Archive for category Uncategorized
Brain drizzling? Try linking instead.
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on May 13, 2012
Early on in my career as a chemical engineer working in R&D process development I came to the realization that many good ideas get shot down prematurely. Granted, many of these thoughts come out half baked, but in the proper environment they can lead to some very nourishing developments.
I always thought Osborn’s methods for brainstorming counteracted the quenching of creativity. However, although his approach certainly does generate a quantity of ideas, the end results never proved nearly as astounding as one might expect.
Earlier this year The New Yorker magazine debunked as Groupthink many of Osborn’s cherished tenets, such as allowing no criticism. The current thinking is that you gather a diverse group of bright people and then just let things fly with no holds barred. The fear of public humiliation forces the participants to think a bit before speaking. If they do get strong criticism, these creative people must regroup their thoughts and try again. The best idea(s) tend to win out.
Here is one minor variation on the “no rules” creativity session that I suggest: Ask that everyone come in with one idea to throw into the pot. Then let the fun begin!
Given Osborn’s rules are passé, where should you turn to next for catalyzing creativity? I recommend you consider Idea-Links. I have had the pleasure of picking the brain of the author, Jim Link—a very energizing fellow. Believe me, he really knows how to get people to think outside of the box.
“To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”
– Albert Einstein
If you have other ideas on fostering creativity (or wish to criticize those already proposed), toss them into the ring. Do not be shy (nor sensitive).
Beware of obvious answers and positive results
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on March 4, 2012
“Most results, including those that appear in top-flight peer-reviewed journals, can’t be reproduced.”
This is a “dirty secret” revealed by the Wall Street Journal’s Gautam Naik in this December report. It cites statistics from Bayer that nearly two-thirds of published studies could not be replicated. Naik blames the complicated nature of experiments nowadays along with the “positive bias” researchers driven to produce results. Glenn Begley, vice president of research at Amgen, a biotechnology company, suggests that “academic scientists, like drug companies, should perform more experiments in a ‘blinded” manner to reduce any bias toward positive findings.”
Meanwhile, Duncan Watts, author of Everything is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer says
“When you do the experiment properly [randomized and controlled], all the numbers go down.”
He’s speaking on the bias of marketing executives toward their own sensibilities, which often do not reflect those of the population being sold to. See what the Financial Times “undercover economist” Tim Harford says about this here. Unfortunately, in my experience, those (the analysts) who know better than to extrapolate from small, non-representative sample of opinions from the ‘powers-that-be’ (often n=1, that is—the Boss) get very little support for spending money to put these assertions to the test. Even though you know the top dogs might be barking up the wrong tree it’s easiest just to go along with the pack and press ahead. To do otherwise risks suffering a painful bite-back. Yes, I am a cynic.
A debatable question: Should healthy people take cholesterol drugs?
Posted by mark in Uncategorized, Wellness on January 23, 2012
At my annual physical before my heart attack in December of 2004 I was advised that, although the cholesterol came in a bit high, it would not be necessary to go on medicine to reduce this. Would I have been spared if I had? This sort of speculation really does nothing for me but it underscores a big question that is debated in today’s Wall Street Journal: Should Healthy People Take Cholesterol Drugs to Prevent Heart Disease.
You be the judge whether the answer is yes or no—it is far too problematic for me to say. However, here are two points I want to make on the WSJ debate:
“we need clinical trials that actually follow healthy people treated with statins for the long term to see if treatment really results in lower mortality.”
I remain very skeptical of “experiments” comprised in a metamorphic manner by happenstance, as opposed to being truly controlled from start to finish and done double-blind (if possible).
Wrong more often than right but never in doubt
Posted by mark in Consumer behavior, Uncategorized on October 23, 2011
The New York Times Magazine provided a great readout on the “Surety of Fools”* in today’s issue. The author, psychologist Daniel Kahneman, starts by providing a real-life example of WYSIATI – “What you see is all there is.” Read his story to learn more about this, but basically it means that many times what you observe does not provide any meaningful information for predicting future behavior. Cocky Wall Street brokers are hit very hard, especially the males, who “act on their useless ideas significantly more often than women.” Ouch!
Kahneman examined the illusion of skill in a group of investment advisors who competed for annual performance bonuses. He found zero correlation on year-to-year rankings, thus the firm was simply rewarding luck. What I find most interesting is his observation that even when confronted with irrefutable evidence of misplaced confidence in one’s own ability to prognosticate, most people just carry on with the same level of self-assurance.
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t swallow everything said by assertive and confident people who advise on highly-variable systems such as financial markets. Heeding what an experienced physician suggests is one thing, but going with the most boastful money manager is another.
“True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.”
— Daniel Kahneman
“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”
— John Wooden
* Posted earlier under a different title here.
Trouble with math & stats? Blame it on dyscalculia.
