Evidence Soup

Which professions provide the most evidence-free predictions?

Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. The folks at Cracked.com are at it again with a hilarious, and impressively evidence-based, post: This one is The 6 Most Statistically Full of Shit Professions. Sure, it would be easy to come up with more than six, but they've limited their picks to these: Stock market analysts, wine tasters, art critics, criminal profilers, weather forecasters, and sportswriters. [BTW, I haven't posted in awhile (and some Evidence Soup readers even noticed!). I was sick for a few weeks - many thanks to those who wrote in with well wishes.]

Christina H. at Cracked.com doesn't just take shots at people who make dubious predictions and pronouncements for a living: She provides evidence to back up her claims, and does it with tremendous humor. For example, in a discussion of wine tasting, she says:

"Sure, Joe Consumer actually likes cheaper wines better, but that's because Joe Consumer is a stupid Philistine. The experts can tell the difference between a 2006 and 2007 Stag's Leap Cabernet Sauvignon in their sleep because everyone knows 2006 was a pedestrian year for Napa Valley reds. Hell, they are so good they can tell the difference between two bottles of the same wine. In one experiment, wine experts were given two bottles of the same wine, only one was labeled a 'vin de table' (France's version of 'Night Train') and one was labeled a 'grand cru' (top-rated vineyard since 1855)."

As you've probably guessed, the experts rated the grand cru much more favorably. "Not only were their tasting skills put to shame, it didn't even occur to them that nobody buys a $40-plus bottle of wine for a university experiment." The story references hands-on evidence provided in the book The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind Tastings. And to her credit, Christina H also links to authoritative evidence and research findings, in this case results cited in the New Yorker:

"Studies suggest that the experience of smelling and tasting wine is extremely susceptible to interference from the cognitive parts of the brain. Several years ago, Frédéric Brochet, a Ph.D. student in oenology at the University of Bordeaux, did a study in which he served fifty-seven participants a midrange red Bordeaux from a bottle with a label indicating that it was a modest vin de table. A week later, he served the same wine to the same subjects but this time poured from a bottle indicating that the wine was a grand cru. Whereas the tasters found the wine from the first bottle 'simple,' 'unbalanced,' and 'weak,' they found the wine from the second 'complex,' 'balanced,' and 'full.' Brochet argues that our 'perceptive expectation' arising from the label often governs our experience of a wine, overriding our actual sensory response to whatever is in the bottle."

On that happy note, I'm going to enjoy a glass of the $12 Spanish vino tinto I bought the other day.

Evidence-based trash talk.

Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. Apparently it's not that easy being a good trash talker on the football field, or anywhere else for that matter. It takes research, preparation, and focus. The New York Times recently profiled Bart Scott of the NFL's New York Jets about his lifelong dedication to creative, high-impact trash talk. Yes, it's humorous, but his advice could benefit anyone presenting evidence to an ornery or unconvinced audience.

As the story goes, he "uses a three-step trash-talk template. He starts with research. He scours ESPN, Google and scouting reports, which include pictures. He wants to understand the opponents he will talk to, understand what angers them, what makes them tick. He looks for police incidents, problems with wives or girlfriends, expanding stomachs, funny faces. To aid in his delivery, Scott watches wrestling videos, or famous trash talkers like Muhammad Ali."

Scott says "I keep ammo on everybody... Because I will never be caught off-guard. No one will outtalk me. Ever." His guide to becoming an expert trash talker includes "Do your research." And "Know your audience. Save your best material for last, and be conscious of whom you are speaking to and what reaction you can get."

When evidence slaps you in the face: Bad predictions.

Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. I often wonder why people make bold, public predictions. Aren't they just asking for folks to gather up some evidence and prove them wrong? The sites WrongTomorrow.com and BusinessWeek.com are doing some of that taunting.

Wrong Tomorrow is a clever site that tracks how well predictions survive the test of time. They monitor when a particular prediction will be testable and then label it right or wrong. Let this be a lesson for all of us next time we start to open our mouths.

