Killing it, getting there

Report from The Department of Seen To Be Doing Something about road deaths on RTE last week. [Non-cabinet] Minister of State at the Department of Transport Jack Chambers is suggesting that speed limits drop 

• Big Roads 100km/h to 80 km/h
• Rural roads  80km/h to 60 km/h
• Urban roads 50km/h to 30 km/h

The driver seems to be that "126 people have been killed on the roads so far this year, which is an increase of 24 on the same period last year. One fifth of all those deaths occurred in August". This is not [sufficient] evidence to make a change to the status quo w.r.t. speed limits. Road deaths have been bumbling along in the grass for the last five years 135 -140 - 146 - 136 - 155.

It's not obvious to all thinking people me that the changes are anything more than a statistical blip. We are certain-sure doing far better at this in this century than in the last. 25 years ago, there were 3 times more road-deaths annually [in a much smaller population] than we experience nowadays. One thing that alerts the crap-detector is to compare the narrative from September 2016 when the (young) drivers of Donegal seemed to be peculiarly dangerous on the roads. Not least because of the articulate soundbytes of Dr Gerry Lane the A&E consultant in Letterkenny, Co Donegal who had to pick up the pieces and sew them back on. The RSA produced an executive summary of the 2023 Year to end-August. I abstract those data county-by-county:

The RSA narrative is that 37% of the Jan-Aug 2023 deaths are due to mayhem in 4 counties Cork - Galway - Mayo - Tipp. But that's a terrible reading of their own data because they fail to adjust for population. In the graphic [L] I have done this to exonerate Co Cork which, at 17 deaths per million, is actually pro rata pop in the bottom quartile of the table. And Galway's rate is exceeded by 7 other counties: Looking at you Offaly and Monaghan! Donegal is now only a few spots above Galway and defo in the bottom half of this grim league table. Tipperary is up this August partly because 4 youngsters were killed in a single vehicle going to a party crash outside Clonmel.

I only hope that Jun.Minister Chambers can mobilise better data-wonks than the RSA before he embarks on an expensive scheme to replace all the speed-limit signs in the country. TDs are going to lose their seats at the next election if they start shouting about lowering the speed limits. Don't bother me none, I get up early and never needed to hurry to clock in at work. But lots of other folk are juggling the school run with sleep-deficit and a second income because they are mortgaged to the hilt and have kids. They won't feel able to dawdle to day-care and then to work each day.

And the known unknown unintended consequences? Our Dau.II has L plates on the car; takes her time driving carefully and is obsessive about speed limits. This seems to act as an insanity magnet for other drivers to overtake her in sketchy situations with or without horn.

The most shoulder-slumping consequence of this political theatre is that in one of the two years after the change to lower speed-limits it is entirely probable that road deaths will blip down again . . . and the pols will claim credit for their sagacious prophylactic actions. But it will just be an example of regression to the mean [explanaprev] after the extremes of 2023. Don't get me wrong: I'm as anti-car as the most obsessive cycle-nut of your acquaintance; we spend far too much time and money tooling about in them to the detriment of 1) our heart-health; 2) the lung-health of the people we chuff past; 3) every living thing on the planet.

Gadzooks gazongas

What is it about British blokes and boobs? Do we really fancy the enormous variety? All of us? Is it a cultural thing from decades of page 3 women in the tabloid press or some sort of trigger to the autonomic nervous system or a fine example of run-away evolution driven by sexual selection: like peacock feathers, bird-of-paradise tails, or bright blue baboon buttocks. There is clearly a lot of scope for investigation but you'll have to go to the sister channel boobthescientist for that.

On the other hand, today is the 20th anniversary of the announcement of Dolly the Sheep who had been born the previous 5th July 1996. Dolly was the first large mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. See L for the cloning process that involved 3 mothers for one small, desperately cute, lamb. The cell that provided the chromosomes was from the mammary gland of a mature Finn-Dorset ewe and Ian Wilmut, the research team leader, really wanted to acknowledge the donor tissue by tribbing the top-heavy generously endowed singer Dolly Parton.  At the time I though that was puerile in a snk snk fnarrr Viz sort of way but maybe that's just because I'm a bit priggish. The power behind the publicity facade was Keith Campbell, a developmental biologist, who had produced a pair of cloned lambs Megan and Morag the year before. But M&M were cloned from embryonic cells which were not fully differentiated. So the process was easier. Was it the name? was it a really effective press release from the Roslin Institute? Was it Wilmut's willingness to give a sound-byte or ten? Whatever, Dolly became an international megastar almost on par with her Parton namesake.  The switchboard at Roslin went white hot as it fielded 3,000 incoming calls in the succeeding days. Wilmut went on to secure a knighthood from a grateful country because he was The Face. Campbell, ten years younger, was later acknowledged to have done 66% of the work but didn't get the title. Wilmut, Campbell and Shimya Yamanaka did go on to share the 2008 Shaw Prize for Life Science and Medicine . . . and $1 million: "for their works on the cell differentiation in mammals, a process that advances our knowledge of developmental biology". Yamanaka has won many other prizes including the 2012 Nobel for his work on converting mature cells into stem cells.

