Archive for category pop
Keep your black plastic spatulas for math-challenged scientists
Back in my day, when a boy misbehaved, he would be threatened with “The Paddle” being administered to his back side. I don’t advocate going back to this corporal punishment. However, with the news that scientists raising the alarm about a dangerous fire retardant in black plastic spatulas miscalculated 60 times 7,000 to a product of 42,000—off by a factor of 10,* I think these less fearsome implements could be repurposed to gently tap some math sense into their heads.
As you can see pictured, I found one, very old, black plastic spatula (classic KitchenAid!) in our kitchen utensil drawer, which I will retire from service but retain as a Halloween decoration or donate to the cause of math ‘education.’
*That viral black plastic kitchen utensil study was overblown thanks to a simple math mistake , Mashable, Tim Marcin, December 16, 2024.
Microwave popcorn still expanding nicely but in shrinking amounts
When I first ran a multifactor design of experiment (DOE) on microwave popcorn in 1993,* the bags contained 3.5 ounces of product. Since then, this product and many other foodstuffs suffered from shrinkflation—a way for their manufactures to fool us into paying the same for less. For example, Pop Secret—one of the snacks tested in my 1993 DOE, now comes in 3.2-ounce bags—a shrinkage of 8.6 percent over the years. Tricky!
I asked Google’s experimental Generative AI for stats on shrinkflation. GAI (my new go-to guy!) tells me that:
- The most common products to experience shrinkflation are savory snacks, chocolate, and sweets. (Popcorn fits the bill.)
- In the US, 71% of people have noticed shrinkflation, with 57% reporting multiple incidents in the past year. Baby boomers are more likely to notice shrinkflation than millennials and Gen Zers. (I am a baby boomer and I am well aware of this trend.)
- Shrinkflation can be harder to notice than price increases because the price of the item stays the same, making it harder to budget. (That’s the idea!)
- According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), shrinkflation has little impact on overall inflation rates. A BLS report from March said that the price of snacks inflated by 26% from January 2019 to October 2023. However, shrinkflation accounted for only 2.5 percentage points of the increase. (OK, so maybe we are making too big of a deal about this, but nobody likes to be tricked.)
The increasing cost of food products is currently creating a great deal of consternation, despite it seemingly abating. But so long as there’s plenty of delicious popcorn to share, even at a higher price for less of it, I don’t mind much.
However, when it comes to the recent trend for popcorn manufacturers selling “mini bags” with 1.5 ounces of product, I draw the line!
Swedish sleep researchers torture subjects with math problems
This is alarming news, literally: Researchers from Stockholm University discovered via studies involving over 1700 subjects* that over two-thirds of them, especially younger individuals, habitually hit the snooze button.
I am appalled at this lack of discipline and ambition! However, I must confess that in my younger days, I got in the habit of putting my alarm on temporary pause repeatedly, which often caused me to run late for class. That would not do! Therefore, I purchased a cleverly built clock called the Clocky that rolls away when ringing, thus forcing you to jump out of bad to hunt it down. Highly recommended!
Putting aside my negative attitude about snoozers, I do feel bad for those subjected to the sleep study because as reported by the New York Times: “Immediately after the participants woke up, the researchers flipped on the lights and presented them with math problems and other cognitive tests — a challenge even more grating than a shrieking alarm, and one the participants had to complete before having a cup of coffee.”** Oof!
The good news for you slackers who do not leap out bed like I do is that this new study provides a pass for delaying the inevitable: “Snoozing [for 30 minutes] does not lead to cognitive impairments upon waking.” Just do not sleep through your final exam on math. That would be a nightmare!
*Is snoozing losing? Why intermittent morning alarms are used and how they affect sleep, cognition, cortisol, and mood , Journal of Sleep Research, October 17, 2023.
**“You Snooze, You … Win?”, Dani Blum, Oct. 18, 2023.
Never ending quest for the perfect grind of coffee
Posted by mark in food science, pop on June 12, 2023
This graphic illustration from the National Coffee Association provides some amazing statistics in support of the claim that their beverage reigns supreme. I am doing more than my per ‘cupita’ (pun intended) of the nearly half a billion mugs of coffee that Americans drink every day.
