Tonight the NCAA filled out their 65-team* bracket for their annual Division I basketball championship. The quality of basketball will no doubt be better than ever, at least since 1995 when Kevin Garnett broke barriers by jumping directly from high school to the Minnesota Timberwolves. That really provides no excuse though for what Larry Wright, and adjunct professor of statistics at Columbia, says is a “mind boggling” lack of improvement in the rate at which college players make free throws. In this article by the New York Times, John Branch reports that in 1965 NCAA teams shot 69 percent. This year they cashed in from the 15 foot charity stripe at a rate of only 68.8 percent.

Some athletic endeavors leap ahead due to an innovation in technique, such as the Fosbury Flop in high jumping or skating on cross country skis. I wonder why more players don’t throw up free throws underhanded like Rick Barry did as depicted by this NBA website on The Art of the Free Throw. His 90 percent rate set the NBA bar when he retired.

I saw an interesting shooting variation at the halftime of a Timberwolves game a few weeks ago. They gave a fan one shot from half court to win a million dollars. The contestant was an older fellow who seemingly had no chance throw a basketball that far. However, he succeeded on distance by flinging it backward over his head, an approach used by this more accurate fan who won a car by sinking the 47-foot shot shown here.

It would be interesting to experiment with an accomplished basketball player to see how their shooting percentage would vary facing forward versus backward from the free-throw line. Surely the success rate would fall precipitously.** Actually, that might make things a lot more interesting – even the seemingly static 69 percent rate is too boringly accurate.

*One aspect of this “March Madness” is that it commences with a “play-in” game that makes one team the absolute loser!

**An exception might be 41 percent free thrower Ben Wallace seen missing the iron completely in this video . He should do the same as the fans watching him at the line — don’t look.

My son Hank, ‘blogmeister’ of StatsMadeEasy, just forwarded me this cartoon from Randall Munroe’s blog xkcd. It dovetails nicely with my presentation to the ASQ Lean Six Sigma Conference this week titled “Friend or Foe? How to Use Graphical Diagnostics for Scoping Out Discrepant Data.”*

As I am wont to do, I started my talk with a humorous anecdote on the topic. This is a story on seeking something out using visual clues. It’s a matter of being on guard for something unusual like Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan but being a Minnesotan my thinking differs a bit on what’s distinctive.

“A fellow borrowed a neighbor’s fishing car** to sneak in some last-minute anniversary gift shopping at Mall of America (MOA) without his wife knowing. After wandering the vast hallways of MOA for a long period of time, he found just the thing. However, by then he’d forgotten where the car was and even what it looked like. All he could think of to tell the security staff was that the front right tire did not have a hub cap. After a thorough search the car was located. However, it would have been easier for the MOA staff if the fellow had thought to mention that the car had a red canoe strapped to the roof! “

*For the basis of my talk, see this manuscript.
**Fyi Minnesotans generally keep two spare automobiles — a ‘winter beater’ that stands up to all the snow and road slop, plus an old ‘fishing car’ that can be kept at the ready with rods and all (and allowed to get stinky with fish and bait).

“Armed with a bevy of State testing data” our local school district’s Superintendent dispelled the notion that Minnesota charter schools provide a superior education. Charter schools are publicly funded, but they are run by independent boards. Their enrollment has doubled in the last 5 years, thus inciting battles of statistics like the one presented by the Superintendent this week. His main point was that published assessments do not account for the impact of special education, “at-risk” and other students that do not attend the particular charter school in our area. (To be fair to the ideal of charter schools, some actually provide for students with particular needs that would otherwise get lost in the shuffle.)

In the interest of helping the general public sort out the endless conflict of statistics by opposing groups like this, the Union College Academy for Lifelong Learning (UCALL) in Schenectady, New York invited an illustrious faculty, including Gerald Hahn – formerly statistician emeritus from General Electric, to teach a course “Numbers in Life.” This 10 hour presentation was really all about statistical literacy, but ironically the course coordinator advised that the word “statistics” in the course title would be a turn-off. That tells it all: How can people be educated a on a subject that must not be named (like the evildoer in Harry Potter)?

