley as some who admired him thought more apropos).
In my blog on March 30, 2013—just after his death, I relayed stories of my two memorable encounters with Box. Friday marked my first visit to UW-Madison since I last saw him in 1996 for his short-course on DOE. Looking over Lake Mendota from the Memorial Union Terrace brought back memories of the incredible view during my class, when Comet Hyakutake peaked in spectacular fashion before rapidly diminishing. I rate Hyakutake on par with Hale-Bopp that came a year later, just as I view Box and Fisher as the luminaries for DOE.
Inspired by the Centenary, I ordered a copy of Box’s autobiography—The Accidental Statistician, which he completed in the last year of his life. I look forward to reading more about this remarkable fellow.
The video presented by Box at the time of publication—March 2013—provides a sampling of the stories he told to inspire experimenters to be more observant and methodical:
- How a monk discovered the secret to making champagne,
- What to make of seeing bloody Mr. Jones running down the street pursued by Mrs. Jones with a hatchet (good one for this Halloween season!).
The hero of zero
Posted by mark in Basic stats & math, history on October 9, 2017
Breaking news about nothing: Dating done with the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit now puts the invention of the number zero 500 years earlier than previously believed. As explained in this post by The Guardian, the hero of zero is Indian mathematician Brahmagupta who worked out this pivotal number in 628 AD. Isn’t that something?
The development of zero in mathematics underpins an incredible range of further work, including the notion of infinity, the modern notion of the vacuum in quantum physics, and some of the deepest questions in cosmology of how the Universe arose – and how it might disappear from existence in some unimaginable future scenario.
– Hannah Devlin,
A knotty problem—how to keep track of stuff without computers or even pen and paper
Posted by mark in history, Uncategorized on January 3, 2016
The New York Times reports today on the recent discovery of several knotted string records, called khipus, that ancient Incas used to record things such as the colorful potatoes I photographed at a Peruvian market. From what I saw on my travels there—see this blog on Incan agriculture experiments, a great deal of food must have been produced and stored.
Based on this Times picture I suspect these “mops that have seen better days”, as George Gheverghese Joseph, a mathematics historian at the University of Manchester, U.K., put it, must be a bit easier to untangle than Christmas lights. But then there remains the problem of deciphering them.
Thus far researchers have picked up on mathematical aspects of the khipus. However, the latest trove of colored strings provides a chance at figuring out the Incan scheme for identifying what was being counted. Here is where database capability and statistical methodology comes in handy.
I amazes me how all of the technology we now have at our disposable is challenged by methods developed 600 or so years ago. Hats off to Incan ‘thinken!
“Many now think that although khipu probably began as accounting tools, they had evolved into a writing system—a kind of three-dimensional binary code, unlike any other on Earth—by the time the Spanish arrived.”
— Cracking the Khipu Code Science magazine.
Experiments by Incan agronomists
Earlier this week I visited Machu Picchu in Peru, which features extensive terracing for crop-growing. Five-hundred years ago the Incans took full advantage of a uniquely temperate microclimate on sites like this along the border of the Amazon. First of all they engineered a drainage system out of rocks brought up from the river below. Then they covered it with dirt laboriously hauled from fertile plains at lower elevations. Next they evidently experimented on different crops at different levels to get the best interaction with varying temperatures each step of the way down from the peak. According to a team of agronomists and archeologists 
from U Penn who reproduced the Incan farming conditions, yields of potatoes came in at two or even four times what would be expected. All this is quite impressive—building a self-sustaining city at nearly 8000 feet on a peak with only a few, small flat areas.
This baby really did explode
Posted by mark in history, Uncategorized on January 27, 2013
I’ve been blessed with another grandson, my second, who arrived just before Thanksgiving. I’ve become a bit gun-shy holding him due to his explosive colonic evacuations. Today, though, I realized that being a babysitter could be a whole lot worse. See what I mean by reading this New York Times obituary for nuclear scientist Donald Hornig.
In a small shed at the top of a 100-foot-tall steel tower deep in the New Mexico desert, Donald Hornig sat next to the world’s first atomic bomb in the late evening of July 15, 1945, reading a book of humorous essays. A storm raged, and he shuddered at each lightning flash.
What value for p is right for testing t (or tasting tea)?
