What's Your Rank?

What's your job score?

Ms. Healthy Gopher:
Occupational Safety: 89

STFU&GBTW:
Motion Picture Editor 19
Computer Programmer 18
not sure which would apply - maybe you count as 18.5

Mr. HT
Computer Programmer 18

Mr. Gopher
Electrical Engineer: 62

Dr.Nuke: Physicist 12
Heather: Attorney: 82
The Author: Author: 93

Of course, there's always top and bottom rank:
Mathematician: 1
Lumberjack: 200

statistics - bizarre indeed

Blogspot has a new tab/function on my page (well, I assume everyone else's too): Stats. I don't know if you can see it, or if it's only available to me. Being inveterately curious, I - of course - looked. It has a graph of page views vs. time. I can't tell if that includes me or not. (update:yes, it does) One tab in Stats provides a list of post titles and number of views for that particular page. The maximum by a looooong way was Scary Hairdos in the Reichstag on Election Day.

It also has a "traffic source", which makes no sense to me. It also leaves me wondering which country/corporation uses .tr This tab lists "Referring URL" and "Referring Sites". Neither one makes sense to me. Given this ... what's the point? I've been interested recently in how statistics is used to further misguide the ignorant/uneducated (which ever you think is less offensive a term, though I really do mean both). If so, these statistics are simply incomprehensible and therefore harmless. I think.

That said, the other function, Audience, is actually interesting, since it's graphic: a world map with countries (and US states) in different colors based upon viewing traffic, a text list of those countries, and pie charts indicating which browser program is used for looking at the page. I realize a large number of the US views might be myself, if the system doesn't consider whether or not I'm the viewer. But the rest of the world? Germany: a couple of friends & in-laws there. France: one in-law there. UK - French resident moved there. But ... Canada, Russia, Netherlands, India, Luxembourg, and Malaysia??

Inveterate curiosity sated: Went to list of how many views per post from today. My viewing is included in the numbers. Therefore the number of views from the US is not really *that* impressive, since a significant - if small - % is mine. I'm not in Turkey or Malaysia, though...

how accurate is good?

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
—John Tukey,
quoted on flowingdata

good ... or not?

SPIEGEL: Polls don't interest you at all?

Merkel: I acknowledge them, but they do not determine my actions.

I'm torn ... is this good that she doesn't run her government based upon someone's limited statistically biased question surveys? Or does this mean she ignores the population?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,726433,00.html

71% chance

We had the nicest Summer I can remember in my entire adult life. Really.

I'm not entirely sure what constitutes a "mild Winter" here in the Northern Midwest. We're supposed to get one, I guess. And, based upon Sunday's visit to an orchard, the woolly bear caterpillars support NOAA's predictions. (A fact I pointed out as one was crawling up Jr.Gopher#2's arm, to the great distress of Jr.Gopher#1.)

The 10-day straight run of temperatures below 0°F ( -18°C) last January reinforced my need for long johns to survive waiting for the bus/train. It actually got to -25°F ( -32°C) one night; it was up to -22 at 7 a.m. Mind you, that's here in urban-warmed Minneapolis. Up in Ely & Embarrass, it was -36°F ( -38°C) with a wind-chill of -52°F ( -47°C).
The metric units are for Mr.Gopher & Dr.Nuke. Sorry, Joachim, I figure everyone ought to have goofy names, and The Nuclear Physicist takes too much time to type. If you'd rather something else, let me know.

Ug. I'm okay if the temps get to 0°F; they don't really need to go further to convince me it's Winter here.

Now, for those of you who get annoyed when older people - say, your parents or grandparents - say "it was colder in my day" ... well, it isn't really global warming. The method used to calculate windchill changed. Rather than measure wind speed at 10 feet above ground, they now calculate it at 5 feet. Less wind = less windchill.

At 0-10 mph, the old & new are about the same. By the time you get up to 100 mph, they're back to be the same again. So, if it's calm, or if you're in the middle of an F-5 tornado, you can tell Grandma that it's really the same as the last century.

7 Deadly Sins - coming to your front door

A couple of geographers from Kansas State University wrangled up a host of national statistical databases, massaged the numbers and used them to quantify lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride on a county-by-county basis across the U.S. ... Greed was calculated by comparing average incomes with the total number of inhabitants living beneath the poverty line.
Graphs are located at: http://www.lasvegassun.com/photos/galleries/2009/mar/25/seven-deadly-sins-nationwide-hot-spots/

Minnesota is pretty cold on most of them... except Envy, with Hennepin & Ramsey Counties leading the pack. This translates to Minneapolis & St. Paul.

Focus on what is truly important

I was just chatting with a classmate about kids & parents' delusions/obsessions about their children's astronomical intelligence/athleticism/whatever. She said there are studies indicating that - regardless of what the parents think - by the time kids are teenagers, they move toward a more obvious normal. That parents' beliefs/hopes of their wunderkind is based upon a child developing faster, not further.

As I told her, as long as my sons grow up to be self-sufficient men who are capable of giving and receiving love ... anything else is icing on the cake of life.