To the everlasting credit of Hahn and his fellow teachers, they gave “Numbers in Everyday Life” the old college try. Here are some of the course take-aways published in the February AmStat News (the parenthetical comments are my own):
— Always ask who is taking/reporting the numbers and how they obtained.
— Be wary of advocate’s numbers (such as a glowing report on a drug study sponsored by the manufacturer).
— Remember that the news media seek surprising numbers.
— Appreciate limitations of observational studies and differentiate correlation from causation.
— Controlled experimentation (the forte of my company Stat-Ease) is the gold standard.

By the way, you’d best be wary of how I cherry-picked these take-aways to support the cause for design of experiments. Actually, this was one of the take-aways that I conveniently omitted (“cherry-picking”). 😉 See the entire AmStat story posted via the YUDU epublishing initiative.

“One of the greatest contributions of statistical thinking… is design of experiments.” – Gerald Hahn

I forget how I first heard about the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve (it escapes me!) but it describes very well what I’ve observed when teaching statistics – a very rapid loss of knowledge – possibly as fast as 50 percent per day. However, it’s been found that by repeated review and practice, details can be remembered for a much longer period of time. That’s why hands-on workshops can be so effective, as opposed to an academic lecture.

For example, I doubt that by noon I’d have been capable of recalling half of what I learned from an 8 AM organic chemistry lecture back in college. Ebbinghaus’s original forgetting curve probably fit my inability to remember chemical formulas. To make matters worse, my notes trailed off every few lines as I nodded off from all the boring details. That was not good, because the chem prof worked completely by lecture – no reference text. There was no chance of getting a ‘re-do’ on any of the presentations – no re-course so to speak (pun intended). Thus my performance on the final exam left much to be desired (at least I passed).

The lesson here is that reviews can be vital for remembering – repetition is the key to recall. Based on recall experiments (for example, the little know fact that Rudyard Kipling invented snow golf), researchers recently discovered the optimal intervals for repeating study sessions. This depends on how long a person wants to remember things. College students hoping to remember information just long enough for the semester-ending final should space study sessions every week apart may be ideal. However, to recall the details a year later a spacing of some months may be far better.

“To put it simply, if you want to know the optimal distribution of your study time, you need to decide how long you wish to remember something.”
— From Spacing Effects in Learning by Nicholas J. Cepeda, Edward Vul, Doug Rohrer, John T. Wixted, and Harold Pashler

If you are determined to remember stuff, consider investing $35 in a flash-card program called FullRecall that promises to “help you memorize the knowledge for lifelong periods with the minimum time investment.” Its neural network converges on the user’s forgetting curve to schedule reviews just in time –i.e., when one gets close to forgetting a detail they hoped to remember.

PS. When I mentioned this blog on memory to my son, he recalled that a fellow named Pimsleur developed a graduated-interval recall system that’s now used for learning languages. In a 1967 publication titled A Memory Schedule, this Ohio State University professor observed that “the process of forgetting begins at once and proceeds very rapidly. If the student is reminded of the word before he has completely forgotten it, his chances of remembering will increase. After each such recall, it will take him longer and longer to forget the word again. Thus, a small number of recalls, if properly spaced, can bring about retention over a long period.”

PPS. By reading the PS above, you just added some length to your recall of how repetition enhances memory. Good for you!

In July of 2007 The New York Times reported an amazing study on obesity by Harvard Medical School. Based on a statistical analysis of a large social network – over twelve thousand people followed for over thirty years, it concluded that a person’s chances of becoming obese nearly tripled when a close friend got fat (or to put it more nicely: “gravity challenged”). Apparently this effect works at a distance, thus a parent like me who just sent a child off to college can anticipate a pile of pounds from the dreaded “freshman fifteen.” Hey – that’s just not fair for one who’s already fighting a battle of the bulge! Also, I worry about getting connected up to wide-bodied people via LinkedIn and Facebook. I’ve noticed that whenever I start surfing these nets I start munching on Twinkies and other bad foodstuffs. This is not good!

Meanwhile, this bulletin from Yale University (might there be a rivalry between this school and Harvard?) counters with a Study [that] Contradicts Earlier Reports That Some Health Issues Are ‘Contagious’ Among Friends. Using similar statistical techniques as the one done on obesity in social networks the Yale researchers discovered that an individual’s height increased by 20 percent of a close friend’s tallness. Therefore I conclude that by spending equal time emailing my beanpole friend and another buddy who inherited a more roomy body type then things will balance out weight-wise on a per height basis.

