Steve Kass

Kevin Underhill* emailed me today about the Schwarzenegger veto letter. Specifically, Kevin wondered whether “it might be possible to calculate the odds against this arrangement of letters being entirely random, as the Governor’s office has claimed.”

Kevin wasn’t the only one to wonder about the odds and contact a math professor.

Several hours after Kevin wrote me, SFweekly.com published “Odds Schwarzenegger’s ‘I F–k You’ Message Was Coincidental? About One in Two Billion, Says Math Prof.” SFweekly.com quoted Stephen Devlin, a mathematician at University of San Francisco, and Gregory McColm, a mathematician at the University of South Florida, and printed various tiny chances, including a) 1 in 10 million, b) 1 in 100 million, and c) 1 in 2 billion. These are (using rough estimates of initial-letter frequencies in English words) the chances a) that seven randomly selected lines of English text begin with f, u, c, k, y, o, and u, in that order, b) that eight randomly selected lines of English text begin with i, f, u, c, k, y, o, and u, in that order, and c) that the first letters of eight randomly selected lines of English text and two blank lines separating those lines into three groups appear in the sequence i, blank, f, u, c, k, blank, y, o, u. The chances of c) are 1 in 2.1 billion, by my calculation, but no matter—only the order of magnitude is of interest here.

Whether many visitors to SFweekly.com (well, male ones of any persuasion) read the piece is questionable. It appeared next to two photo links with more click appeal than “Blah Blah F–k Blah Blah Math Prof.”: Exotic Erotic Ball (image of exotically costumed ladies kissing) and San Franciso’s Hottest Chefs (image of boyish chef wearing five o’clock shadow and a uniform, smiling seductively).

Similar calculations appear with less distraction elsewhere.

For the record, even before making any calculations, I was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the governor meant full well to say “fuck you.” In a later blog post, however, I’ll try to explain that the unlikelihood of “fuck you” or “i fuck you” appearing in a letter isn’t in and of itself a smoking gun.

*I’ve e-known Kevin for a couple of months now, ever since I introduced myself with an unceremonious, if politely worded email to the effect of “your arithmetic is wrong.” More details here. It turns out to be a better way to meet people that you might think.

Kevin finds fortune at Shook, Hardy, and Bacon (shb.com, Alexa US traffic rank 292,302, with 132 sites linking in), and he finds fame at Lowering the Bar (www.loweringthebar.net, Alexa US traffic rank 59,588, with 145 sites linking in).

The following subheadline on the Scientific American website caught my eye today (and not only because of the missing period):

New research makes the case for hard tests, and suggests an unusual technique that anyone can use to learn

I may be a bit thick, because neither the article nor the research paper it mentioned suggested any unusual technique to me. But this was better than my last wild goose chase reading episode, when I vainly sought a footnote on a cereal box (there was a dagger: †, but no footnote. Can you believe that?).

Henry Roediger and Bridgid Finn, the Scientific American article’s authors, write that researchers Kornell, Hays, and Bjork found that “learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so that students make errors.” There’s that pesky word “better.” Better than what? The eternal unanswered question. My guess is that Scientific American is reporting that Kornell et al. have found that learning under a) conditions arranged so that students make errors is better than learning under b) conditions arranged so that students do not make errors. In other words, that the researchers found errorful learning to be better than errorless learning. Not that it’s a bad article, but it would be nice if Roediger and Finn had stated what they’re reporting a bit more clearly. (This is why I give writing assignments to my statistics students. By the end of the semester, they better learn not to use adjectives like better without answering “Better than what?”.)

Anyway, Kornell et al. do mention errorless learning in their paper, recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition® (yes, the name of the journal is a registered trademark), but they don’t study it. The abstract notes that they examine the question of “what happens when one cannot answer a test question—does an unsuccessful retrieval attempt impede future learning or enhance it?” Kornell et al. didn’t exactly examine this question either, because they didn’t (and possibly couldn’t) isolate what part of the learning in their scenario was “future” learning. In addition, they only studied learning after wrong answers, so one must be careful not to assume their research sheds light on getting test questions wrong vs. getting them right. (Suppose a researcher reported that “Student learning among African-Americans is enhanced when they are given test questions they cannot answer.” If the researcher only studied African-Americans and made no comparison to other populations, the reported finding might easily be misinterpreted.)

