Stats Made Easy

Thank goodness for my son Hank (pictured) who knows the ropes of modern information technology (IT). At the suggestion of another IT whiz – my brother Paul – Hank added a new link below the quote on the StatsMadeEasy web page that allow you to Subscribe via Email. Then the latest StatsMadeEasy missive will magically appear in your electronic in-box and possibly provide a “bright spot in a dull day” (as one of my readers kindly complimented me).

For those of you that are more sophisticated on blogs, we offer a mechanism to provide a Site Feed. This is done via Feedburner – a provider purchased by Google for a very large sum – reportedly. If you’re one of the legions like me that are mired in a love-hate relationship with Microsoft and their personal information manager Outlook, you may need this help on how to Add an RSS Feed.

I keep tabs on two blogs — the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog by John Hunter and one by William M. Briggs, Statistician, which offers “All manner of statistical analyses cheerfully undertaken.” These go automatically into separate RSS Feeds folders that I browse when I need a bright spot to break up a dull day. (Caution: Briggs tackles some controversial subjects.)

What’s in for you to convince those funding your research that you are on the right track?

I once wrote a proceeding for a technical talk that featured active sentence structure with my familiar style of writing, in which I strive to write on a personal note (it’s all about “you”). The moderator, a PhD scientist, chastised me for not using passive language and keeping the tone impersonal (no “you” turns of phrasing allowed!). She told me that this was mandatory for a technical publication – in other words, dull my writing down to make it more boring and uninspiring.

“When it comes to writing engaging content, “you” is the most powerful word in the English language.”
— Brian Clark, The Two Most Important Words in Blogging

Similarly, I’ve seen many engineers suck the life out of exciting discoveries. They do this by starting from the most mundane details and then methodically building their case in a “scientific manner.” Such a train of thought derails all but the most tenacious and technically-savvy reader. Granted, this must be done for academic journals, but presentations that go over the top scientifically frequently fall flat in the high-flying world of industrial R&D.

I am reading a book of short stories by a writer who captured the spirit of living on the edge – Jack London. Although he is best known for stories of Alaskan adventure, such as “The Call of the Wild,” London also wrote of the rough-and-tumble world of the newspaper business in the early 1900’s – a time when William Randolph Hearst ruled the roost with his sensational journalism. I came across this good advice for aspiring writers by a character in Jack London’s short story “Amateur Night” (1903):

“Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize upon things salient, eliminate the rest. … Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end.”

Does this not tell what you need to do to put some pizzazz in your presentations? Go for it!

I heard this fellow Colin A. Ross interviewed on radio last week. He patented a switch that, with a bit of training, can be activated by eye via a beam of energy. For example, let’s say you have your iPod set up to be an “eye” Ipod. Then you could just look at it to start up the music!

Here are some of the assertions I heard over the airwaves from Ross:
– eye beams explain how one feels a person staring at them
– via survival of the fittest, animals such as gazelles can sense when predators like lions focus on them
– military snipers learn not to look too intensely at their targets because they can get spooked
– eye beams are not energetic enough to cause any harm — they are not like lasers
– a person can lock on to an eye beam aimed at them — for example, while hunting for rabbits, Ross felt one staring at him and turned around to shoot it without having to search it out (he ate the rabbit for dinner that night).

Although this last assertion I heard from Ross goes a bit over the top, he sounds very scientific – a reflection of impressive credentials in psychiatry. So I asked my sister, an ophthalmologist who specializes in laser eye surgery, whether she considers Ross’s claim to be credible. Here’s her comments: “I have never heard of him, but I found this report describing his eyebeam of energy on the web. Eye beams are not beyond theoretic possibility but I have never ever heard of anything like this (one would think with the opthamology literature I routinely survey that I would have come across some mention of energy emissions). I think it more likely that Dr. Ross has exceptional hearing, quick reflexes, and good spatial sense which allowed him to shoot and subsequently eat the rabbit, for example. Light is definitely reflected from the eye (hence the red-eye camera effect). However, it seems hard to imagine that even this energy would amount to much after a short distance.”

Dr. Ross hopes to be tested by scientific skeptic and former magician James Randi to achieve his One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. For more details, see this press release put out by the Colin A. Ross Institute based in Richardson, Texas.

I am keeping my eyes open for definitive proof of eye-beams. Meanwhile I am trying to perfect a penetrating stare, while at the same time watching my back for apprentices of Ross who have mastered the ability to generate extramissions out of their eyeballs. However, I think that, after withstanding almost 34 years of looks from my rightly-irate wife, nothing short of a LaserCat can penetrate my battle-hardened skin.

My assistant Karen, knowing that I am fond of chemicals (being an engineer in this specialty), sent me the link to The University of Nottingham’s periodic table of videos. If you are a pyromaniac, check out their flick on phosphorus. I learned that an average person processes 70 kilos of phosphorous — an essential element for human life. That makes me wonder if the stories of people spontaneously combusting could be true!

I enjoyed the video on arsenic — an element I worked with on my first job after graduating in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota. My supervisor handed me several bottles of varying forms of arsenic and suggested that I dope them into a quantity of shale oil. My mission was to experiment on adding various metals that might tie up the arsenic in the solid ash. This toxic element occurs naturally in shale oil, which, when burned, creates an oxide that sublimates on nearby greenery. For example, the rabbits eating outside the shale-oil power plant might go cotton-tail up after enjoying their salad. I had no idea how to construct a lab-scale combustion chamber so I simply poured some oil into a ceramic ‘canoe’, added a pinch of arsenic, put the canoe into a pyrex cylinder and heated it up with tube furnace. Sometimes the oil would vaporize and explode — shotting the stopper around the lab like a rubber bullet. Thus I took the precaution of standing in the hall, which made some colleagues wonder what I was doing all day.