Back before we all started working from home during the pandemic and kept on doing so afterwards, my son Hank (now VP of Software Development) and most of our Stat-Ease colleagues jived on java (the real stuff, not the coding language). He and our lead statistician Martin Bezener (now President) conducted a very sophisticated experiment on coffee-grinding, as reported by him in our September 2016 Stat-Teaser. Check out Hank’s dramatic video-detailing of the split-plot coffee experiment.
With the aid of Design-Expert® software’s powerful statistical tools, Martin discovered the secret for making delicious coffee: Use a burr, not a blade, grinder, and go for the finest granulation. Based on these findings, I upgraded my grinder to the highly-rated Baratza Encore, which works really well (though very noisy!).
However, a new study published this May in a Special Issue on Food Physics reveals an uneven extraction in coffee brewing. Evidently, “a complicated interplay between an initial imbalance in the porosities and permeabilities” creates “a cutoff point” where “grinding coffee more finely results in lower extraction.” Along the same lines, but with open content and some nice pictures and graphs to lighten up a lot of dense math (e.g., Navier-Stokes equations for fluid dynamics), see this earlier publication on Systematically Improving Espresso. It “strongly suggests that inhomogeneous flow is operative at fine grind settings, resulting in poor reproducibility and wasted raw material.”
So now that experiments show that finer may not always be better, the quest for the perfect grind continues!
Hard-boiled Easter eggs not a-peeling
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on April 17, 2023
One of my daughters provided me with half a dozen hard-boiled eggs left over from Easter. However, so far I have not cracked (pun intended) the process for peeling of their shells without also taking off much of the albumen (the white part on the outside). That leaves a very raggedy yolk with white bits hanging off. You could say that the yoke is on me (sorry, cannot resist). Even this supposedly “genius” hack (literally—using a spoon) failed miserably.
Unfortunately, my wife ate up the remaining stock before I could try more eggs-periments. She also experienced difficulties peeling them, which made me feel better (my dexterity falling fall short of hers). Should un-a-peeling eggs be encountered again, here are my other possible remedies:
- Shock them with an ice bath using my Waring Pro Wine cooler
- Soaking in vinegar per this procedure recommended by Gnarly Science blogger Dr C M Helm-Clark PhD
- Try an instant egg peeling device such as the well-reviewed Negg. (I am going to pass on the cheaper Eggstractor based on the hilarious difficulties encountered by Insider product testers.)
Any other ideas for easy and reliable egg peeling are welcome!
Odds of winning the lottery versus being impaled by an icicle
The odds against winning today’s $1+ billion Mega Millions come to over 300 million to 1. According to these statistics from the National Weather Service, the chances in being hit by lightning strike in any given year are far greater—about 1 in a million.
Being in the dead of winter, I’m more worried about the icicles hanging over our walkway.
I cannot find any ‘official’ statistics on the odds of dying from one of these frozen daggers, but it must be on par with winning the lottery.
Though it makes far more sense for me to invest in a helmet rather than the Mega Millions, I bought 5 tickets just to participate in the dream. It’s fun doing something irrational every so often!
To get the math on the odds and tips on improving them (such as: pick at random!), see this post by Davidson College Professor Tim Davidson.
Stay on task when working on your computer or pay the price
Gone are the good old days during the pandemic when you could slack off work and chat online with your friends and family or wander away for a long spell. According to a worldwide survey of 816 organizations by IDC Global conducted in July, nearly half of all large organizations (over 500 employees) now deploy monitoring software. More and more employers feed these analytics into algorithms that rate relative performance. They then tie the productivity score directly to their worker’s compensation.
You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
George Orwell, 1984, speaking on how intrusively “Big Brother” watches you
Will this surveillance make digital workers do more, or will it backfire and cause “quiet quitting”? For some thoughts on this from an expert in the field of human relations, see Employee monitoring: Why it’s ‘dysfunctional’ but gaining popularity by Phil Albinus, Tech Editor for HR Executive.
Going nerdle on Wordle
I am habituated to my daily Wordle, the addictive online word-puzzle. It hinges on the 5 letters you lay out at the start. It’s too boring to enter the same vowel-heavy word, such as “adieu” or “orate”, every time, so I go with a different one every day of the month, referring to my top-secret list garnered from Wordle experts. Every day I compete (not especially well) against 4 or my adult children—us all posting our play to the family WhatsApp.
