Author Archives: legallysociable

Rare events may happen multiple times due to the law of truly large numbers plus the law of combinations

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Rare events don’t happen all the time but they may still happen multiple times if there are lots of chances for their occurrence:

Improbability Principle tells us that we should not be surprised by coincidences. In fact, we should expect coincidences to happen. One of the key strands of the principle is the law of truly large numbers. This law says that given enough opportunities, we should expect a specified event to happen, no matter how unlikely it may be at each opportunity. Sometimes, though, when there are really many opportunities, it can look as if there are only relatively few. This misperception leads us to grossly underestimate the probability of an event: we think something is incredibly unlikely, when it’s actually very likely, perhaps almost certain…

For another example of how a seemingly improbable event is actually quite probable, let’s look at lotteries. On September 6, 2009, the Bulgarian lottery randomly selected as the winning numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, 42. There is nothing surprising about these numbers. The digits that make up the numbers are all low values—1, 2, 3, 4 or 5—but that is not so unusual. Also, there is a consecutive pair of values, 23 and 24, although this happens far more often than is generally appreciated (if you ask people to randomly choose six numbers from 1 to 49, for example, they choose consecutive pairs less often than pure chance would).

What was surprising was what happened four days later: on September 10, the Bulgarian lottery randomly selected as the winning numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, 42—exactly the same numbers as the previous week. The event caused something of a media storm at the time. “This is happening for the first time in the 52-year history of the lottery. We are absolutely stunned to see such a freak coincidence, but it did happen,” a spokeswoman was quoted as saying in a September 18 Reuters article. Bulgaria’s then sports minister Svilen Neikov ordered an investigation. Could a massive fraud have been perpetrated? Had the previous numbers somehow been copied?

In fact, this rather stunning coincidence was simply another example of the Improbability Principle, in the form of the law of truly large numbers amplified by the law of combinations. First, many lotteries are conducted around the world. Second, they occur time after time, year in and year out. This rapidly adds up to a large number of opportunities for lottery numbers to repeat. And third, the law of combinations comes into effect: each time a lottery result is drawn, it could contain the same numbers as produced in any of the previous draws. In general, as with the birthday situation, if you run a lottery n times, there are n × (n ? 1)/2 pairs of lottery draws that could have a matching string of numbers.

Rare events happening multiple times within a short time also tends to provoke another issue in human reasoning: we tend to develop causal explanations for having multiple rare events. These multiple occurrences can still be random but we want to know a clear reason why they occurred. Having truly random outcomes doesn’t mean outcomes can’t be repeated, just that there is not a pattern to their occurrence.

Another contender for “The Anti-McMansion”

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Combine a tiny house and minimalist design and the New York Times gives you another contender for an anti-McMansion:

Living in a one-room house with an ultra-minimalist aesthetic and two small children sounds more like the setup for a joke than something any reasonably sane person would attempt.

And yet that’s exactly what Takaaki and Christina Kawabata set out to do when they renovated an old house here. They were convinced that an open space with as few toys and material possessions as possible was a recipe not for disaster, but for domestic calm…

“Most of the people we’ve invited here are shocked by how we live,” Ms. Kawabata, 41, said. “How we can raise kids without toys and clutter and stuff everywhere.”…

Eventually, there will be an addition, a 1,500-square-foot structure that may be connected to the main house with an open walkway. But that’s a few years off. For now, instead of walls, the family makes do with transparent room dividers created out of metal frames wrapped with nylon string.

There are three features that set up this home apart from conceptions of a McMansion:

1. A smaller size. This one-room house has 1,200 square feet. It is interesting to note that the home will eventually include another 1,500 square feet which would then put it above the average for a new American home at 2,500 square feet.

2. A different and better design. Rather than having spaces for everyone to do their own thing, this home is one big open space where the family is always together. Additionally, the minimalist design is presumed to be better aesthetically (and presumably in durability and appeal to others) than the typical McMansion attempt to impress and mash together numerous styles.

3. The commitment to live with less stuff. McMansions might be so large because even as the average American household has decreased in size, the average new home has increased dramatically in order to hold more consumer goods.

At the same time, I would guess most Americans would not accept this particular design as the best anti-McMansion: it is too open (do household members want to be that close?) and minimalist design does not appeal to everybody.