Posted by mark in Basic stats & math, history on July 25, 2010
Seeking sponsors for his educational website, statistician Keith Bower sent me a sample of his work – this 5 minute podcast on p-values. I enjoyed the story Keith tells of how Sir Ronald Fisher, who more-or-less invented design of experiments, settled on the p value of 5% as being a benchmark for statistical significance.
This sent me scurrying over to my office bookshelf for The Lady Tasting Tea – a delightful collection of stories* compiled by David Salsburg.** Page 100 of this book reports Fisher saying that below p of 0.01 one can declare an effect (that is – significance), above 0.2 not (that is – insignificant), and in-between it might be smart to do another experiment.
So it seems that Fisher did some flip-flopping on the issue of what value of p is needed to declare statistical significance.
PS. One thing that bothers me in any discussion of p-values is that it is mainly in the context of estimating the risk in a test of the null hypothesis and almost invariably overlooks the vital issue of power. For example, see this YouTube video on Understanding the p-value. It’s quite entertaining and helpful so far as it goes, but the decision to accept the null at p > 0.2 is based on a very small sample size. Perhaps the potential problem (underweight candy bars), which one could scope out by calculating the appropriate statistical interval (confidence, prediction or tolerance), merits further experimentation to increase the power. What do you think?
*In the title story, originally told by Sir Ronald Fisher, a Lady claims to have the ability to tell which went into her cup first—the tea or the milk. Fisher devised a test whereupon the Lady is presented eight cups in random order, four of which are made one way (tea first) and four the other (milk first). He calculates the odds of correct identification as 1 right way out of 70 possible selections, which falls below the standard 5% probability value generally accepted for statistical significance. Salsburg reveals on good authority (H. Fairfield Smith–a colleague of Fisher) that the Lady identified all eight cups correctly!
**Salsburg, who worked for some years as a statistician at a major pharmaceutical company offers this amusing anecdote from personal experience:
“When I first began to work in the drug industry…one…referred to…uncertainty [as] ‘error.’ One of the senior executives refused to send such a report to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA]. ‘How can we admit to having error in our data?’ he asked [and]…insisted I find some other way to describe it…I contacted H.F. Smith [who] suggested that I call the line ‘residual’…I mentioned this to other statisticians…and they began to use it…It seems that no one [in the FDA, at least]…will admit to having error.”
Tasty tidbits gleaned by a news-starved junky for stats trivia
Posted by mark in history, Uncategorized on June 10, 2010
The June 10th “Views” section of the International Herald Tribune (the global edition of New York Times) offered a few choice bits for me to savor after nearly two weeks traveling abroad without an American newspaper.
- A pie chart reporting on a June 1-7 telephone survey by Stanford University of 1000 American adults asking their opinion on belief in global warming. A pie chart illustrated that about 75% do believe in global warming, 20% do not, and 5% “don’t believe in pie charts”. I suspect that the author of this editorial, Jon A. Krosnick – a professor of communications at Stanford, meant this last bit of the chart to represent those who are undecided, but the graphic designers (Fogleson-Lubliner) figured they’d have some fun.
- Olivia Judson’s comments on “Galton’s legacy” note that this preeminent British statistician once published a comment in Nature (June 25, 1885 “Measure of Fidget”) that correlated boredom by how the audience squirmed during particularly wearisome presentations. I wish I would’ve thought of this “amusing way of passing an otherwise dull” lecture before attending two statistical conferences over the last several weeks. Based on this 2005 assessment of “Nodding and napping in medical lectures”, the more things change the more they stay the same, at least so far as presentations are concerned. The only difference is cost. For example, the authors figure that at a typical 1 hour talk to 100 high-powered professionals, say master statisticians, perhaps as much as $20,000 goes up in snores.
“Nodding was common, but whether in agreement with the speaker or in reverie remains undetermined.”
— Kenneth Rockwood (Dalhousie University), Christopher J. Patterson, McMaster University, David B. Hogan (University of Calgary)
Bonferroni of Bergamo
Posted by mark in Basic stats & math, history, Uncategorized on June 6, 2010
Bonferroni corrected
Uncorrected (random results)
I enjoyed a fine afternoon in the old Citta Alta of Bergamo in northern Italy – a city in the sky that the Venetians, at the height of their power as the “most serene republic,” walled off as their western-most outpost in the 17 century.
