Moby Dick, by Stephen King

[Doctor Rock]

Good moaning! 

[Doctor Rock]

Atheists, Agnostics Know More About Religion Than Religious

For comparison purposes, the survey also asked some questions about general knowledge, which yielded the scariest finding: 4% of Americans believe that Stephen King, not Herman Melville, wrote "Moby Dick."

Holy moley!   

[Doctor Rock]

Are you speechless too? 

[captqitn]

not so  much.  4% sounds good.   You're getting pretty far down the bell curve at that point.

[Bizarro]

Wow, this Toronto mayoral candidate is talking ten kinds of gibberish:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/ry1-xZIx_Zw" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/ry1-xZIx_Zw</a>

I guess it's better than him claiming that only homosexuals and drug users are at serious risk of getting AIDS. And better than him saying he supports the views of a right-wing pastor who thinks that same-sex marriage will "dismantle" civilization. Or him calling Asian people "Orientals" and suggesting that they are taking over, then when rebuked explaining that he thought this was a positive thing. Also nutty that he has suggested that Toronto cannot handle any more immigrants and that in a "perfect world" Toronto's population would remain even. He recently suggested banning marathons from public streets.

All links via Metafilter

Good to know the US isn't home to all the right-wing loons in North America.

[Doctor Rock]

Loons are everywhere.  Idiots are no longer isolated in their stupidity.  Ignorance is now becoming the social norm.  Stupidity went supernova, remember? 

[Bizarro]

Incredibly depressing Mega Millions simulator

[Doctor Rock]

Incredibly depressing Mega Millions simulator

That's probability and the law of large numbers for you...

I warmly recommend this book: Struck by lightning

[Doctor Rock]

One of my "favourite" statistical phenomena is the old regression to the mean, that is, if a variable is extreme on its first measurement, it will tend to be closer to the average on a second measurement, and if it is extreme on a second measurement, will tend to be closer to the average on the first measurement.

Here's a story about Daniel Kehneman told to the writer in a book called "The Myth of the rational market":

The only point Daniel Kahneman was trying to get across was that praise works better than punishment. The Israeli Air Force flight instructors to whom the Hebrew University psychologist delivered his speech that day in Jerusalem in the mid-1960’s were dubious. One veteran instructor retorted:

On many occasions I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver, and in general when they try it again they do worse. On the other hand, I have often screamed at cadets for bad execution, and in general they do better. So please don’t tell us that reinforcement works and punishment does not, because the opposite is the case.

As a man trained in statistics, Kahneman saw that of course a student who had just brilliantly executed a maneuver (and was thus praised for it) was less likely to perform better the next time around than a student who had just screwed up. Abnormally good or bad performance is just that – abnormal, which means it is unlikely to be immediately repeated. But Kahneman could also see how the instructor had come to his conclusion that punishment worked. “Because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean,” he later lamented, “it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”

[Bizarro]

Regression to the mean is key in baseball, too. Batting average on balls in play--that is, how many balls that players make contact with that actually become hits--is, outside of a certain level of influence from the quality of defense and the parameters of the park they occur in--essentially random for pitchers. The amount of fly balls that turn into home runs is prone to variation, too. And so, increasingly people look at stats like FIP for pitchers, which show, luck being equal, what a pitcher's ERA would be. A guy might have an ERA of 5.50 because of bad luck, but a FIP of 4.15 that  better represents his true ability, or conversely, a 3.30 ERA but a FIP of 5.85. That wide variation is the kind of thing you usually see regression to the mean on. For hitters, it's trickier, but you can look at their contact percentage and what types of balls they hit--line drives and such--to see what they might be hitting if more standard luck had gone their way.

(takes off nerd hat)

The moral of the story is, you have to track the individual elements of a guy's performance because weird outliers that won't last may be skewing his numbers.

[Bizarro]

Baseball has taught me to look at pretty much everything in life through that type of filter.

[Doctor Rock]

Baseball has taught me to look at pretty much everything in life through that type of filter.

It's a good filter! 

[brainfiber]

the one thing about my job ending is I'll be able to watch the playoffs starting next week...post season baseball...i love it!

Yankees need to win one more game or have boston lose one to be guaranteed a post season spot...so far both are doing their best to prevent it.

And after the 2004 Yankees collapse in the playoffs anything is possible.

[captqitn]

Is the Myth of the Rational Market a good entry point?      I had some statistics in college, but not a great professor that brought it to the real world, so I  subsequently left most of  it behind.

[Doctor Rock]

Is the Myth of the Rational Market a good entry point?      I had some statistics in college, but not a great professor that brought it to the real world, so I  subsequently left most of  it behind.

Start with Struck By Lightening then.   The Myth of the Rational Market is on poorly thought-out economic theories, and the self-serving ideologues who push them down people's throat's. 

Of course, the author doesn't quite put it in this terms...