Steve Kass

How big was this weekend’s really big mid-Atlantic snowstorm? So big that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson noted it in their diaries!

Really. The New York Times said so. Our founding fathers wrote in their diaries about this weekend’s storm. Awefomenefs.

This snowstorm was bigger than the U.S. Civil War, bigger than the moon landing, and bigger than Lady Gaga and Elton being on stage together last week! Geo. and Th. didn’t write about those other things, right? I mean, I spent most of the summer of ‘69 reading and would’ve seen something about the moon landing being in those guys’ diaries, I think. Yeah, Nixon was president, but still, we’d know, right?

Here’s the Times quote:

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although it was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Unless I missed something in Bits about time machines, I’m pretty darn sure the Times is wrong. Maybe they meant to write something like

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although it that was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

or

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, which occurred long before record-keeping began and was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Or maybe they meant this for an audio-only story, where it would be possible to say “Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although IT was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,” (still sloppy, but talk is a whole nother language from written) because if you say “it” very emphatically, you can intimidate it and make it change its antecedent.

And maybe I understood what they meant, too. But writers should write as precisely as possible; they shouldn’t write in the spirit of nearest-neighbor error-correcting codes and assume it’s fine to publish written nonsense assuming the reader will subconsciously refer to a Hamming distance ruler and an unabridged vector space of things that make sense and infer the right thing.

Any errors, whether regarding pronomial antecedents or otherwise, are my responsibility.

In July, I griped here about misleading news reports of a higher crash risk among texting truckers than among non-texting ones. I pointed out that the research quoted had not shown an increased crash risk, and in fact observed fewer crashes (zero, in fact) among the texting truckers. The data might suggest a decreased crash risk among texting truckers, I noted. The reason for the confusion was that crashes and near-crashes (which included sudden and possibly crash-preventing maneuvers) hadn’t been separated in the calculations. Nevertheless, the increased crash-or-near-crash risk was widely reported as an increased crash risk. I wondered whether more near crashes might in fact be a positive thing; those who occasionally swerve suddenly might be paying more attention to the road than those who rarely do.

Today, researchers and others are expressing surprise that just-in real crash data doesn’t support what they don’t realize the earlier research didn’t show in the first place. For example:

• Results of Study on Cellphone Use Surprise Researchers
• Cell phone bans do little to reduce crashes, study finds

If researchers (or journalists) are surprised by today’s news, they probably didn’t examine the research very closely. They may have believed the misleading headlines instead.

Disclaimers: I haven’t read all the research, and some studies might have in fact shown an increased crash risk, unlike the one I mentioned. That might be reason for real surprise. In addition, today’s data doesn’t specifically show that less phone use means no fewer accidents, because laws don’t always change behavior. But some of the reports I read did suggest that there was less phone use, yet no lower crash rate, in places that instituted bans.

Ironically, the crash data out today could make things worse. If drivers think phone use while driving is not as unsafe as previously thought, they might be less careful when using a phone while driving, and phone-related crashes might increase. Common sense suggests that multitasking requires greater concentration. If you do use a phone while driving, drive with even more care than usual. In other words, this might be one situation where being wary might have benefits, even when its not warranted by the facts – especially because being somewhat over-cautious while driving has no serious down side, it seems to me. (It’s not like it infringes upon hundreds of millions of people’s civil rights, like acting on other unwarranted fears can and does…)

A headline in today’s Washington Post is “Fewer Americans think Obama has advanced race relations, poll shows.” My statistics students know what I have to say about that: “fewer than what?” Yes, headlines are generally false, and the Post reports the statistics somewhat more carefully in the article. “On the eve of President Obama’s inauguration a year ago, nearly six in 10 Americans said his presidency would advance cross-racial ties. Now, about four in 10 say it has done so.”

According to the actual poll results, a year ago, 60 percent of Americans answered “help” to the question “Do you think Obama’s presidency will do more to (help) or more to (hurt) race relations in this country, or not make much of a difference?” Last week, 40 percent of Americans answered “help” TO A DIFFERENT QUESTION: “Do you think Obama’s presidency has done more to (help) or more to (hurt) race relations in this country, or has it not made much of a difference?”

Big deal. Not a story. Fewer Americans today also think they have died than thought last year that they would die.

Original title: Over 90% of Research Studies Make Me Want to Scream (P < 3E-12).

Shania Twain is in the news today. No, her new album still isn’t out, but her face is in the spotlight. It turns out someone “applied” the latest “research” to “determine” that she has the perfect face, “scientifically” speaking. The distance between her eyes and mouth are precisely 36% of the length of her face, and her interocular distance is exactly 46% of its width. These proportions, according to an article in press at Vision Research, are universally optimal (among low-resolution, mostly Photoshopped images of a few white women).

Garbage. Poppycock. Nonsense. Balderdash. Crap, crap, crap of a research paper, right from sentence 1: “Humans prefer attractive faces over unattractive ones.”

But you came here for the pictures. (more…)

Starting today, funny math is moving to a new and better home, www.lolmath.com. Vulpigeration and other serious number-related topics will stay here.