Clearly, it is better to have an adult donor because the full set of desirable qualities will have been compared across many sheep and hundreds of identical super-sheep can be generated from The One. This is better than going back to the genetic lottery each generation because that mix will persist in churning up undesirable qualities or combinations of genes. It is standard process in population biology called regression to the mean: the offspring of the elite cannot be more elite than their parents so look nearer to normal. But you have to be certain-sure that the mix you go with is indeed The Best rather than only Best in the few traits that we can, or care to, measure. For sheep this might be about fleece quality, or weight-gain from weaning, or docility. But you should also try to factor in desirable qualities of disease resistance from a fizzing-good immune system. It's also handy to set it so that the cloned lamb [Dolly R with birth-mother] is genetically different from the surrogate mother. The white face could not be the genetic offspring of the Scottish blackface.

Ironically, Dolly contracted JSRV [Jaagsiekte sheep retrovirus] one of the many, many viruses to which sheep are prey [prev Schmallenberg]. This after a short happy life consorting with David the Ram to produce 6 of her own lambs: called Bonnie, Sally, Rosie, Lucy, Darcy, and Cotton, as you ask. The JSRV developed into lung-cancer and Dolly was put down in 2003. There was much critical talk that the diseases she contracted were the act of an angry god for upsetting the natural apple-cart but that's very unlikely. Dolly has four identical twin sisters Daisy, Debbie, Dianna and Denise who haven't yet gotten JSRV or arthritis. Dianna? What sort of a name is that? I bet it's to scotch any idea that Diana, Princess of Wales is being disrespected á la Dolly Parton. You wouldn't want to rile up the Windsor family - they give out the knighthoods.

Anybody out there?

A few years ago, I wrote about the Drake Equation, one attempt at guesstimating whether we are all alone in the Universe or if there are intelligent beings out beyond the solar system with whom we could converse. I wouldn't be much of a dialogue because the nearest star is Alpha Centauri and that's 4.2 light years [same as radio-wave years] away. Ask a question like "Have you discovered Thorium?" or "Is DNA at all relevant to your lifestyle?" and, even having sorted out the language of communications, it's going to be 8.4 years before you get an answer back. It is evens probable that there's a planet orbiting one of the suns of the Alpha Centauri system and that the planet is in the Goldiloxian 'habitable zone': not too close and torrid or so far as to be frigid.

I was tooling about The Déise yesterday and caught Newstalk FM with Sean Moncrieff interviewing one of the team from Nottingham who have re-jigged the Drake Equation to come up with their best guess about the likelihood of Intelligent Life "out there". Despite repeating the name of the interviewee, I was unable to recall it 30 minutes later when I'd stopped driving and was able to pick up a pencil. I did, however, remember their number of habitable planets with intelligent life that hadn't yet blown itself to buggery or asset-stripped their home to an uninhabitable cinder. So I googled "Nottingham 36" and found a) Bus #36 serves the Queen's Medical Centre, whither my boss decamped in 1993 leaving me i/c bioinformatics infrastructure Ireland at INCBI b) the authors of the habitable planets paper "The Astrobiological Copernican Weak and Strong Limits for Intelligent Life" were Tom Westby and Christopher Conselice. What a crappy, keep the proles at bay, title for a paper of such galaxial importance. The Copernican Principle is the idea of human non-exceptionalism: just because we are the only speaking, dancing, technologically capable species we know doesn't mean that we are specially created by a [beneficent] god. It's much more likely [regression to the mean etc.] that we are just about average

What Westby & Conselice [and Drake] are trying to do is have a punt at the number Communicating Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent civilizations (CETI) to establish a) whether it's worth looking for them b) whether any of them pose a threat, so we should worry about them. The answer is a clear nada, nix, zonders, furgeddit. Their key problem is trying to extrapolate a distribution of data points from a single case [humans [and dolphins] on Earth]. The media is predictably joyful about the proximity of "36" to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's "42" as the answer to the question "life, the universe and everything?".

W&C are much better informed than Drake on one aspect of the necessary conditions for intelligent life. Since the early 1900s, astrobiologists have been looking hard for planets orbiting around stars and now have 4,000-and-rising to choose from; with the discoveries doubling about every two years. The first was evidenced in 1994. And space-hero Sara Seagar has been designing nifty tech to help find more.