Death, sooner or later -- Taxes now

good god, this is great... you have got to see this

Death & Taxes: a visual guide to where your tax dollars go

A poster of the 2009 federal budget, in gross detail. (really detailed, really gross) You'll need to zoom in a bit, before the click-and-drag function works. This has a list of all the major projects of all the executive departments. Wow.

A statistics paper I was required to read was titled: How to Present Data Badly, Wainer, American Statistician, 1984(?). It's not the calculations of statistics, just how to display data - badly. If you could find a copy and want to see how the media and government are dis-informing you, I recommend it. One of Wainer's recommendations for how to display your data poorly is a metric of 'data density'. Measuring how many data points are presented per square inch. A couple of points of real data swimming in a huge graph with other pretty non-data is a great distraction. This budget picture has a huge data density.


p.s. if you want to read the Wainer article, I'll send you a copy. It's fascinating

Δvote = 206

1,211,565 vs. 1,211,359

The Never Ending Saga of our state's senate race: Franken(DFL) is trying to get Hennepin County (where Minneapolis is) to re-assess absentee ballots. County says "it's not our problem, it's the state's problem". Coleman(R) is claiming:
Matt Haapoja, an attorney with the Minnesota Republican Party, accused the Democrats of trying to create votes. "This was clearly an example of the Franken campaign trying to find more votes where there aren't votes," Haapoja said.

Let me guess - the Republicans will graciously decline any 'made-up' votes for Coleman?

Where are those 207 votes Franken hopes to find? There is no state standard for storing votes, so he'll have to look:

St.Louis County: "They've (Rep.) had representatives [in front of the elections office] since Election Day," Tynjala said. "There's three of them. Apparently, they had them out in the car over the weekend." 400 ballots are locked in a safe in Hibbing ... The rest of the ballots are all up in our attic"

Douglas County: "They're locked in a secure room in the courthouse. There are only two keys to the room, and I'm not going to tell you where that room is."

McLeod County: "... in effect, incarcerated her ballots in the county jail. "They're in a cell, and the jail correctional officers have given me both of the keys to the cell, so no one can go in there...".

Chisago County: locked in next door office

Polk County: locked in county jail

Other popular locations: closets, secure safes, vaults

I must admit this seems much less of a C.F. than Florida 8 years ago. Although the accusations of voter fraud and legal charges are already making lawyers rich.

There are other opinions, of course. "I have no reason to think at all that the four judges and the Secretary of State who sit on the canvassing board are going to be affected by all of this bitching and moaning that the two campaigns are engaged in right now," Smith said.

My favorite suggestion, so far is:

The MN Statutes website is down, so I can't make a direct citation. But what I remember is that in the event of a tie, the election is to be decided by "chance", not necessarily a coin flip. For example, some ties have been decided by drawing cards and the high card wins.

I propose that the "chance" be the purchase of 10 Powerball tickets for every drawing (2 per week) until one of them wins the jackpot. That way, we can draw out the suspense AND keep either of these Bozos from occupying the Senate for quite some time.

Got Vote?

Think nationally, act locally.

Miller points to the ouster of ACORN's founder earlier this year after the controller, the founder's brother, had embezzled nearly a million dollars. --- maybe he should move to Alaska. --- Lewis, ACORN's chief organizer, says the group's profile has never been so high. "This election, this linking us to Obama in order to try to damage him, that's a great opportunity," she says.

And, since "others" (i.e., the RNC) are complaining about ACORN nationally (accused of getting people to register multiple times), the Hennepin County (i.e., Mpls) attorney is checking into them for potential fraud. ooooh, horrid! Fraud, in this case, means holding the registration cards for longer than the 10-day submission deadline. A deadline intended to avoid a document log-jam for the county, since they enter the registrations on the same day they receive them. Strangely unmentioned here is the fact the county attorney also said they would accept all of the registrations as valid; it's just that they might nail the poor schmuck in question anyway.

On an 80% positive note:
The Sec.State expects an 80% voter turn out, while achieving a 90% voter registration by Election Day (we have same-day-at-polls-registration).

A recent surge in Minnesota voter registration — 60,000 new voters in a little more than a month — has pushed statewide voter registration to an all-time high.

An analysis shows half of the new registrations come from three (most liberal & most populous) counties that voted heavily for John Kerry in 2004, potentially giving Democratic hopeful Barack Obama a boost in a critical battleground state as the 2008 presidential election enters the homestretch.

"These results actually reflect our strategy of focusing aggressively on new voters and current nonvoters and getting them engaged in this election," said Jeff Blodgett, Obama's state campaign director. StPl PiPress

Those 3 counties have been referred to as "ground zero for our get-out-the-vote efforts" (by DFL). Someone has been hammering voter registration on campus. I just got an email from the U's president reminding me to register to vote. My Tuesday evening class professor gave us permission to miss class for voting, since most have either work or a long bus ride rather prohibiting getting to class by 4:40. I've been accosted twice to get me to register. There have been postings all over the school of public health to get people to register (although I didn't notice which group posted them).

See, class, you should have paid attention in math class.