What Kornell et al. did was compare two scenarios for learning previously unknown information. One scenario was unsuccessful retrieval attempts (the students were asked to provide the not-yet-learned information as answers to test questions, and they answered incorrectly). In this scenario, the retrieval attempt was followed by feedback that included a brief presentation of the new information (i.e., the correct test question answer). The second scenario was a longer-lasting presentation of the new information with no retrieval attempt (the students were not asked to answer a test question, and it’s unclear in some of the experiments whether the students knew what kind of test question they would later be asked). Not surprisingly, unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhanced learning (as measured by scores on a test containing questions like those in the retrieval attempt), when compared to presentation of new information with no retrieval attempts. Despite the Scientific American article’s subheadline, this research makes no case that “hard tests” are better for learning than non-hard tests. They may be, but this research doesn’t help us figure it out. The research does support the value of tests, hard or not-hard, so long as there’s feedback with the right answer.

Almost every semester, I use the AOL Breach data as a point of departure for something in at least one of my classes. The data is fascinating. Most data is fascinating, but this data is particularly so: at once shocking, funny, creepy, poignant, sad, frightening, noble, ignoble, shrewd, and lewd. It’s also rich in the way data can be rich. It’s completeness—for a sample of several thousand AOL accounts, it includes the complete account search history during March, April, and May of 2006—which includes timestamped search strings and the result rank and destination of clicks-through, makes it ripe for discovering all sorts of patterns of human thought and behavior.

It’s AOL data week in one of my classes now. This morning, I proposed several nontrivial questions about the data that could be answered with SQL queries. We looked at the results and discussed what they might say about the unwitting study subjects. Then I asked my students to suggest some questions of their own. What are the typical time-of-day and day-of-week patterns of an individual AOL customer’s searches? Are there identifiable differences in the patterns (and by extension in the sleep, social, and perhaps employment or school behavior) of people whose searches included, say, “britney”? For what kinds of searches do users most often click through several pages of results? And so on.

One of my students suggested an excellent simple question. What are the most common searches of the form “how to …”? Out of millions of queries in the AOL data, there were many thousands of “how to … ?” searches. The most frequent was “how to tie a tie,” requested 92 times by a total of 47 distinct users. The rest of the top ten (in terms of most distinct users asking the question) were how to write a resume, gain weight, have sex, get pregnant, write a book, write a bibliography, start a business, lose weight, and make money, each sought by a dozen or more different people. AOL converted the queries to lower case and removed much of the punctuation, but they didn’t correct spelling. Consequently, how to masterbate and how to masturbate appear separately at ranks 49 and 51 respectively. The question would have nearly hit the top 10 without the misspellings.

Here’s a PDF file of the top 1000 “how to” queries submitted through AOL explorer by a sample of AOL users in the spring of 2006. You can probably guess that it’s not safe for work. Although there are no pictures, plenty of sex, drugs, and gambling is spelled out, and there are more than a few questions likely to offend in one way or another. Have a look.

Mom, in front of a Resort Airlines C-46 Commando, probably on her honeymoon in 1950, but surely before September 28, 1953. The plane in the photo crashed at Louisville airport that day and was subsequently written off.

 
 
 
 
 
 
. 
 
 
 

 
.

Not long after my recent experience of laughing and throwing up, I took preventive measures, or what I thought were preventive measures, to keep it from happening again. I added a couple of F**news [obscenity censored] domains to my firewall’s list of blocked sites.

Not long after I added them, my Internet connection started acting up. Just the browsing part. Lots of broken image links, web pages loading without style sheets, and not a few “not available” or “may have moved permanently” errors, sometimes on major domains like bing and Google. Facebook, several news sites, and Weather Underground were especially troublesome. It was strictly a browser thing, a little worse on Chrome maybe, but at the same time Chrome told me the page was unavailable, I could ping the AWOL site without a problem.

It was mysterious enough that I even tightened my router and modem cables. I finally figured it out, but newsgroups, blogs, and Google search results, which usually help, didn’t have the answer. Maybe this post will help someone out.

The domain I’d newly blocked didn’t have a static IP address. It’s an akamaized domain, it turns out, that resolves to any of a dozen or so numeric IP addresses, and the resolution changes every minute or less. About 10% of the Internet seems to live on those same dozen or so IP addresses, too. (Among the domains there are static.ak.fbcdn.net, i.telegraph.co.uk, and abcnews.com.)

My firewall was blocking what it thought was the right IP address, but when the IP addresses of these akamaized sites flipflopped, the firewall was suddenly blocking the wrong site. Moments later, maybe it was blocking nothing, then the site I’d added, then different wrong sites…

Insert various image and DNS caching mechanisms between me and the Internet, and it’s an erratic mess of a mystery. At least it was for me. No matter how bad it was, though, it usually got better in 10 or 15 minutes. I didn’t go so far as to start using OpenDNS, which was one web-grown remedy I heard about, but I can imagine it might have changed the caching and resolution landscape enough to have made some difference. Enabling or disabling Google’s DNS prefetching, another web remedy, didn’t work for me. Once I unblocked the offensive domains, the Internet was butter again.

If you’re having this problem (the dodgy Internet problem, not the laughing and throwing up problem), first try running a traceroute on one of the problem sites you can’t browse to. If traceroute says it’s tracing a route to something like a20.g.akamai.net, or if successive traceroutes over a few minutes show different IP addresses for the domain, it’s possible something between you and the Internet is blocking one route to some of the akamaized web.

Despite the vicious insinuations, Obama and his supporters aren’t cruel and thoughtless—they aren’t hiding a “throw Granny under the bus” clause in the health care reform bill. Keeping Granny alive is one of the few things Americans agree on for now. Obama unequivocally refutes the insinuation. At the same time, Obama staunchly defends against a loud challenge to his plan to throw nannies under the bus instead.  Nannies, gardeners, food handlers, farm workers, janitors, if they’re undocumented immigrants, throw them all under the bus. No matter how many millions of them there are, no matter how hard they work for how little pay and benefits they get, no matter that they pay taxes, contribute to the local economy, no matter anything. They aren’t Americans. Throw them all under the bus.

The undocumented of America’s hard-working, poorest laborers, harvesting, packing, preparing, and serving our and our children’s food; caretakers responsible to our children and our homes; gardeners keeping our grounds beautiful. Them. Throw them under the bus. Don’t give them access to affordable health care.

America’s undocumented workers and their families deserve health care just like everyone living in this country. Grievously, no one, no one sees the value or the ethical imperative, or the public health benefits, to treat the undocumented workers fairly.

Quoting Representative Mike Pence on Van Jones:

His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.

Mike, whose extremist views and coarse rhetoric do have a place in the public debate? 

Pence is the House sponsor of the “Broadcaster Freedom Act,” which would prohibit the FCC from repromulgating the Fairness Doctrine. Not that the FCC is likely to do so any time soon, nor that they necessarily should, but Pence must really, really want no one to overrule him and his supporters about what should be kept out of the public debate.

Speaking about Pence’s supporters, click here to read Rebel Reports’ Jeremy Scahill on Pence, Blackwater/Xe, and other stuff.

This concludes my contribution to the public debate for today. Thank you for listening.

• [link] Google News results for “Barrack Obama”
• [link] Google News results for “Barak Obama”
• [link] Google News results for “Barrak Obama”
• [link] Google News results for “Brack Obama”
• [link] Google News results for “Barck Obama”

They might look harmless and play cheery songs, but El Segundo, California councilman Don Brann is warning parents and protecting children from them: ICE CREAM TRUCKS. Brann warns, according to the Los Angeles Times, that ice cream trucks

• Deplete children’s pocket money
• Distract them as they walk home
• Make it harder for local sports leagues to raise money by selling snacks
• Often sell dangerous toys, including fire crackers [sic] or replicas of guns

Brann doesn’t want to issue a permit for “someone to do this in our town.”

I’ve got my doubts about whether the “KFC Double Down” is a hoax or for real. If it were real, wouldn’t someone have uploaded a photo of it to Flickr other than the photo in the news? And as far as I can tell, there’s only one source of all the reporting. One picture of the menu, one picture of the food, and one video of a commercial. Ain’t no one gone to Omaha to check it out? [The Consumerist, Treehugger, Orlando Sentinel, etc.]

Whether the Double Down is real or not, this is a good occasion to point something out:

“Associated Content” is not a real news organization.

A commenter to one blog let readers know the Double Down was real, because the “real” media had reported it (Associated Content, that is). No. AC only sorta looks like real news. Its contributors are all freelancers, and while some of them do a reasonable job of summarizing the web, others don’t or they just make stuff up. It’s like reading bad college papers (which is different from reading bad journalism). Unfortunately, Google News seems to have been hoodwinked into treating them like a real news organization. Watch out for them.

The Double Down, on the other hand – yeah, I’d try one, hold the sauce please.

Update (August 24, 2009): Rene Lynch of Daily Dish, a Los Angeles Times blog, writes, “We lobbed a call to a media representative,” and that “[the] sandwich does indeed exist.” I’m beginning to believe this thing exists, despite Lynch’s odd prose. It would have been simple to write “A KFC media representative confirmed that the sandwich does exist.” Unless of course Daily Dish only lobbed a call, but didn’t communicate with the media rep, or if the media rep had no connection with KFC. Daily Dish reports that the sandwich is being tested in Providence, Rhode Island, and Omaha. I’m driving to Boston this weekend, and I’m on the fence as to whether it’s worth swinging by Providence on the way back.