A Pearson Person

All my post-grad life I've been buying up 25c copies of MJ Moroney's book Facts From Figures (1951) and giving them to younger people who have numbers to crunch. Because statistics is a) essential for effective science b) usually taught so poorly across these islands. Moroney strikes an agreeable balance between correct and accessible, but it's dated by being written before calculators, let alone Excel SPSS and R. As a 12 y.o. could calculate the variance of a [small] dataset with the help of a pencil, squared paper and Charlier's Checks. Nobody would consider teaching the skill to Gdau.I at the same age.

I was in Wexford Town Library early before Science Cafe in mid-December and found a copy of David Spiegelhalter's The Art of Statistics, Learning from Data (2020) call out to me from the 519.5 shelving. Spiegelhalter is frequently wheeled on stage for the Tim Harford's More of Less podcast when some egregious numerical bloomer needs to be exposed and explained to Joe Public . . . without being either stodgy, geeky or patronising.

There are some arresting patriarch-involving images. In explaining the prosecutor's fallacy, Spiegelhalter uses the following as a reductio ad absurdem: if you're the pope, then you're a Catholic is not the same as if you're a Catholic then you're the pope. Later, in a discussion of Bayesian statistics, he considers likelihood ratio = (the prob of dealing himself a royal flush, assuming the Archbishop of Canterbury is cheating) ÷ (the prob of royal flush assuming the ABofC is lucky). Which was funnier because absurd when the sentence was written than now with the 2024 Archbishop of Canterbury sheltering abusive paedophiles and resigning only with reluctance.

The self-styled Chevalier de Méré was a 17thC rake who gambled A Lot. He wanted to know which of two dicey games of chance was mostly likely to make him long-term money: a) throw a single dice 4x to get a single ⚅ or b) throw pairs of dice 24x to land ⚅⚅ [wrong wrong almost R]. Neither he, nor anybody else at the time, knew the correct mathematical way to calculate the odds, so he set to and rolled a heckuva lot of dice to [correctly] determine the answer. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet This is exactly what I did to determine the likelihood of winning while playing Klondike patience. The Chev wanted the right answer mathematically to save other gamblers from doing a similar multiple trial experiment and presented it to Blaise "God's Wager" Pascal [prev] who in turn shared it with Pierre "Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet" de Fermat [prev]. Between them they started the modern ride in probability theory. People like me, who started calculating means standard deviations on paper ~60 years ago are now trying to get their heads around Bayesian stats and  prior and posterior probabilities. Spiegelhalter 2020 is helpful in this regard, while Moroney1950  ignored the issue entirely.

Reveal. Pearson Person? Both Karl "correlation" Pearson and son Egon "confidence" Pearson get a shout. But really, at heart, Spiegelhalter is a Bayesian Bloke

Finding your level

Last Friday we had the annual Works Do in the canteen when the Management put up a slap up feed for the troops. It is officially to honour the previous year's crop of retirees with short trib from the relevant line-manager and the presentation of a clock to the ex-employee. Actually it's not useful like a clock but rather a monster glass vase engraved with the name of the perp. It was an opportunity to rehearse my accept-and-thanks speech for this time next year when the vase will have my name on it. I have 15 working weeks to go on The Institute gig.

I've spent a chunk of holiday time reading and giving feedback on the Literature Reviews of my [N = 8] final year project students. They are requested and required to get some background on their project topic by reading other men's flowers and summarising the state of play in 5,000 words. A cap of 5,000 words was put on the task a few years ago after some goon submitted a 50 page ramble. Clearly they hadn't heard If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter. This old saw has been laid at the pen of numerous wags including Blaise Pascal: Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. One of the commonest failings in these essays is woolly, rambling sentences that need to have their lapels-seized to have the sense shook out of them. The base is either a) failure to limit each sentence to a single idea b) qualifying each statement with hedging and officialese to make it look more thoughtful c) a certain amount of phatic waltzing around the subject matter because direct speaking can seem abrupt and abrupt can seem rude.