Now that’s how you can put stats to work with just a little creativity.

I presented a world-wide webinar Wednesday on “An Introduction to Mixture Design for Optimal Formulations” (posted with prior Stat-Ease webinars). As an ice breaker I described the view from my desk of downtown Minneapolis cloaked in a fog of frozen water crystals. One of the participants, our new value-added reseller Peter Trogos of Boston Software Group, expressed curiosity as to how Minnesotans can stand living in our Nation’s icebox. It is hard to explain, but here’s an example of what works for me — embracing the elements.

I dressed up for a walk yesterday and my wife Karen got very alarmed. She misread our outdoor digital thermometer as -13 degrees, but I could see it was only -1.3 degrees. The placement of a decimal makes all the difference!

For my fortitude in walking no matter what the elements (like the proverbial postman) I was rewarded with this vista of the soccer field adjoining a nearby preschool. It was fun to think of upcoming days in Spring when it will be filled with energetic kids!

However, I enjoy the solitude of this frozen season, when only the conifers and hardy birds (and manic Minnesotans) remain active.

“It was January and cold in Minnesota, which was redundant.”

— Garrison Keillor as Guy Noir in the 1/24/09 radio broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion

I’ve just completed my first year of high-deductible medical insurance coupled with a health savings account (HSA). I like this relatively new option very much. However, it requires yet another form to be submitted to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS 8889). I printed this out yesterday. It seemed complete, but then one last page spit out with only this paperwork reduction notice — nothing else on either side. Have you ever felt like crying and laughing at the same time? Anyways, I feel better now after processing this piece of paper with the IRS paperwork reduction notice. You can see where I put stuff like this — a machine that makes a very satisfactory grinding noise, which saves me gnashing my teeth.

International (aka “Frostbite”) Falls reported a record low of 42 below Fahrenheit the other day. Would statisticians deem this an outlier? I think not – just another notch on the low end of the normal curve of temperature in this northern Minnesota city.

On the other hand, this morning I came across this pictured vehicle from Florida. That is much more unusual in the dead of Minnesota winter. You may not resolve the license plate in the photo, but here are a couple of clues that the driver is not a Minnesotan:
— They did not brush off the snow from the rear window – only ran the wipers.
— They are tailgating on the exit ramp to Interstate 694 on a day of extreme cold when black ice* makes the roads extremely slippery.

Given these unsafe practices, I predict that this outlying Floridian car will soon be off the roads and we will be back to our normal distribution of Minnesotan and Wisconsites (don’t get me going on them!).

PS. Here’s a little poem that just came through in an email circulating around these parts (author unknown):

The weather here is wonderful
So I guess I’ll hang around
I could never leave Minnesota
‘Cause I’m frozen to the ground!

*If you do not know about black ice, consider yourself fortunate. It’s a phenomenon that occurs only in below-zero cold: The water resulting from the internal combustion engine freezes when the exhaust hits the road. This ice cannot be seen – hence the designation of it being “black.”

Today’s Wall Street Journal article on Doing Math to Find the Good Jobs reports that the top three professions are mathematician, actuary and statistician! The perpetrator of this outrageous claim is Les Krantz, author of the “Jobs Rated Almanac.” You can infer what floats his boat by comparing these three ivory tower jobs to the down and dirty ones he rated as the absolute worst: lumberjack, dairy farmer and taxi driver.

So it seems that this caps the revenge of the nerds. However, I am not sure what to conclude from a school chum who went on to become an actuary, made a mint in investments on the side and then retired early to become a dairy farmer. I suspect that many math mavens secretly desire being outdoors chopping trees rather than crunching numbers in an office.

Nevertheless, maybe it’s best for those of us that can do the calculations to resist acting upon our daydreaming during the deadly dull parts. For example, when I rev up my little chain saw things often get quickly out of control, such as the time I took it up a ladder to cut off a branch and while leaning at a particularly dangerous angle got stung viciously by a wickedly large wasp. At times like this one must be thankful for a job involving numbers that can be done despite being temporarily incapacitated.