Anyway, that 36 comes with error bars: with all their assumptions and extrapolations or best-guesses, there could be as few as four [4!] CETIs in our galaxy or more than 200. But those are, if you pause your rubbish! button for a moment, really confident bounds on the limits of their calculations: only 2 orders of magnitude. As you have been told [I am careful not to use as you know because the numbers involved are waaaaay bigger than a breadbox and effectively incomprehensible] the galaxy has a great many stars but they are spread really thin: loads of space between them. Another view on the W&C numbers is that the average distance between CETI planets is ~17,000 light years. Even if we detect a signal, it will be such old news that we won't be able to respond appropriately. And if we're planning on sending out a signal telling our story, it seems unlikely that there will be anybody intelligent around to process the response.  All good fun, though, or at least "Mostly Harmless"

Stats laid bare

In April 2015, I was invited to An Event in Trinity College Dublin and had an interesting chat with one of the last-man-standing Professors of Anatomy. We compared notes on the several deficits in university education - driven off the curriculum by The New Sexy. The New Sexy is often fabulously expensive to develop and pricy to roll-out, so pennies need to be pinched elsewhere in the budget. Trad knowledge, like Anatomy, are undervalued and when the AnatProf retires he (almost always He) ain't replaced. So that class of chap is becoming an endangered species.

Same thing happened at the July 2024 Wexford Science Café which was a conversazione with Dr Sheila Willis, late Director of Forensic Science Ireland. When she started in Forensics in the 1980s the people there could do old style: 

• microscopic paint chips could be found in a child's jumper and matched to the car of a boy racer
• it was definitely Monaghan mud on the boot-heel and the pollen is oak
  
• the blood spatter on the ceiling was [not] arterial
• the hair was from the cat, definitely not the neighbour's aardvark
  

But the great god DNA has nudged a lot of this accumulated expertise into the dustbin of history and thrun the deer-stalker hat in after it. New hires tend to be from genetics and biochemistry rather than geology and ag. It's probably a sound judgment economically: paint-chip breakthroughs are rare but every perp is full of DNA; but having the framing always DNA is not good for expansive hypotheses. Dr Willis was innerviewed on The Life Scientific recently and the revelation that she'd been to school in Wexford Town secured her invite to the WxScCafé. The Blob has quite a lot to say of forensics.

We were invited to lunch recently (they only allow me out with my bib every ten years) and I rubbed shoulders with a different (and still in post) Prof of Anatomy. We agreed that a) scientific training was far too specialised and this was probably affecting a) creativity b) critical evaluation of data through lack of context. We also agreed that everyone, but especially scientists, cd/shd be much better trained in probability and statistics.

Was I a bit shiny-eyed & ranty about that? If so, it might have been my then current earbook: Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data by Charles Wheelan. Wheelan has a faculty position, currently at Dartmouth and before that at U.Chicago. But he has been active in explaining math, data and money, not only to his students, but also on the radio, and in several newspapers of record. And there's more of that in Naked Statistics which uses jaunty, not to say facetious, examples to illustrate such arcana as the central limit theorem and the standard error of the mean. I thought these were pretty good explanations, and some of them were funny. ymmv, I guess. Everyone in the room I am in as I write (N = 3) knew that LeBron James is a tall American basketball player. But similar assumptions are made about the length of an inch, the weight of a pound, the significance of a "hole-in-one" and the function of a "pitcher". Maybe the author and publisher don't give-a-damn about bamboozling non USians. Maybe I am being patronizing about what my neighbours know and ignoring the ubiquitous penetration of American language and culture.

As with all vaguely technological non-fiction earbooks, aural processing is at a significant deficit if the words are either full of numbers or supported by pictures. Don't bother me none in this case: I've seen enough right-skewed distributions in 40 years of data processing to visualise what one looks like; I don't need to see the actual numbers to be believe that two confidence intervals do not overlap. But it is a bit tiresome, yet again, that publishers will take money by selling audio-books without providing these aids to understanding. For one thing it is effectively exclusionary of, say, dyslexics for whom audio is a much more efficient medium for knowledge acquisition.

But here's the thing: Wheelan gathers all the basics covered in the earlier chapters into a big puff for the value of multiple regression with dummy variables. He makes a convincing case that using this technique (readily available in your favorite stats package - yea even Excel) can yield interesting and unexpected insights into your data. One of the first, most challenging, and most rewarding courses I took in graduate school in Boston was Multivariate Statistics: sitting at the feet of Ralph D'Agostino. D'Agostino was also mad for multiple regression with dummy variables and explained that it was mathematically equivalent but much more obvious in its assumptions than ANOVA which is very widely used as a blackbox by people who know no better. D'Agostino died, in the fullness of his years, in September 2023. The obit reveals that he was, for 30 years, one of the Principal Quants in the famous Framingham Heart Study - a longitudinal [1948 - now] investigation into the effects of lifestyle, income, exercise, diet on the likelihood of cardiovascular events. The stats used there to effectively crunch through the data have changed our understanding of cause and effect; and implemented all sorts of policy changes, product labelling and drug development.