Here's an example, not the worst: The mammalian orders have long been demonstrating successful evolution for over 250 million years. Which I replaced with Mammals have been evolving and diversifying for 250m years: more information with only 60% of the letters! One of the reasons I am still on the planet is to try to instill more confidence and assertiveness in young scientists, esp young women-in-science. You've done some good work, I say, nobody knows this thing you've found out but you (and now me), you should tell it like it is without skating about pretending that it's not important. Part of the reason that science is top heavy with Patriarchs is that women present themselves and their work with more humility and skepticism than Joe Blowe-your-trumpet.

Whoa! Evidence for that last statement flagged by MeFi comments by Clawson and Mrs.Potato: in the Science Stakes, Male leads are 21% more likely than women to call their contribution ground-breaking, excellent, unique, wonderful [BMJ paper]. What's perhaps worse is that the rest of science buys the packaging and cites those positively framed papers 13% more than equivalent fem-papers. [Exec Summary Harvard Gazette].

It has been really fortunate [but you make your own luck!] that I've landed this Twilight Years job because it suits my demeanour and my tool kit. I coulda been a contender but not so much in top flight cutting-edge science. What I do, I do okay: I make it seem like fun, and funny, without losing sight of the serious. We have to dig a bit to uncover the truth without getting a hernia with too much heavy lifting. I like to think that I encourage my students to fulfill their potential . . . and a little bit more. The world, and Ireland Inc., is not short of genius but genius needs a Good Pair of Hands to implement the creative sparks of genius. Technical Hands trained in an Institute of Technology.

PhotoCred: Joe Pugliese

I'm reflecting on that equilibrium because Simone Giertz [above] Queen of the Shitty Robots <no longer> [prev] has a long piece to camera in Wired where she discourses on her latest high-end engineering projects: making electric pick-ups because she couldn't wait for Elon Musk to make one. The other item on her agenda was to quit being QotSR because she thought, that The Man thought, that she was (just) playing it for larfs and so not to be taken seriously. I won't be alone in thinking that she's wrong to put her Shitty Robot past in the dustbin of history. She's done more, with her crazy [wake-up call] ideas [soup robot] and dopey, hilariter implementations, to inspire young scientists, esp young women-in-science to give science a go. Not least because her best videos emphasise that it is okay to be wrong and that wrong is the first step towards right.

Nobody achieved nothing by not trying.  

QIermont Ferrand

Alors mes gars, j'ai promis de trouver quelque chose d'intéressant sur Clermont Ferrand. Mais c'est plus facile à dire qu'à faire.
When I was a guest of the School of Engineering for dinner the other day, the key-note speaker was introduced by the head of the college by telling a funny story about Le Grand Fromage. Later when I was fact-checking for my Blob, I found that same story was the 4th hit with Google. If The Provost was a journalist, I'd probably chid him with being too lazy-arsed to dig up something novel. But then as the head of a large corporation, his diary is full of similar events and he has to write his own speeches - in contrast to US Presidential candidates, for example.

I should be a little more sympathetic: in trotting out my 600 words a day, some Blobs turn out more timeless and insightful than others. If I didn't have a day job and a certain requirement for sleep, I'd find more time for reading and research and to polish the final draft. Sometimes you can throw in the towel and start making ironic comments. When I worked in England, long before the WWW and friendface, it was the custom to send a picture postcard back to the workhouse while on vacation.  It was a courtesy and mostly harmless "having a lovely time, wish you were here" gesture. But the accumulated pictures on the coffee-room notice board got to seem all too samey after a while - sunsets, white-sand beaches, La tour Eiffel - so that there was barely a twinge of envy that we the recipients were still choosing between a Kit-kat or a Twix at the Office. Some bright spark sent in a postcard of a campus office block with the message "this is an entry in the most boring postcard competition".  That appealed greatly to the well-developed English sense of irony and started off an spate of increasingly banal picture postcards.