My supervisor took a one month vacation while I completed this introductory project as a new engineer. He looked surprised to see me upon his return.

One thing I learned about arsenic from the video guy with the crazy hair — research professor Martyn Poliakoff of the University of Nottingham — was that in the Victorian age it was an essential element for the green dye used in wallpaper. Unfortunately, when water seeped into the walls, the mold converted the arsenic to a volatile form that killed a number of homeowners. I’d have thought the arsenic would have killed the mold, but I suppose that would be too convenient.

Out of the land of the blue-sky waters, my daughter Carrie called me collect last week from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area wilderness region in the far north of Minnesota. The group of Girls Scouts led by her and another counselor were forced back to the start of their trek by a bear who took all their food. Evidently this particular creature learned via trial and error experimentation that by pulling on the rope it collect a tasty cache of treats. In any case, it did not scare when Carrie yelled and brandished a rain pancho. When the bear advanced menacingly – growling with teeth bared, the Girl Scouts decided they really did not want their food!

Apparently mid-summer is not as bountiful for bears as the spring or fall (when berries abound). Carrie told me that the bear pulled so hard on the nylon rope that it melted the surface from the friction! A friend of mine who grew up in Duluth told me that a bear in their area got so good at collecting food from campers that it collected up dozens of packs that were eventually discovered in an astonishingly large discard pile out in the woods.

Perhaps this unbearably bad behavior could be extinguished by a dousing like that experienced by the monkeys noted in my blog of July 09, 2006. However, the bear in the picture would probably enjoy the option of a shower over a bath.

My hometown Major League baseball team, the Minnesota Twins, typically play one weekday game every home stand. They do this to entice commuters in the area to knock off early for a
‘meeting’ at the ballpark.

I try to catch every game by some means — in person (I split season tickets with my sister), on the radio or via television. However, these matinee games proved too challenging to track while working — even the radio created too much disruption. However, I recently discovered the internet-based MLB GameCast, which provides live updates and a myriad of stats. It’s accessed via ESPN Scoreboard during any given baseball game. I leave it open for spot checking while I’m doing work on my computer — mainly to catch up via the helpful status report that’s continually updated. However, I get a great charge out of seeing the live updates pitch by pitch. It even shows the directional flight of batted balls!

Whatever loss of time MLB Gamecast creates is more than made up by the stimulation it provides to my afternoon productivity. That’s my hypothesis and I am sticking to it just as tight as my man Joe Mauer does to a baseball when an enemy player barrels into home plate!

PS. Another heads-up: I captured the screenshot via the handy Snipping Tool that came with my Windows Vista. If you use this operating system, look for the utility in your Accessory folder. It may not be there. In that case, go to your Start menu, click Programs and look at the “Turn Windows features on or off” list. Turn on the Tablet PC Optional Components. (The Snipping Tool was originally developed by Microsoft for the Tablet PC.)

“Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.” — Herbert Hoover

75 years ago, legal beer – albeit only 3.2% alcohol, returned to the U.S. and provided a spark of hope for a country in a depression – this is the subtitle of a recent story by the LA Times by Maureen Ogle on “The day the beer flowed again”. This ended a hugely unsuccessful experiment on temperance that lasted over a dozen years beginning in 1920. I still remember a home brew recipe from this era, yellowed and curled, that my grandfather had tacked up above his workbench – it was labeled “Bill’s Beer.” I’ll bet it tasted good on a dry decade!

My interest in 3.2 beer was piqued by the author of Land of Amber Waters, Doug Hoverson, who spoke last weekend at gathering sponsored by our county’s historical society. Before Prohibition* the alcohol level in beer was 2.75% but on April 7, 1933 it went back on the market with a higher amount of 3.2% that was considered “chemically necessary to make a better beer.” Hoverson said that two US Congressmen experimented on how much they needed to feel so intoxicated that they could no longer function properly in their work. [Insert your joke here.]

This experiment by Prohibition-busting USA lawmakers may have benefitted from a more scientific “titration” to develop a dose-response curve as illustrated by this white paper from the University of British Columbia. I’d always thought of titration as something a chemist did, for example to precisely determine pH of a solution. However, my colleague Pat Whitcomb showed me how this concept can be applied in a very sophisticated statistical approach for dose response curves. This is presented in a new workshop he developed called Designed Experiments for Life Sciences — a great introduction to powerful tools of value to scientists, engineers, and technical professionals working in the pharmaceutical, biomedical technology and biomedical device fields, as well as organizations and institutions that devote the majority of their efforts to research, development, technology transfer, or commercialization of life enhancing products.

* According to the USA’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) detailing of 3.2% beer, the 18th Amendment, which outlawed intoxicating liquors, but made no reference to alcohol content. However, the Volstead Act, named after a Representative from Minnesota (land of intemperate emigrated Scandinavians) set the legal alcohol limit at one-half of 1 percent. Thus the only “beer” that could be sold legally in the United States during Prohibition (1920-1933) was “near beer”(now known as “low point beer”) – a “wishy-washy, thin, ill-tasting, discouraging sort of slop that it might have been dreamed up by a Puritan Machiavelli with the intent of disgusting drinkers with genuine beer forever,” according to food critic Waverly Root.