TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| Advances Offer Path to Further Shrink Computer Chips Researchers say they can overcome a barrier to the continued rapid miniaturization of computer memory. feeds.nytimes.com |
Turtle egg rescue at space center billed success By MARCIA DUNN 2010-09-08T20:03:09ZCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- The unprecedented turtle rescue effort at NASA's Kennedy Space Center is winding down.... hosted.ap.org |
Can We Build in a Brighter Shade of Green? Advocates of the passive-house standard for home design say it could greatly improve on America’s drafty houses. But it has caught on only in Europe. feeds.nytimes.com |
Scientists see new bugs, frogs in Papua New Guinea By KRISTEN GELINEAU 2010-10-07T11:01:59ZSYDNEY (AP) -- A thumbnail-sized frog with a long snout, a brilliant green katydid with bright pink eyes and a mouse with a white-tipped tail are among 200 species scientists have discovered in Papua New Guinea.... hosted.ap.org |
Chances are, we'd all benefit from a statistics lesson | Frank Swain With large numbers of scientists about to become unemployed, the public is going to need some serious protection from statisticians who go bad, says Frank SwainToday, in case you didn't know, is World Statistics Day, a UN-sponsored event celebrating the "many contributions and achievements of official statistics". I'm not sure why the UN felt the need to emphasise that only official statistics would be honoured, as if implying that unofficial statistics like your annual take-home salary or the number of women you've bedded are somehow less credible as contributions and achievements. Starting at the aesthetically pleasing time of 20:10 (on 20/10/2010), the Royal Statistical Society Centre for Statistical Education kicks off a 10-year statistical literacy campaign, getstats, aimed at helping Britons understand numbers about numbers, so that we can make better-informed choices and live better lives as a result.This is somewhat ironic, as the statistic weighing on the minds of most mathematicians (and of all British scientists) is the proposed 25% cuts to the UK science budget. If that happens, we shouldn't be surprised if itinerant scientists start popping up on street corners selling copper stripped from solenoids and offering to read your fortune with multi-dimensional Myers-Briggs matrices. The most dangerous among these Royal Society rascals will be the statisticians, precisely because they understand odds better than we can.One such tool of their trade might be a set of non-transitive dice. A curious little toy not well-known beyond geek circles, a typical set has three different dice, all with an unusual number of spots on each face. The game is to choose a die and roll against your opponent. Whoever rolls highest wins, and best of 10 takes the pot. But no matter which die you choose, the shady nerd will almost always win. If you decide to try a double-or-nothing round, using the trickster's preferred die, the geek will still win. How?Non-transitive dice are the mathematician's version of rock-paper-scissors. Each die is strong against one of the dice, and weak against the other. Trying to pick the "best" die is pointless 窶 so long as the huckster chooses their die second, he or she will always win on average. It's like trying to win at rock-paper-scissors where your opponent only ever casts after you.Pondering this, I wondered aloud whether the nation's favourite fact-based card game, Top Trumps, was just an example of a glorified set of non-transitive dice. Armed with a pack of limited edition 007 Best of Bond Top Trumps, I began to pick apart the secrets of the deck, with help from James Grime, a mathematical wunderkind whose many wonderful videos on YouTube explore the world of numbers.First question: was the highest-scoring card in the pack also the most likely to win a round? Answer: Not necessarily. Despite having twice as many points as Sean Connery in total, the sharply dressed henchman Oddjob is marginally less likely to come out best in any particular draw. (The highest-scoring card, in case you're wondering, is the aptly-named Xenia Onatopp, played by Famke Janssen's thighs in Goldeneye). Here I'd used the total number of points for comparing cards, which is a bit of a lazy fudge, and Grime told me as much. Much better would be to ask what the average outcome for every single one of the 870 possible combinations of cards would be. And here it is, in a slightly awkward Excel chart:By tracing a horizontal line against the character's name, you can see how well they fare against the others. Xenia Onatopp's path is mostly green, indicating that she wins on average. Poor old CIA agent Felix Leiter almost never wins.Top Trumps is a game of two halves, and if it's your opponent's turn, they're likely to pick their character's strongest suit. So the "best" card also has to be able to defend itself when attacked by another card's strongest suit. Here the set up of Top Trumps is more telling. The six James Bond cards always have more than 50% chance of surviving a challenge by any other card, no matter what suit the opponent chooses. (The only blip in this near-flawless performance is by George Lazenby, funnily enough.) Just look at the defensive strength of MI6's premier Scottish secret agent compared to pint-sized personal assistant Nick Nack:So all-in-all, Top Trumps isn't a set of non-transitive dice, because there isn't an unbroken chain of cards that each have a >50% chance of beating the previous card. Some characters are destined to be bit players (sorry, Miss Moneypenny). Grime, however, had other ideas. In a flourish of genius he produced values for a perfectly balanced set of Top Trumps, where every character could beat the previous card more than 50% of the time, a Penrose Staircase fashioned from Top Trumps cards.I spoke to Ben Meakin, the product development manager at Winning Moves (the company responsible for Top Trumps) who has personally developed more than 70 different editions of Top Trumps. He confirmed that each card in a pack of Top Trumps could win a hand, even if some weren't as good as others. "Every card has a chance," he said. "But a couple will be Top Trumps 窶 literal top cards." The trick was to make the game exciting while still making it winnable for both players. To obscure the relative strengths and weakness of the cards, different scales were used for each suit: "In this way we can engage kids and get them to think about probabilities, which is an important educational part of Top Trumps." I tell Meakin about Grime's perfectly balanced set of non-transitive cards, and ask if a "Statistician's Top Trumps" using this formula is possible in the near future. "Well, we get a lot of requests," he says, "Everything from farm machinery to serial killers." I sense that's a no.Dreams of entrepreneurship dashed, there's nothing left for me and Grime now other than to begin trawling dive bars and pool joints like a nerdy reimagining of Fast Eddie and Vincent, suckering money out of unsuspecting punters with our curiously numbered dice and mathematically stacked decks of Top Trumps cards. Now more than ever, the British public needs a campaign for statistical literacy, lest we fall victim to the approaching wave of scientifically trained shysters.MathematicsScience policyMathematicsSpending review 2010Tax and spendingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |