That’s what meteorologist Edward Lorenz postulated in his 1972 paper on predictability of weather. Lorenz, who died last week at the age of 90, used this example to illustrate his “chaos theory,” which linked small changes in a system to large, unforeseen consequences. For more background on the life and accomplishments of the 1991 Kyoto prize winner for earth and planetary sciences, see this article by Thomas Maugh.

I am certain I heard of chaos theory well before the movie Jurassic Park, but who can forget the pessimistic views the scientific character Doctor Ian Malcolm, who cited Lorenz’s thories to predict the subsequent catastrophe of dinosauric proportions. This is a recurring theme of Jurassic Park author, Michael Crichton: Any complex system will inevitably break down due to the natural state of disorder, or entropy.

I fear that I shall always remain unclear on distinctions a fine as this – chaos vs entropy. Perhaps things may come into focus after I read this article on “Chaos, Complexity, and Entropy”— a physics talk for non-physicists by Michel Baranger of the Center for Theoretical Physics, Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Department of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It seems to me that Lorenz in his chaos theory considered Earth’s meteorology as a system that often becomes so tightly wound that it comes right to the brink of breaking down — so close that the tiniest disturbance, such as that caused by a benign Brazilian butterfly, can create a terrible upset. Being a chemical engineer, what comes to mind for me is a supersaturated solution of a salt that solidifies around the tiniest seed.

I only hope that I do not get twisted up in Earth’s chaotic meteorology — a very real possibility here at the northern end of the USA’s tornado alley. Maybe a minnow in the Amazon is wiggling a fin at this very moment! I’d better bunker down in the basement…

I collected three articles for my blog this week that all involve the decision to go left or right.

Last Sunday’s Parade magazine reported that Tom Dowdy, an engineer for UPS delivery, estimates a savings of 3 million gallons of gas per year by biasing delivery routes to right, rather than left, turns. The reduction in idling time reduced UPS truck emissions by 32,000 metric tons – the equivalent air pollution of 5300 cars.

This week’s “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade features an observation by Bob English of Lakeland, Florida, who avoided a head on collision thanks to time seemingly slowing down. Marilyn calls this phenomenon “extreme concentration” – a positive reaction to incredible stress. This happened to me some years ago. On a peaceful weekend morning with ideal driving conditions I took my daughter and niece up the Saint Croix Valley for a visit with my mother. Halfway there the one car we encountered on the 15 mile country route veered into directly at us. To me it felt like time stood still as I realized that we’d hit head on in just a second. I remember seeing that I had only a narrow shoulder on the right and realizing that we’d roll if I went any further that direction. Then I clearly recall looking beyond the oncoming driver, who must have dozed off on this sunny morning. There were no other cars coming down the road. I then decided to go around to the left of the opposing automobile – a very radical move. What I did not consider was the other driver waking up and moving out of my lane back to the correct side of the road. I made the move successfully in any case. However, as I learned later from a defensive driving course, the correct maneuver is to go right not matter what – even it means you will crash into a ditch – better that then a head on collision.

The last of the three articles I collected this week is by Shankar Vedantam of the Washington Post. He discusses the natural “action bias” of people who would do best by doing nothing. This causes investors to hold stocks as they peak and sell them after a big fall in price – not an optimal strategy! In another example of action bias, economist Ofer Axar compiled statistics on soccer goalies defending a penalty kick. He concluded that they would stop the most goals by standing still. However, over 90 percent of kicks were defended by diving left or right.

So, the next time you feel pressured into a decision one way or the other, consider the option of not doing anything just yet. However, if something bad will happen for sure by sitting still, I hope that you will benefit from a spell of extreme concentration and not the other typical reaction of people under extreme stress – a paralyzing ‘freeze.’

One year ago, Bill Hathaway, founder of Six Sigma web-based trainer MoreSteam.com, announced their development of a university campus in Second Life – a 3D virtual world where users can socialize, connect and create using voice and text chat. That’s pretty cool, but what intrigued me was the picture shown here that accompanied Bill’s e-mail. It depicts an avatar-hurling catapult called the Avapult.™ (Avatars are the in-world characters assumed by the participants, for example, I am known in Second Life as “Stat Mathy.” My moniker betrays my interests!)

