Meanwhile back home in here in the USA everyone is up in arms over a measly 0.1 percent difference in inflation caused by “chaining” our CPI.  The gist of this is explained in this recent Time-magazine personal-finance column.  It seems like much ado about very little.  However, those who get cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) fight like crazy over anything that reduces their income.  Here’s a spin on statistics:  A 0.1 percent reduction from 1.5 percent is actually a 7 percent loss in COLA.  No wonder seniors want to throw off those chains!

The fiddling with money supply and shenanigans on inflation computations reached a new low not long ago in Argentina when the government forced out statistician Graciela Bevacqua for rounding rather than dropping decimal points, which made the government look better with their official rate.  It’s all reported here by The Economist.  Now working in private industry Bevacqua continued to present a truer calculation on inflation and got fined $100,000 for her honesty.  After an uproar from far and wide, including the American Statistical Association (ASA), the courts in Argentina overruled the government and spared this outspoken statistician, according to this news from Buenos Aires Herald.  Someone ought to give her a medal for speaking the truth.  But as the great statistician George E. P. Box said:

“Whenever we see virtue rewarded, we are completely surprised.”

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

-  Archilochus

In the June 3^rd issue of Chemical & Engineering News Frederick M. Peterson, a chemical engineer who went on to achieve a doctorate in economics, dissects what happens when “Scientists Tackle Finance.”  He warns against the tendency of experts in one field being overly bullish about their ability to manage things outside of their specialty.  These are the hedgehogs—people who make bold predictions and happen to be right long enough that they attract a strong following.

On the other hand, the foxes, who observe many things and adapt readily to differing situations, lack confidence about the chances of any particular path leading to success.  They are seen as being weak and wish-washy, which is not very popular.  Nevertheless, it may not be surprising that foxes do better than hedgehogs at forecasting, according to Peterson, who cites a seminal study by the School of Business at University of California, Berkeley.

The moral of this story is to be wary of anyone who expresses too much certainty about the shape of things to come.  It does not pay to follow hedgehogs—they will ultimately go beyond their narrow limits of competence and roll into something very prickly.

Follow the link above to a virtual quincunx that you can experiment on by changing the number of bins.  To see how varying ball diameters affect the results, check out this surprising video posted by David Bulger, Senior Lecturer, Department of Statistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

A few weeks ago I stepped up for a weighing and received a pleasant surprise: It seemed that I’d dropped 10 pounds during a five-day business trip.  Although deep down I knew this could not be, I indulged myself for the day with the thought that something magical had whisked away this weight.  Then after getting home from work I got back down to earth by discovering that the base of the scale had got off kilter.  I mentioned this to my wife and daughter.  It was funny seeing them being so crestfallen—they also were hanging on to the belief in a mysterious, but real reduction.

I suppose all this supports the use of control charting* for filtering out common-cause variability (not worth reacting to) from statistically-significant process upsets (special causes that merit attention).  At least that’s what my logical side says.  On the other hand, it was fun to believe for some hours in supernatural forces.  Ignorance can be bliss!

*(See this detailing posted by the George Mason University College of Health and Human Services.)

• Shocks to the Brain Improve Mathematical Abilities. (You ‘mathaletes’ should do some calculating before wiring up because the sample size for these findings is miniscule!)
• Brain, Interrupted-How distractions make us dumber.  (The news here is mixed:Multitasking may be a myth but perhaps some people, with practice, can handle it.)

I hope this blog did not derail your train of thought.  If so, go lick a battery to reverse the brain drain.

“In many cases, we’re more incentivized to be productive than to be right.”

-          Marcus Munafo, University of Bristol, UK

For example University of Minnesota chemistry professor Chris Cramer will teach this 9-week MOOC on Statistical Molecular Thermodynamics starting next month.  Follow the link and watch him demonstrate a thermite reaction.  If anyone can make statistical molecular thermodynamics interesting, it will be him, I think, so I enrolled.  It’s free, thus there’s nothing to lose.  Also, I still feel guilty about getting an A grade in the stat thermo class I took 30 years ago—the reason being it was graded on a curve and thus my abysmal final score of 15 out of 100 got rated highly as the second highest in my class.  As you can infer, it was not taught very well!

P.S. I recently unveiled a distance-based lecture series on design of experiments called the DOE Launch Pad.  It augments my book (co-authored by Pat Whitcomb) on DOE Simplified.  Contact me at mark @ statease .com to sign up.  It’s free for now while in pilot stage.

For each run into work I randomly chose one route or the other based on a recipe sheet produced by Design-Expert software and timed it with a stopwatch app on my smart phone.     Then I entered the results in the software and it gave me the answer I wanted.

It appears that I can save the better part of a minute by not shooting around on 694.  That is good to know!

My memorable stories about Box both relate to his way with words that cut directly to a point:

• In 1989 at the Annual Quality Congress in Toronto seeing him open his debate with competing guru Genichi Taguchi by throwing two words on an overhead projector–”Obscurity” and “Profundity”, and then after a dramatic pause, adding the not-equal sign between them.  This caused Taguchi’s son Shin to leap up from the front row and defend his father.  This cause the largest crowd I have ever seen at a technical conference to produce a collective gasp that one only rarely experiences.
• In 1996 at a DOE workshop in Madison, Wisconsin enjoying his comeback to a very irritating disciple of Taguchi who kept interrupting the lecture: “If you are going to do something, you may as well do it right.”

Lest this give the impression that Box was mean-spirited see this well-reasoned white paper that provides a fair balance of praise and criticism of Taguchi, who created a huge push forward for the cause of planned experimentation for quality improvement.

The body of work by George Box in his field is monumental.  It provides the foundation for all that we do at Stat-Ease.  Thank you George, may you rest in peace!

People who can crunch data like Silver are in big demand these days according to Wall Street Journal Numbers Guy Carl Bialik in his column on March 2.  The jobs site icrunchdata (very descriptive!) posted 28,305 openings for jobs in statistics and the like last month—up from 16,500 openings three years ago (I love data like this!).

It seems that number-herding nerds now rule, but there is a catch according to Dan Thorpe, senior director for analytics at Wal-Mart.  He says that “the bulk of the people coming out [with statistics degrees] are technically competent but they’re missing the consultative and the soft skills, everything else they need to be successful.”  So, which to do you prefer—good math skills (and lots of money) or an attractive personality (and many friends)?  My advice is to aim for some of both.