In a move that was widely expected, Procter and Gamble has ended its 53-year marketing relationship with Mr. Clean, whose eponymous line of cleaning products is one of the consumer goods giant’s most profitable brands.

In a statement Thursday, the company said Mr. Clean, 81, was “no longer the best representative” for its advertising. The action came just weeks after revelations that Clean had engaged in infidelities both before and after his 2004 marriage to pulp and paper company Georgia-Pacific’s icon, the Brawny Paper Towel Guy.

While tabloid rumors of infidelity had dogged Clean before, lack of hard evidence had allowed Proctor and Gamble to dismiss wipe up what it called “dirty rumors” about the well-known celebrity. During the Thanksgiving weekend, however, internet users searching for stain removal tips saw explicit pictures of Clean and Vin Diesel appear among Google’s live results.

Amid mounting evidence, Clean “came clean” last week in a series of statements on his web site, explaining that while what he did was wrong, he had “just tapped the wrong contact on my iPhone” when sending the photos. He added that he never intended his Facebook photos to be visible to Everyone, and he left open the possibility of a lawsuit against the social networking firm, claiming damages resulting from misleading defaults for the new Facebook privacy settings.

Clean has also made a public apology to Diesel, Procter and Gamble, and Guy, his partner since 1964. Guy and Clean were married in 2004 at their Martha’s Vineyard home. Neither Georgia-Pacific nor Diesel, who is not married, have spoken publicly about the revelations, and neither responded to our requests for a statement.

Ives Psalm 90 is to die for, and the rest of it is damn good, too. You can download DRM-free mp3 files from digstation here. It’s also available on iTunes and some other sites. It will be available as a CD at dessoff.org. An uncommon, fully rewarding look at American choral music.

On Thursday, November 19, and Friday, November 20, the Dessoff Chamber Choir backed up Ray Davies live at Town Hall in New York in a set of songs from the Kinks Choral Collection.

You can see all the tenors in this photograph from a superb collection posted to SmugMug by Arnie Goodman of Bluestormmusic.com and Elmore Magazine:

Tenors, L to R: Jeff Lunden, Andrew Willett, Daniel O’Brien, Steve Brautigam, Erol Tamerman, Tansal Arnas, Douglas Riccardi, Steve Kass

And here’s a YouTube clip of us singing. Friday’s concert was recorded for radio broadcast in early December. Stay tuned for details.

It was a fantastic gig. Ray, the band, and the sound and stage crew were all as nice as could be, and David Temple, the choir director was brilliant. Also brilliant was Dessoff soprano Christine Hoffman, without whom we couldn’t have done this. She prepared us superbly in the weeks before the concerts. Best of all was the crowd, who were wildly appreciative of the choir both during and after the show.

Finally, Dessoff would be happy to meet fans, friends, or supporters at our upcoming CD Release party:

Yesterday, the Italian postal service misprocessed a bunch of ATM and credit card transactions. Specifically, the virgola was shifted two places, appending two zeros to the transaction amount. There’s no telling exactly how this happened, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it had something—if not everything—to do with localization in one way or another. In Italy, a comma (virgola), not a period, precedes a number’s decimal part, but software might see things otherwise.

Some software interprets number strings according to the operating system localization (unless overridden). Other software ignores the OS localization. SQL Server’s CAST operator, for example, only accepts a period as the decimal separator, and it disregards commas in strings intended to represent numbers.

At least it does this as of 2005; previous versions followed a complicated set of rules in an attempt to disallow numbers that weren’t valid in the U.S., India, or China. In India (ones, thousands, lakhs, crore, thousand crore, lakhs crore, etc.), digit groups bounce between two and three digits, and 1,234,56,70,000.0 is a valid number. In China (yi1, wan4, yi4, wan4 yi4, etc.), it would be 123,4567,0000.0. Interpreting human-readable representations of numbers is no simple task. Explaining the issue isn’t much easier.

In all versions of SQL Server, this happens regardless of language or culture settings.

select cast('115,00' as money) as TooMuch;

TooMuch
---------------------
11500.00

[From Slashdot, noting ilsole24ore.com]

Early this morning, Wikileaks began posting alphanumeric pager messages from four carriers (Arch, Metrocall, Skytel, and Weblink_B) that were intercepted during a 24-hour period beginning early on September 11, 2001. Alphanumeric pager messages are unencrypted, and, like communications over a public 802.11 wireless network, they’re skimmable with the right (and not exotic) software and hardware.

• “Due to today’s tragic events, it makes sense to cut back wherever feasible on payroll. Expect a very light business day. Please call all stores and review payroll issues”
• “RING ALL CHICAGO AIPORTS AND EVERY MAJOR BUILDING DOWNTOWN. BUSH IS DOING A SPEECH.  THIS IS SERIOUS POOH..”
• “Holy crap, are you watching the news.”
• “I hope you have gone home by now. The BoA tower and space needle here are closed. I suspect tall buildings across the country will be closed. Take care my love.-cb”

This might be the most interesting public data mine since the AOL breach. The total volume is far less, but unlike the AOL data, this data hasn’t been anonymized. There are full names, phone numbers, and other identifying information in the mix.