It took me a while to work through some issues related to my Vista operating system, but the day came not long ago when I typed in “moresteam” and teleported to the island home of the Avapult. I watched as Bill’s avatar donned a Viking helmet (in homage to me being a Minnesota football fan), climbed on to this fearsome-looking engine of destruction and flung himself virtually over the cliff. Unfortunately, Bill’s character missed the target but came close enough to become ignited. The virtual-human missile, easily tracked by its trail of smoke, then plunged into a swamp, where it literally (figuratively?) found itself up to its behind with an alligator.

So, in addition to the normal engineering challenge of determining which Avapult factors are significant, students of MoreSteam.com’s virtual university will face real (?) world stressors that make it imperative to find the best combination of settings quickly. That underscores the need for multifactor design of experiments (DOE) such as those detailed in DOE Simplified, 2nd Edition, used as a reference for MoreSteam.com web-based Six Sigma training. As Bill says, “this will be help teams separated by distance to build rapport among members, especially in advance of a blended learning classroom session.”

Tuesday I travel to Columbus for my twice-a-year teach at Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University, who team up with MoreSteam.com for blended training on Six Sigma aimed at executives seeking Black Belt (BB) status. This Spring’s bunch of BBs have been invited to take a shot at the Avapult. I will be interested to hear how this goes. The proof for me will be seen in how well the teams do at my semi-annual paper helicopter fly-off. In the past, when confronted with the task of putting DOE tools to task, some of my students, especially those who work in non-technical areas like personnel, seemed very unclear on the concepts. I feel sure that work on the Avapult will be very useful for education on design and analysis of experiments.

My son Hank, who assisted me in a trebuchet response surface method (RSM) experiment that I wrote up in RSM Simplified, is way ahead of me on the virtual world. He traveled to MoreSteam island on Second Life the other day and scoped out their Avapult. I volunteer my alter ego Stat Mathy as fodder for Hank’s designed experiments. However, I plan to first purchase chain-mail shorts as discouragement against the gator!

While cleaning out files this week, I found my long-forgotten notes from “Design of Experiments for Discovery, Improvement and Robustness” co-presented by DOE guru George Box in March of 1996 – over a dozen years ago. The first thing I noticed was the photo roster showing how huge my spectacles and others were in that era.* The ones I have now are so narrow I cannot see, but at least they are fashionable! (There is an added factor: In 1996 I did not need progressively-lensed bifocals, although they would have benefited from the goggly glasses of that time.)

However, even more enjoyable than the chuckle over obsolete fashions were Box’s timeless anecdotes, which I recorded religiously. For example, Professor Box mentioned how his father would comment on trivial differences: “A blind man would be glad to see it.” This drove home a point Box wanted to make on how being statistically significant did not necessarily lead to anything of practical importance. In fact, while working as a statistician at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), he banned the use of p-values by their industrial experimenters! (Box advocated the use of confidence intervals, instead.)

In my webinar last month on “10 Ways to Mess Up an Experiment & 8 Ways to Clean it Up”. I made this point (statistical significance versus practical importance) in a slide similar to that shown here. It accomplishes little to achieve a low p value for a change that is so small that it produces nothing of any practical importance. In today’s age of robotic experimentation this happens more-and-more often due to the large number of runs — in the hundreds or even thousands. On the other hand, plenty of experiments are still done in situations where runs are dear and not many can be performed. Then a big difference may be seen that fails the pre-ordained threshold level for p. In that case it often pays to investigate further.

“Even if the probability was 6% of not finding a crock of gold behind the next tree, wouldn’t you go and look?”

— Quote from “An appendix featuring quaquaversal quotes … that embellish key concepts and enliven the learning process” presented by George E. P. Box, J. Stuart Hunter, and the late William G. Hunter in the second edition of the classic book Statistics for Experimenters: Design, Innovation and Discovery.

*You have to see this web site, at least the goofy glasses shown on the rotating eye-catcher, on spectacles through the ages.

This is the motto of those fearless few, such as successful surgeons, who forge ahead with never a look back. As they progress, by-standers bullets just bounce off these never-doubters impervious armor. Assuming it’s true that such confidence (if not outright arrogance) is not misplaced, this a highly desirable trait for doctors, lawyers and other professionals (such as statistical consultants) that others rely upon for good advice on critical matters. Umpires and referees mustn’t ever waver in their calls, but as all fans would doubtless agree, bad judgments are made every game, especially against their home team. Also, consider the current race for the American Presidency – do you hear any candidates saying that they doubt the country can ever be put back on the proper path (right or left, depending on party)?