Mais revenons nous a L'Auvergne! If only the task was to find something interesting about the Auvergne; why you could just listen to Canteloube's chants d'Auvergne for half an hour. That would set you up for the day.  Microbiologists could muse about the cheeses of the Auvergne - Cantal, Saint Nectaire, Gaperon until the cows came in for milking.  What can we say about Clermont-Ferrand? I asked the folks at QI but they came up almost empty. The WWW te1ls us that

• Blaise Pascal had a religious sister, Jacqueline, and that both were born in C-F.
• Pope Urban announced the 1st Crusade from Clermont before it was twinned in 1630 with Montferrand
• There is a splendid statue of Vercingetorix in C-F's Place de Jaude
• it was created by Frédéric Bartholdi, more famous for the Statue of Liberty in NYC
• The cathedral is build of a local black lava which stands in striking contrast [see R] to the surrounding buildings.

You see, it's clear that we are scraping the barrel a bit here. Here's the lazy-arse GoToogle site for those who want 15 C-F soundbytes. I guess the most well-known picture to come out of C-F is Bibendum the Michelin Man [see L early avatar and top newer, cuddlier], the brain child of Édouard and André Michelin the tyre people. Their company Compagnie Générale des établissements Michelin SCA still has it's headquarters in C-F.

• SCA = société en commandite par actions, entirely different from
• SA  = société anonyme or 
• SNC = société en nom collectif

Here's a nice essay, from the advertising design perspective, on the evolution of the cartoon chappy that drinks up obstacles on the road. And here's another: apparently there is a whole book written about the icon and its development. There is museum to the company L'aventure Michelin which is ironically located in the old factory where Michelin used to make tyres. Making tyres in C-F is history because although head-office and The Suits remain, the manufacture has been shipped out to where the labour is cheaper. Santé!

Journal Club, not

I love my job.  I work at the teaching coal-face of science helping a variety of youngsters fulfill their potential as technically capable contributers to Ireland Inc. and, hopefully, questioning and interested in the workings of the natural world.  The Institute's management aspires to re-casting us as a Technological University, as if a change of name will make us all smarter. For me the defining characteristic of a university is a ferment of intellectual curiosity and structures which encourage wide-ranging interests.  In a university, you can cross the campus and hear a talk about Blaise Pascal's Pensées or the diet of a sooty mangabey Cercocebus atys or the birth of the universe. But it's not so much the availability that defines a university as the fact that members of the community actually cross the campus to hear about things outside their field of expertise.

That's really valuable; there are numerous examples of ground-breaking insight being generated by going to hear about something different. The strange perspective can act as a creative trigger. Universities make a point of having a schedule for external speakers; any academic visitor expects to be asked to give a talk about their research. Usually in parallel, an active academic department with thinking students will run a Journal Club.  Here you're not getting it from the horse's mouth but you should be getting it from the cutting edge.  Since I wrote about reading last week, 24,000 new papers have been published in biomedical science: plenty of choice - surely you can find something to talk about from your recent reading of the literature.  Not reading the literature? Then you're not doing science.  I've had a long, fruitful and interesting relationship with Journal Clubs over the last 30 years.

At The Institute we have a Journal Club but the running of it is like pulling teeth. The post-graduate students maintain that they are too busy to take half-an-hour a week out of their schedule to learn something new. It's like the old adage that if you think you're too busy to do 15 minutes of X - meditation, say -, then you really need to take 30 minutes. Their supervisors rarely turn up to JoClub because of the insane teaching schedule we are subjected to - more than half the working week we are giving face-time to the students. To people who work in factories and offices that sounds like a doddle because those outsiders don't know about class prep, marking lab copies, meetings . . . and the sharpening pencils, checking the e-mail, updating Friendface, filing stuff and trying to find the stuff you filed last month with which all office workers consume their day.  There are also a large proportion of the teaching staff who gave up on active research years ago and devote their remaining hours and years to teaching. Needless to say, none of them ever attend Journal Club. Even when the schedule was let slip to once a fortnight, only the usual suspects could be reliably found at a JC session and only a handful of them at that.  Unsurprisingly, the usual suspects are also up for it if you offer to fill a car and drive to Dublin for some celebrity speaker. It was one of these who made me happy by sending me the link about Sara Seager. The same chap won a $10,000 prize presenting his research in Kentucky last month.  Coincidence? I don't think so!

No Journal Club. No real research. No credibility as a university.