Posted by mark in Basic stats & math, Uncategorized on October 16, 2011
According to this article in Journal of Child Neurology “dyscalculia is a specific learning disability affecting the normal acquisition of arithmetic skills, which may stem from a brain-based disorder. Are people born with this inability to do math in particular, but otherwise mentally capable – for example in reading and writing? Up until now it’s been difficult to measure. For example, my wife, who has taught preschool for several decades, observes that some of her children progress much more slowly than other. However, she sees no differential in math versus reading – these attributes seem to be completely correlated. The true picture may finally emerge now that Michèle M. M. Mazzocco et al published this paper on how Preschoolers’ Precision of the Approximate Number System Predicts Later School Mathematics Performance.
Certainly many great minds, particularly authors, abhor math and stats, even though they many not suffer from dyscalculia (only numerophobia). The renowned essayist Hillaire Belloc said*
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.
I wonder how he liked balancing his checkbook.
Meanwhile, public figures such as television newscasters and politicians, who appear to be intelligent otherwise (debatable!) say the silliest things when it comes to math and stats. For example a U.S. governor, speaking on his state’s pension fund said that “when they were set up, life expectancy was only 58, so hardly anyone lived long enough to get any money.”** One finds this figure of 58, the life expectancy of men in 1930 when Social Security began, cited often by pundits discussing the problems of retirement funds. Of course this was the life expectancy at birth, in times when infant mortality remained a much higher levels than today. According to this fact sheet by the Social Security Administration (SSA), 6.7 million Americans were aged 65 or older in 1930. This number exhibits an alarming increase. The SSA also provides interesting statistics on Average Remaining Life Expectancy for Those Surviving to Age 65, which show surprisingly slow gains over the decades. I leave it to those of you who are not numerophobic (nor a sufferer of dyscalculia) to reconcile these seemingly contradictory statistical tables.
*From “On Statistics”, The Silence of the Sea, Glendalough Press, 2008 (originally published 1941).
**From “Real world Economics / Errors in economics coverage spread misunderstandings” by Edward Lotterman.
Proofing Blackbeard’s rum
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on September 11, 2011
Being only about a week from this year’s Talk Like a Pirate Day this Atlantic Monthly article (read belatedly from a backlog of magazines) about Gunpowder on the Rocks caught my eye. I like the idea of setting a drink on fire and then drinking it, as Blackbeard did to impress his pirate crew.
It turns out that this is a practical test of rum to ensure it hasn’t been watered down by a ne’er-do-well hornswoggler, as you can see in this video by experimental archaeologist Jeff Lindow. After watching this, I decided not to try this at home as it would no doubt shiver my timbers. However, if it gets cold enough this winter, I might consider a swig of this gunpowder-infused Man O’War rum. Yo ho ho!
It may pay to make your product less than perfect!
Posted by mark in Consumer behavior, Uncategorized on September 4, 2011
I once analyzed data from a designed experiment that quantified consumer distaste for flaws in chocolate-covered cherries. This was a very rewarding project – lots of free candy! It also produced a counter-intuitive result: People preferred boxes with a few upside-down morsels. I figure this is akin to a beauty mark adding to the enticement of a model or actor. This article on “When Blemishing Leads to Blossoming”, published online by the Journal of Consumer Research confirms that under specific circumstances, a flaw makes a product more attractive. For example, in one experiment (highlighted in the July 16 issue of Wall Street Journal) the researchers (Danit Ein-Gar, Baba Shiv, Zakary L. Tormala) offered either perfect or slightly flawed chocolate bars to several hundred relaxed (strolling around) or stressed (rushing to exams) college students. I searched out the results and reproduced them in this interaction graph from Design-Expert® software. It seems to me that this surprising effect, presuming it’s real, provides yet another devious opportunity for marketing mavens to make us buy stuff. One thing I might advise is that you never buy anything when you are in a hurry.
Eggs-plosion in the aftermath of Easter
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on April 30, 2011
I’ve become accustomed to hard-boiling an egg for my breakfast so I was pleased to see a surplus of Easter eggs after celebrating this holiday last Sunday. My dexterity for shelling eggs is not a-pealing (ha ha) so I decided to try an eggs-periment: Microwave an Easter egg just long enough to heat it up and loosen it up for eggs-traction. If I’d have quit after my first try of 15 seconds, I may’ve succeeded. But the egg just didn’t feel hot enough so I added more time. Kapow! The eggs-plosion left nothing more than a millimeter of shell intact. The uniformity of organic matter throughout the inner surface of the microwave oven was very interesting, I think – quite impressive.
Although I consider this to be a very successful experiment, it’s one that I don’t feel needs to be replicated. My colleagues at Stat-Ease have provided a number of suggestions for another eggs-periment such as boiling the Easter eggs in vinegar or baking them. This creates a looser shell, they say.