Business Week has a good piece, The Worst Predictions About 2009. One that might have seemed safe until very recently is: "Tiger never does anything that would make him look ridiculous," appearing, sadly, in the brand-new January 2010 Golf Digest.

Only because it's Friday. You know celebrity gossip isn't my thing. But while we're on the subject of Golf Digest and TigerGate, I'll mention the new Wall Street Journal story "How Tiger Protected His Image" which claims the golfer agreed to an interview and cover photo in Men's Fitness magazine -- in exchange for the National Enquirer tabloid squelching a story about infidelity. This wasn't recently: It was in 2007. Even though Golf Digest "spent as much as $1 million annually on donations to the Tiger Woods Foundation, printing the charity's annual report and sponsoring many of Mr. Woods's preferred tournaments.... In return, Mr. Woods agreed to contribute monthly articles on golf techniques and limit his appearances in competing publications." (The story appears on page W6 of today's Wall Street Journal print edition.) Adding insult to injury, Woods appears on the cover of the new Golf Digest. Oy.

Fun-with-Evidence Friday: How to explain your research at a party.

It can be difficult to tell people about research without triggering the dreaded MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) effect. Here's a fun t-shirt suggesting ways to explain your research at a party. (If you saw this week's Big Bang Theory episode, you know Sheldon and Leonard could both use one of these.)

Just in time for the holidays! This t-shirt would be especially effective when dancing your PhD, a technique I wrote about in February.

Brought to you by the good folks at AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Info on ordering this t-shirt here.

Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday!

Apophenia: The enemy of evidence-based management?

Finally, we might have a name for the phenomenon we've been combating all this time: apophenia. From Wikipedia: "Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad¹, who defined it as... a 'specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness'." 
¹Brugger, Peter. "From Haunted Brain to Haunted Science: A Cognitive Neuroscience View of Paranormal and Pseudoscientific Thought," Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by J. Houran and R. Lange (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2001). [Note: There's a 2007 edition on amazon.]

The Lostpedia on Wikia (about the TV show Lost), describes apophenia as the "perception of patterns, or connections, where in fact none exist. Most psychologists agree that this condition exists in everyone, to some degree; it is a bias of the human mind." They refer to the Wikipedia page.

Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. So is it time for a smackdown between EBEs (Evidence-Based Enthusiasts) and Apophenites?

Oops, not so fast. Not everyone uses this term pejoratively: A social media researcher named Danah Boyd describes apophenia as "making connections where none previously existed" - well, that sounds okay... isn't that what research, innovation, and discovery are all about? Boyd also has the apophenia.com domain.

And finally, on SourceForge there's Apophenia: An open statistical library for scientific computing. It has "functions on the same level as those of typical statistics packages (OLS, Probit...)".

Fun with recreational evidence.

Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. I'm the first to admit that talking about "evidence-based ___" isn't the best way to attract a crowd. Making evidence interesting - and, with any luck, fun - isn't easy. Here's how some folks are doing it successfully.

Recreational probability. The site Book of Odds presents the statistical odds of all sorts of things: Having twins between the ages of 40-44, being unemployed, throwing a no-hitter. They make it relevant by answering the question "What are the odds of me?" And they have fun features such as The Odds Couple (see comparison below - odds of being unemployed in the U.S. in 2008 vs. 2009). 

The Book of Odds uses what could be mind-numbing probability and statistics to give people something useful to think about. And they do a fantastic job of presenting the evidence. The site is well-designed, using graphics and layouts that rival top-tier commercial sites.This is a web property I wish I'd thought of myself.

Recreational mathematics. The amazing Martin Gardner is being recognized for turning 95 years old, and for releasing his second book *this year*. He presents difficult concepts in entertaining ways and encourages people to look critically at evidence.