Trouble comes when an expert in a specific area cannot acknowledge incompetence in other endeavors. If you ever run into such a maddening individual who dismisses your greater experience in an area of primary interest, consider this premise of neurologist Robert A. Burton: Certainty arises out of involuntary brain mechanisms that function independently of reason, which I paraphrased from this author’s web page for the newly-published book On Being Certain.

Obviously ignorance is bliss in my case, because I am not the least bit interested in reading Burton’s book – it will undermine my confidence in the few things I really feel certain about. Ever since I saw someone at an American Statistical Association conference wearing a shirt proclaiming that “Statistics Means Never Having to Say You’re Certain” it’s been hard for me to develop 100 percent confidence in anything. To be told that I am manifesting an ephemeral mental state like anger or other emotions when I leave no doubt in pillars of certainty such as ‘2 plus 2 equals 4’ would be too much for me to bear.

Can Burton possibly be right? No way! I doubt it very much.

When warned of winter storms, my wife must pay attention because she teaches preschool, which might be canceled if enough snow falls. The weathercasters like to tell us where their models predict the heaviest bands of precipitation, but often these fall all over the map. The TV meteorologists then say the “the models don’t agree” as a hedge against being blamed for a bad forecast. My standard joke to my spouse, who just wants a simple answer on the amount of snow to be expected, is that of course you cannot get models to provide consistent insights on such complicated natural phenomena – they are far too busy primping themselves for their next photographic shoot! (In my mind I always picture at this point the shallow character Ben Stiller played in the movie Zoolander and his inane arguments with fellow models.)

On a more serious note, it came to my attention (a bit belatedly) that the American Statistical Association (ASA) issued a Statement On Climate Change change several months ago. It included this statement: “The design and analysis of computer experiments [DACE] is an area of statistics that is appropriate for aiding the development and use of climate models. Statistically based experimental designs, not currently used in this field, could be more powerful.” I added the acronym DACE as the shorthand for an approach that seems to be getting more-and-more attention as simulations increasingly complex. The objective of DACE is to produce a transfer or surrogate function that provides an adequate approximation of what the simulation actually predicts. Because these computer programs often are very costly to run, a model of its output can be very valuable for taking short cuts to areas of primary interest by researchers. For example, see this DACE done by Canadian hydrologists studying the Smokey-River watershed in the Edmonton, Alberta area.

I also found a website offering Postdoctoral Opportunities in Statistics at the National Center for Atmospheric Research that includes a number of nuggets for further data mining. The abstract for a project on Estimation of Climate Model Parameters, notes that this work is “a novel implementation of new methodology called ‘Design and Analysis of Computer Experiments’ (DACE)” and that “some computer experiments will always be too expensive to run, so one must be judicious in the experiments that are run.”

In any case, I liked all the colored pictures of contour maps, radar images, hurricanes and tornadoes. It looks compelling enough to distract even a real model from their mirror.

Purdue University researchers revealed earlier this month that the artificial sweetener saccharin caused rats to put on more weight than others fed sugar. Manufacturers of the sugar substitute responded that this study oversimplified cause for obesity, which involve many factors. See this report by Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Denise Gellene for both sides of the story.

I have no idea if this result will extrapolate to humans, but I would not be shocked if it did. As I gain life experience (that is, get older), my skepticism about generally-held, but never tested, assumptions grow stronger. I find myself more and more reluctant to jump on board with what most people come to accept as irrefutable. Thus a counterintuitive result like this, that something thought to reduce weight actual induces it, does not surprise me.

If you find this result to be difficult to swallow (ha ha), think of how hard it must have been to give up the obvious fact of the earth being flat. Famed physicist Stephen Hawking opens his classic book A Brief History of Time with the story (probably apocryphal) of a flat-earth believer who says to a cosmologist that the earth is supported on the back of a tortoise. When asked how this can be supported, she triumphantly declares that it is turtles all the way down.

“The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.”
– George Jean Nathan