Feel free to provide other ideas, but keep in mind that disaster seems to lurk behind me whenever I try an experiment. My failures tend to be quite spectacular. But, on the other hand, that’s what makes experimentation so eggs-citing!
“Welcome, Body Mass seeker”
Posted by mark in Uncategorized, Wellness on February 27, 2011
This is the greeting from Steve Halls, MD, at his web weight-calculator. After a fair amount of searching on the internet, I found this site on body-mass the easiest to use and informative. However, I cannot speak on its accuracy. I will only admit that it provided far less scary news (and realistic, I feel) about my own weight than other websites giving advice on this vital subject.
According to the “updated hall.md v2” standards, I am “marginally overweight” at the 53rd percentile of other American males at my age and height. As we like to say in Minnesota, this could be worse, so it’s not so bad.
Discussing what should be the “ideal” weight would take up a great deal of time and energy: Never mind that. What I want to do is focus on monitoring weight. For example, I just completed the pictured outlier-detecting run-chart* on my 20 weighings** thus far this year. Notice that none of the results fall outside of the 95 percent confidence limits.
Even so, after I penciled in my number for the highlighted point, my wife hassled me a bit about going overweight when she saw . I predicted that she would see a regression to the mean, which didn’t impress her one bit. Nevertheless, the value of being patient by charting data over a period of time can be seen in this instance – it vindicates me not reacting to one result.
Coincidentally, our contract trainer Doug Hubbell came to Minneapolis for our new Advanced Formulations workshop. He is the author of a handbook for managers seeking quality improvement (Managing for Profits – to be published soon). Doug is a plain-talking straight-shooter who rifles in on what’s needed to stop chronic manufacturing waste. Charting is a powerful part of his arsenal of quality tools. His reaction to me mentioning my monitoring of weight was “I hope you do not expect this chart to help you lose pounds.” Naturally I wouldn’t admit to that, but, honestly, it did cross my (hopeful!) mind. However, I am mainly just trying to track a very gradual increase of about 1 pound per year since my high-school graduation, when I was in the best shape of my life.
The battle against the bulge continues…
*Using Design-Expert® software’s diagnostics tools. I focused on a chart that deletes each point before calculating its deviation in terms of standard deviation, which makes it more sensitive to statistical outliers. For details, see this Wikipedia entry on Studentized residual (it explains internal and external methods).
**Done with a new bathroom scale that I really like – this Precision Digital model by EatSmart.
Favorite posts from three rings in the 2010 carnival of management blogs
Posted by mark in Uncategorized on January 2, 2011
For this year’s Annual Management Improvement Blog Carnival, hosted by John Hunter,* I am picking the best posts from three blogs:
- Seth Godin’s Blog (this fellow is a real character — very stimulating!)
- Lean is Good (focus on statistical guru W. Edwards Deming appeals to me)
- Flowing Data (theme is “visualization and statistics”: graphs and numbers — what a wonderful combo!)
See us hosts and the blogs we’ve chosen to review at this site coordinated by John.
Seth Godin has much to offer for entrepreneurs and professional workers trying to contend with this increasingly high-tech world. This past year Godin published the very timely book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? . The 2010 blog from Seth Grodin that stands out for me is:
- The Levy flight, which provides the mathematical-underpinning for foraging behavior by animals and humans – seeking sustenance in the form of food and information; respectively. Sharks hunt by this random method punctuated by long forays in a particular direction as reported here by Discovery News. Browsers of internet presumably behave in a similar manner – occasionally delving deeply into a given website. Knowing this, model-builders can provide more accurate simulations of consumer behavior. Grodin is astute to recognize this.
My pick from last year’s Lean is Good blog is this one written by Bryan Zeigler:
- Goalpost Quality – Taguchi Losses and SPC provides a simple, but compelling vision for improving quality – think of your specification range as “V” – not a goal post. From my years working on manufacturing improvement, I can attest to the corrosive nature of settling for output that squeaks by the customer requirements.
Of the three blogs featured here, my favorite by far is Flowing Data, written by UCLA Statistics graduate student Nathan Yau. The charts it presents can be truly amazing, such as this one that details the extremely-fascinating 2010 movie Inception. However, here’s my favorite chart presented by Flowing Data this past year:
- Where Bars Trump Grocery Stores highlights Wisconsin as the place to party hearty. Being just over the border in a State that’s bonkers against beer,** I say thank goodness for more liberality about liquor. The graphic tells the story.
That’s it for this year’s best of the Carnival of management blogs that I sampled. Take a Levy Flight for yourself and see if you can hunt out one that strikes your fancy.
*For background on John Hunter and his Carnival, see this post from last year
** See this blog by Andrew Zimmern about Stupid Beer Laws in Minnesota