In statistical circles this town is most notable for being the birthplace of Carlo Emilio Bonferroni. You may have heard of the “Bonferroni Correction” – a method that addresses the problem of multiple comparisons.
For example, when I worked for General Mills the head of quality control in Minneapolis would mix up a barrel of flour and split it into 10 samples, carefully sealed in air-tight containers, for each of the mills to test in triplicate for moisture. At this time I had just learned how to do the t-test for comparing two means. Fortunately for the various QC supervisors, no one asked me to analyze the results, because I would have simply taken the highest moisture value and compared it to the lowest one. Given that there are 45 possible pair-wise comparisons (10*9/2), this biased selection (high versus low) is likely to produce a result that tests significant at the 0.05 level (1 out of 20).
This is a sadistical statistical scheme for a Machiavellian manager because of the intimidating false positives (Type I error). In the simulation pictured, using the random number generator in Design-Expert® software (based on a nominal value of 100), you can see how, with the significance threshold set at 0.05 for the least-significant-difference (LSD) bars (derived from t-testing), the supervisors of Mills 4 and 7 appear to be definitely discrepant. (Click on the graphic to expand the view.) Shame on them! Chances are that the next month’s inter-laboratory collaborative testing would cause others to be blamed for random variation.
In the second graph I used a 0.005 significance level – 1/10th as much per the Bonferroni Correction. That produces a more sensible picture — all the LSD bars overlap, so no one can be fingered for being out of line.
By the way, the overall F-test on this data set produces a p value of 0.63 – not significant.
Since Bonferroni’s death a half-century ago in 1960, much more sophisticated procedures have been developed to correct for multiple comparisons. Nevertheless, by any measure of comparative value, Bergamo can consider this native son as one of those who significantly stood above most others in terms of his contributions to the world.
Stat-Ease Corporation celebrates 25 years in business
Posted by mark in history, Uncategorized on May 16, 2010
My business partner Pat Whitcomb started up Stat-Ease as a business entity in 1982,* but he did not incorporate it until June of 1985. So that brings us to 25 years as a Corporation this coming month. This is quite an achievement for a software publisher – not many remain since 1985, I’ll wager, especially ones so specialized as us. That’s our saving grace, I figure – sticking to a niche like a clam in a wave-beaten hollow.
According to this report on U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy statistics from September 2009, only half of all startups survive five years. This correlates with a decay curve posted by Scott Shanem Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University, which shows that only about a quarter of companies remain alive after ten years.
I’d say we’ve done very well to make it this far. Having weathered the recent economic downturn in good shape, I feel positive about continuing on for at least a few years more. 😉
PS. If you’re interested to learn more about us, check out this history of Stat-Ease.
*The year the word “internet” was used for the first time according to this timeline. Check out these photos from the 1980’s by the Computer History Museum, especially the Osborne “portable” (24 pounds!) PC with a screen that looks about the size of today’s internet-enabled smart phones.
Test and evaluation of the Great Panjandrum – a spectacular failure for weaponry
Posted by mark in history, science, Uncategorized on March 23, 2010
When time becomes available – mainly while I do cardio-exercise on my home elliptical, I’ve been watching a classic 26-episode BBC series on The World at War that my oldest son gave me. It’s extremely compelling – rated 9.7 out of 10 by over two thousand voters at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
This morning I watched the chronicle of D-Day. Being that I just returned from the Annual National Test & Evaluation Conference by the National Defense Industry Association (NDIA), it was interesting to see what the boffins of Britain invented to defeat the defenses put up along the Normandy beaches. Perhaps the most amazing device was the Great Panjandrum, a rocket-propelled cart, which according to this write-up for Wikipedia was developed by the Admiralty’s Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development. (One wonders about the “miscellaneous” bit.) The clip I viewed on the spectacular failure of the Great Panjandrum can be seen (along with other incredibly-inept military devices for D-Day) in a video on British Secret Wartime Follies posted in this article by UK’s Daily Mail. Check it out!
PS. The Brits continue to come up with the most audacious inventions, such as this flame-throwing moped developed as a deterrent against derelict drivers competing for motorway lanes.