Here’s my stats thus far (nicely maintained and bar-graphed by Wordle): 152 games with 0 in 1 word, 5 in 2, 51 in 3, 45 in 4, 40 in 5, 7 in 6. The other 4 times I failed to get the word worked out in the 6 tries allotted, thus ruining those 4 days for me. However, my success rate of 97.4% is not too shabby, I think. (Because it is so easy and tempting to cheat with online Wordle solvers, getting valid stats on players’ performance is problematic.)
The current issue (June) of the Royal Statistical Society’s Significance magazine features a breakdown of the “War of Wordlers” by Mary J. Kwasny—a Northwestern University professor. She collected results from 20 Facebook friends (including herself) to compare with the performance of computer-based Wordle solvers. After a plethora of nerdy statistics, step plots and simulation graphs, Kwasny concludes that the computer will probably win out over an expert player. But that will be no fun at all.
If you have more of an appetite for Wordle as well as statistics (I’ve had enough!), check out this blog by data scientist Esteban Moro on Playing (and winning) Wordle with R.
Finis! (By the way, this is a valid Wordle word according to this list.)
PS Two of our family—my wife Karen and a son-in-law Ryan—quit playing after they made Wordle’s in one. Ryan got his ace on his first try at Wordle. With roughly 13,000 words in the hopper, that was extremely ‘skillful’.
Daylight elimination time
With virtually no opposition, the US Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which, if approved by the House and signed by President Biden, will make daylight savings time (DST) permanent beginning next March.
I was hoping for an end to the very annoying biannual change in time, but figured it would revert to standard, not daylight time. It will be very unsettling for those living in the far north to delay sunrise from 8:30 to 9:30 on the mornings around the winter solstice when days are shortest. However, I suppose that with the creep of DST over the years from 6 months in 1966 to only 4 months now, standard time stood no chance. Evidently the majority prefers not being woken up too early by the bright sun, and they like lighting up evening activities, for example, trick or treating on Halloween.*
An extra yawn one morning in the springtime, an extra snooze one night in the autumn is all that we ask in return for dazzling gifts. We borrow an hour one night in April; we pay it back with golden interest five months later.
Winston Churchill
Going to fixed time nationwide, even if it must be DST, will be very welcome. The clock fiddling got completely out of control in my Twin Cities years ago when the whole region split on going to DST. It came to a head with Minneapolis and Saint Paul being one hour apart for two weeks in 1965.**
It’s about time to settle on one time per zone and allow for the natural variation in daylight caused by our planet being so ‘tilty’. If you do not like it, move to the equator.
*See How Retailers Got American Kids an Extra Hour To Trick-Or-Treat On Halloween
**See Two Cities, Two Times
Statbot AI a bust…sad…now in need of Woebot consoling
Sir David Cox, a giant in the field of statistics, passed away early this year at age 97. Boffins like him cannot be easily replaced—hence the interest in creating artificial intelligence (AI). Therefore, I was excited to see this announcement of NelsonBot5000 (NB5k)—an automated “statistical concierge”. Alas, after submitting several questions such as “what is a p value”, I discovered that NB5k referred all questions to Google. Lame (but a clever gimmick to create engagement!).
“When I was a young cyborg, knee-high to a dial-up modem, PapaBot_x86 used to tell me tales of what the future would hold. However, I never dreamt that we’d ever see the day where free statistical expertise would be available to everyone, instantly.”
– NelsonBot5000
This got me got me going on the state of AI in general. The first thing I found via Google was a New York Times report on an “automated conversational agent” called Woebot that, according to this randomized controlled trial (unblinded), significantly reduces depression. I wanted to share my disappointment about NB5k but Woebot would not talk to me—it requiring a referral from a mental-health provider. My colleague Pat Whitcomb, founder of Stat-Ease, had a good response when I shared similarly trivial woes with him: “GOI!” (get over it).
On the bright side, my work as a consultant, trainer and educator on statistical design of experiments (DOE) remains secure from smart bots. All I ask is that before you ask me for stat help, please consult with Google or the like. Or, better yet, read the trilogy of “Simplified” books on DOE, lead-authored by me based on brainpower from Pat and statistician Martin Bezener.
*“Something Bothering You? Tell It to Woebot. When your therapist is a bot, you can reach it at 2 a.m. But will it really understand your problems?”, Karen Brown, 6/1/21.