Dean Foster's Rants

Rants:

• Lovely rant by Schneier on the uselessness of TSA.
• A few weeks ago, there was a cool graph showing Obama's intrade futures price vs SP500. I took a stab at looking at this data for by 471 class. So do you believe it is real or not?
• The number of Israelis killed in road accidents since independence in 1948 is greater than the number killed in wars and terrorist attacks. In 2002, 522 Israelis were killed in road accidents. 20,500 Israelis have been killed in wars and terrorist attacks between May 1948 and May 2003, compared with 21,600 killed in road accidents. (source) So why do good numerate people worry more about my visiting Israel for the terror than for the autos? (Aside: the number of death from cars in Israel is about 1/2 that for a comparable number of Americans.)
• Science presented a silly graphic a few years ago. So we (Robert Stine, Kate Propert and I) wrote a comment on it, which Science was unwilling to publish. The advantage of it now being a web publication, is that the cool dynamic graphic works better than it would in hard copy. Samantha Bee did a lovely piece using this trick for the daily show (SC State Representative Tries To Amend Constitution To Allow Free-Pour Bottles In Bars, season 9, episode 37).
• I actual believe that cryptograph can solve some things. Bruce Schneier used to believe, but his current book he loses the faith. Here is my review of his book.
• Let me weigh in on the teaching of evolution in our schools. I actually believe evolution is the most beautiful and accurate theory ever created. But what is taught in schools is more often the religion of evolution.
• Adi Wyner and I worked on a blog on politically incorrect statistics for awhile. Some more of our rants can be found there.

• A great rant from Bjorn Lomborg: "If you reduce your child's intake of fruits and vegetables by just 0.03 grams a day (that's the equivalent of half a grain of rice) when you opt for more expensive organic produce, the total risk of cancer goes up, not down. Omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and your child is worse off." (Gelman discussed this quote.)
• A nice tirade by Norvig against Chomsky.
• Dawkin's wrote this rant for the Guardian that I really wish I had written. He points out that religion dehumanizes life in ways that can't be matched by science. (I've mirrored this rant here.) (see also Salman Rushdie.)
• Deirdre McCloskey wrote a nice rant (ungated version) against the usual accedemic policy of getting letters for P & T.
• Emails sent to me (foster@wharton.upenn.edu) become the property of the University of Pennsylvania unless they are encrypted.¹ Consider this policy a first step towards Stallman's nightmare.

Raves:

• Ok, let me put in some raves just for balance. Tom Weller wrote a cool book called science made stupid. (I now own two copies of which I'm very proud.)
• A nice article to make you feel better about having to resubmit your research papers.
• So you have a cool new body fat scale (say from amazon) but is it calibrated? So does it have a bias for you personally? One easy way to check is using pennies, a few liter bottles and this page.
• Using randomized trials in society is to my mind the single best advance we could make. The article points out that the costs are much lower than many people expect and the rewards can be extreme.
• Philosophers have written many papers about what is called the "surprise quiz." I've only written one and its in the form of a story.
• I was very lucky to be born under ophiuchus, the 13th sign of the zodiac.
• There is lots of research that shows that the best way to learn something is to struggle and mostly succeed. So for example, if you want to learn vocabulary, reading with material just above your level is prefect. (The idea behind AR for example.) So a perfect application for this theory would be to learn IPA to read texts in your native language written in this format. But on the entire web, all I can find are the following 5 articles.. Too bad! (And even those five have been deleted. So the link is via the very cool wayback machine.)
• This site has you listen to various accents and see how they are recorded in a standard notation. To get a handle on the IPA listen here.
• I like red wines. They are pretty good on a alcohol/calorie basis. They are even better for overall health.
• The Washington Post ran an obit on my dad. (cached) He wrote a time line of his life a few years back as an exercise for his memory (this was post bike accident).
• Ever wonder how many people play on a team? We put this list together.
• I love high dimensional spaces.
• My favorite wine glasses are available from Robert Dane made them and has a gallery.
• I own all the books written by Terry Pratchet. You should start too!

• 29 tips for a healthier life.
• This is a stress test which I heard about as a child. I'm amazed that so few people know this research. Basically, changes in life are stressful--AND stress leads to measurable health problems.
• A cute dot counting test . It is supposed correlate with your math ability. But no one knows why this should be.
• Religion, lack of control and seeing patterns: all here (ungated) from the new scientist.
• Cute graphic showing imigration to the US over 100 years.
• Have you ever wondered how to convert an amazon sales rank to sales per week? Here is an answer.
• Gopen and Swan wrote a nice piece on writing: "The Science of Scientific Writing."
• XKCD is a nice cartoon which often has nice jokes about linux and sometimes about statistics: boy friend, correlation, and null hypothesis.
• The American Scientist has an article ("Animal Contests as Evolutionary Games") on spiders that yeild to intruders. Very nice evolutionary game theory.
• A nice discussion of risk and the preception of risk. I'm not sure I believe all his numbers.
• I mostly program in C++. But two other languages I use are Ruby and R. It is nice to see that the poplularity of both are now doing pretty well.
• My friend and colleague Mike Steele has an interesting twist on the impending bird flu epedemic. Namely, what about the economy?
• Here is a lovely article on procrastination. The author would encorage you to put of reading it to work on better things. But your sufing the web now aren't you? So give it a read!
• Lyle Ungar wrote up a way of saving wine that I find very useful. Though now a days, we just put the wine in plastic bottles that we can crumple to squeeze out all the extra air. Not as pretty--but keeps out the O2 just as well.

• A nice deflator which computes the value of US dollars over time. Useful when reading about history.
• A cool science site is based on the idea of a the 3rd culture.
• cut-the-knot is a wonderful web site for expository mathematics. Now I just have to get him to add statistics and I won't have to teach any more!
• My favorite weather view of philly (I also like this radar, and this 10 day forecast). (NYC: NOAA, uswx) (SEA: radar,uswx
• My mom wrote Deni's song about the Marriott.

• For a nice discussion of the similarity between power laws and log normals see this paper.