John Tierney of the New York Times quoted Ronald Graham (UC San Diego) as saying: “Martin has turned thousands of children into mathematicians, and thousands of mathematicians into children.” I can't think of a higher compliment for anybody.

Gardner was an early debunker of pseudoscience. His Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science is considered a classic in scientific skepticism. Wikipedia says "Martin Gardner more or less single-handedly renewed and nurtured interest in recreational mathematics in North America for a large part of the 20th century. He is best known for his decades-long efforts in popular mathematics and science journalism, particularly through his 'Mathematical Games' column in Scientific American.... [which] ran from 1956 to 1981 and introduced many subjects to a wider audience, including flexagons, polyominoes, M.C. Escher, and fractals."

Besides his magazine columns, Gardner has authored more than 70 books. I believe my favorite title is Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?: Discourses on Godel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics. It doesn't hurt that he's a good writer who isn't afraid to say what's on his mind. Gardner's latest book is When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations About This and That.

'Sniffer bees' can detect evidence of explosives, TB, food spoilage, and other stuff.

Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. This is very cool. A U.K. biotech firm is harnessing the olfactory ability of bees for trace vapour detection. Apparently they can reveal evidence of spoiled food, explosive chemicals, and disease, among other things.

Just the name of the company alone - Inscentinel - makes me want to work with these guys (didn't Agent Smith use inscentinels in the first Matrix?)

Sniffing the evidence. From the Inscentinel site: "The science is based on the acute olfactory sense of honeybees. Bees are trained to recognise particular odours (e.g. that of explosives) and associate that smell with a food reward. When the bees detect the odour, they extend their tongue or proboscis (the Proboscis Extension Reflex or PER) in expectation of food. Honeybees make excellent detectors because they are inexpensive, quick to train (a few minutes per bee) and have extremely low limits of detection (odours can be detected to parts per trillion levels).

"Our system has the potential to be deployed rapidly and quickly retargetted to new compounds when required. There is a large scope of possible applications ranging from explosives and drug detection to the diagnosis of tuberculosis and food spoilage.... Bees are not harmed undertaking their sniffing tasks... only healthy bees work effectively."

These are early days, so on their web site I didn't see success stories or published studies demonstrating the effectiveness of their system. The company is currently seeking commercial partners.

Who knew? Graphic novels are a great way to present evidence and argue logic.

I once took a course on the history of mathematics -- it was quite interesting, but would have been better if one of our texts was Logicomix, a cool, new graphic novel exploring the quest for mathematical certainty. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou, was a best seller in Greece and is now out in English. It's a fun and informative way to address important concepts about logic and argumentation. 

The amazon.com review says: "This exceptional graphic novel recounts the spiritual odyssey of philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his agonized search for absolute truth, Russell crosses paths with legendary thinkers like Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, and Kurt Gödel, and finds a passionate student in the great Ludwig Wittgenstein. But his most ambitious goal -- to establish unshakable logical foundations of mathematics -- continues to loom before him."

The New York Times Book Review ran a really nice review of Logicomix last Sunday: "Improbable material for comic-book treatment? Not really. The principals in this intellectual drama are superheroes of a sort. They go up against a powerful nemesis, who might be called Dark Antinomy. Each is haunted by an inner demon, the Specter of Madness. Their quest has a tragic arc, not unlike that of Superman...."

Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. It's not every day that I come across such a clever, light-hearted approach to explaining serious concepts.

 

Fun-with-Evidence Friday: Scientific method applied to comedy, why Jesus has a middle name, and other stuff.

Need to explain some evidence? Take a lesson from the PowerPoint comedian. I always wished scientists and technologists would use more humor to explain their message. Now there's the PowerPoint Comedian, Tim Lee, a PhD scientist who "spent years developing simulation and analytical models of population dynamics before he discovered that this bored him to tears." Here's a link to a YouTube video of him onstage (with an impressive 500,000+ views), and an example of his humor (funnier when you hear his delivery).

The Scientist sheds light on Lee's analytical approach. "In addition to incorporating science into his act, Lee also uses it offstage, applying the statistics he learned in school to analyze his development as a comedian. There are two types of errors, he explains -- type 1 and type 2. The first is when people quit when they shouldn't, and the second is when people never quit even when they really should. 'I didn't want to make the second one,' he says. So he kept a log of every set he'd ever done, noting how well the jokes did and analyzing the results. 'I figured as long as I was improving I shouldn't quit.' Seeing his progress in 'a quantitative fashion' motivated him to keep moving forward." Very cool.

Are you a power walker? I am (since my knees lost interest in running 10Ks) -- and I'm always a little embarrassed at how wildly I swing my arms when I really get going. But it seems impossible not to do it. New evidence helps explain why we swing our arms when we walk, and why it's not as inefficient as you might guess. Cosmos Magazine, The Science of Everything, does a fantastic job of summarizing the evidence from the arm-swinging study: The researchers "used simple robots and human experiments to show that arm swinging is both easy and beneficial. The movement requires little muscular effort, yet it makes walking much easier. 'This puts to rest the theory that arm swinging is a vestigial relic from our quadrupedal ancestors,' said Steven Collins, a biomechanical engineer with the University of Michigan in the USA. 'Instead, arm swinging is a sensible part of an economic gait on two legs.'"

Yahoo's Weird Science column has a nice overview of the research in Out on a limb: Arm-swinging riddle is answered. Researchers "recruited 10 volunteers, who were asked to walk with a normal swing, an opposite-to-normal swing, with their arms folded, or held by their sides.... Arm-swinging turned out to be a plus, rather than a negative, the investigators found ...requiring little torque, or rotational twist, from the shoulder muscles." Evidently, we use 12% more metabolic energy when holding our arms still when we walk, and something called "vertical ground reaction moment" goes up by 63% -- which makes us bobble and drains energy from the lower leg muscles.

Stub your toe? Swear a blue streak and you'll feel better. Scientists have new evidence that Swearing Makes Pain More Tolerable. According to Live Science, "Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon... It taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere.... Because swearing often has an exaggerating effect that can overstate the severity of pain, the team thought that swearing would lessen a person's tolerance. As it turned out, the opposite seems to be true." Not surprisingly, this was a popular science story. As Stephen Colbert humorously explained it on the Colbert Report, "Evidently, the pain that you feel is inversely proportional to the number of middle names you give Jesus." Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday, everyone.

New way to present evidence: Dance Your Ph.D.

Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. Since I do rattle on about the need for better ways of presenting evidence, this caught my eye: Now you can compete in a contest called Dance Your PhD. Really. The official site says "the human body is an excellent medium for communicating science -- perhaps not as data-rich as a peer-reviewed article, but far more exciting."

Success! The contest is a bonafide hit, earning lots of media coverage (NYTimes Tierney Lab writeup here). To get in the game, you have to upload a video of your, um, presentation to YouTube. My personal favorite is the 2009 winner in the professor category, Vince LiCata, with A Molecular Dance in the Blood, Observed (view YouTube here). Sue Lynn Lau, this year's winner in the grad-student category, interpreted "The role of vitamin D in beta cell function."

Live! On stage for one night only! February 13 in Chicago, the group presented a live performance, "a dance synthesized by 4 choreographers based on the published research of the 4 scientists who won the AAAS/Science Dance Contest" (Facebook invitation here). As the Gonzo Scientist explained it after the competition's 2008 maiden voyage, "No one quite knew what to expect as the lights came up on a pair of astrophysicists dressed as binary galaxies. To the tune of an old tango, Ruth Gruetzbauch stalked and twirled around Jesús Varela before surrendering to his supermassive gravity. The rowdy audience of scientists exploded with applause. The world's first Dance Your Ph.D. Contest, with Christoph Campregher at the controls of the sound system, was off to a good start."

Happy FEF, everybody!