Gratitude

The Blob has had rather a lot to say about gratitude and the art of saying thank you [most recently]; like when I realized that editing newsletters was it's own reward and that expecting any readers to send cakes for my efforts was all frosting. I've ignored Mark Twain "Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for."

I resolved to take a break from the ould social media because I was starting to care what other people thought about my comments. It's not a good place to be, because pleasing a bunch of para-social randos is a recipe for regression to the mean until we all sound like each other. It makes the world a very boring place if there is no grit of dissent.

There is only so much entertainment to be got from staring at the ceiling - especially in winter when there are no flies drowsily circulating up there. Accordingly, casting about for something to read, I pulled from the shelf East & West, a collection short stories by W. Somerset Maugham [bloboprevs], and opened it at random. Maugham was a story-teller and to achieve that he needed to be a story getter: travelling outside his echo-chamber; conscientiously listening to other people; probing and poking and goading a bit . . . et voilá! more copy. The Back of Beyond [full text; cw: adultery, domestic abuse] is one of many set in the East: in particular colonial Malaya where the rubber [supervising, tapping, patriarching R] came from. It concerns a bit of adultery between two consenting adults married to others who should have stuck to being good neighbours but had inclination and opportunity to try something more interesting than watching geckos on the ceiling. For reasons, they agree to give up the ould nookie and return to their wedded spouses. He then dies [off-stage] and Her extravagant grief allows her husband to rumble his own cuckold's horns.

Husband is severely pissed off because his dignity is affronted and he goes to an older chap for advice about how to handle the divorce. Old Chap, calling up his own younger-self experience, says he'd be mad to divorce his wife just because she had a fling with another bloke. Husband rails on about how he's always giving and few seem to appreciate his generosity. To which Old Chap, with characteristic Maugham cynicism retorts:

"One mustn’t expect gratitude. It’s a thing that no one has a right to. After all, you do good because it gives you pleasure. It’s the purest form of happiness there is. To expect thanks for it is really asking too much. If you get it, well, it’s like a bonus on shares on which you’ve already received a dividend; it’s grand, but you mustn’t look upon it as you due . . ."
 "You'll have to walk warily. She'll have a lot to forgive too . . .you're behaving very generously, old boy, and, you know, one needs a devil of a lot of tact to get people to forgive one one's generosity." 

I posted the whole of The Verger, another story by Maugham a while back. I like Maugham's writing: his insights into the human condition seem to hold value in our different world.

And the planes!

Eeee, we do love a bit of death in our news. We have a certain cause to feel collectively smug for 2017 to clock the lowest number of Irish road-deaths since records began. But the well known statistical concept of regression to the mean dictates that the road-death toll for 2018 is likely to be higher . . . but not 3x higher! If you listen to the news at all, you will have heard that the number of commercial airplane fatalities worldwide in 2018 was zero. If only because of the derision attached to President Trump's claim of responsibility for the success, albeit on twitter which trivialises and simplifies discourse: 'Unlike Obama, Trump won't let any planes crash' which he later clarified / qualified with “I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation,”

You may have heard that news, but it's just not true! as a thoughtful, data-driven piece in Forbes clarifies.  For starters my statement above misses out a key adjective: jet and excludes jet freighters. If. If you include (smaller) turbo-prop data and the ACT Airlines 747 freighter that came down in a village in Kyrgyzstan in January, the the death toll rises to 64. Even so, that's better than the score for previous years 2014= 864; 2015 = 471; 2016 = 271 which is looking shockin' close to a straight line pointing at 2017 = 0.

The implication, as for the Irish road-deaths data yesterday is that death-count is a good surrogate for 'the state of the nation' or here the state of aviation. In fact there were several near-misses, crap landings and in-air disasters which could have had a "no survivors among passengers or crew" outcome but for good luck, good air-traffic control, and good pilots.  For luck compare Air France AF66, CDG to LAX which suffered an "uncontained engine failure" while flying over the edge of Greenland and had to divert to Goose Bay in Canada. Uncontained engine failure is where the whizzy bits inside the cowl come through the casing at speed. A similar event occurred in 1989 to UA 232 when the flying debris severed the hydraulic control-lines. The shards from the AF66 engine didn't hit the fuselage, so the damage was ring-fenced. Incidentally the nacelles [engine casings] of jet-planes are designed to shear off from the wing under certain adverse conditions: discarding the damaged parts.

If you believe the trendline in my graph, or indeed Mr Trump, you'll have to conclude that 2018 will bring negative deaths in commercial jet-liners. I guess that means homeward-bound coffins opening up in the baggage hold and the incumbents demanding dry roasted peanuts and a complimentary drink.