Call for more comparative study of poor urban neighborhoods using new techniques

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Urban sociologist Mario Small recently argued sociologists and others need to adopt some new approaches to studying poor urban neighborhoods:

Small, who is also dean of UChicago’s Division of the Social Sciences, studies urban neighborhoods and has studied the diversity of experiences for people living in poor neighborhoods in cities across the country.

Studying only a few neighborhoods extensively fails to capture important differences, he said in a talk, “Poverty and Organizational Density,” at a session Feb. 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago…

“The experience of poverty varies from city to city, influenced by neighborhood factors such as commercial activity, access to transportation and social services, and other facets of organizational density,” Small said.

He explained that new sources of information, ranging from open city data to detailed, high-resolution imagery from commercial mapping services, provide new opportunities to compare the experience of the poor among multiple cities, in turn pointing cities and service providers toward optimal decision-making about policies, investment, or other interventions.

One of these changes is driven by changes in technology, the ability to collect big data. This can help sociologists and others go beyond surveys and neighborhood observations. Robert Sampson does some of this in Great American City with the ability to map the social networks and neighborhood moves of residents from poorer neighborhoods. Big data will be enable us to go even further.

The second suggestion, however, is something that sociologists could have been doing for decades. Poor neighborhoods in certain cities tend to get the lion’s share of attention, places like Chicago, New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. In contrast, poor neighborhoods in places like Dallas, Miami, Seattle, Denver, and Las Vegas get a lot less attention. Perhaps I should return to a presentation I made years ago at the Society for the Study of Social Problems about this very topic where I suggested some key factors that led to this lack of comparative study…

Recent sociological findings: many evangelicals think science and religion can work together, few highly invested in evolution/creation debate

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Two recent studies suggest there may be less conflict between religious Americans and science than is typically portrayed.

1. Sociologist Elaine Ecklund on how religion and science interact:

“We found that nearly 50 percent of evangelicals believe that science and religion can work together and support one another,” Ecklund said. “That’s in contrast to the fact that only 38 percent of Americans feel that science and religion can work in collaboration.”…

  • Nearly 60 percent of evangelical Protestants and 38 percent of all surveyed believe “scientists should be open to considering miracles in their theories or explanations.”
  • 27 percent of Americans feel that science and religion are in conflict.
  • Of those who feel science and religion are in conflict, 52 percent sided with religion.
  • 48 percent of evangelicals believe that science and religion can work in collaboration.
  • 22 percent of scientists think most religious people are hostile to science.
  • Nearly 20 percent of the general population think religious people are hostile to science.
  • Nearly 22 percent of the general population think scientists are hostile to religion.
  • Nearly 36 percent of scientists have no doubt about God’s existence.

RUS is the largest study of American views on religion and science. It includes the nationally representative survey of more than 10,000 Americans, more than 300 in-depth interviews with Christians, Jews and Muslims — more than 140 of whom are evangelicals — and extensive observations of religious centers in Houston and Chicago.

Ecklund comes to similar conclusions in her 2010 book about scientists and religious faith Science vs. Religion.

2. Sociologist Jon Hill on how Americans view the evolution debate:

As part of a recent project funded by the BioLogos Foundation, I have fielded a new, nationally representative survey of the American public: The National Study of Religion and Human Origins (NSRHO).

Unlike existing surveys, this one includes extensive questions about human origins that allow us to develop a more accurate portrait of what the general public—and, in particular, Christians—actually believe. The survey includes questions on belief in human evolution, divine involvement, the existence of Adam and Eve, historical timeframe, original sin, and more. For each of these questions, participants are allowed to respond with “not at all sure” about what they believe. If they claim a position, they are also asked to rate how confident they are that their belief is correct. Lastly, they are asked to report how important having the right beliefs about human origins is to them personally…

If only eight percent of respondents are classified as convinced creationists whose beliefs are dear to them, and if only four percent are classified as atheistic evolutionists whose beliefs are dear to them, then perhaps Americans are not as deeply divided over human origins as polls have indicated. In fact, most Americans fall somewhere in the middle, holding their beliefs with varying levels of certainty. Most Americans do not fall neatly into any of the existing camps, and only a quarter claimed their beliefs were important to them personally.

So what does this mean for the church? I think it shows that most people, even regular church-going evangelicals, are not deeply entrenched on one side of a supposed two-sided battle. Certainly, the issue divides Christians. But Christian beliefs about human origins are complex. There’s no major single chasm after all.

In other words, the average religious American doesn’t have think this issue is a matter of life and death, even if the rhetoric from both sides is that the other is a clear enemy.

Limit power outages by burying power lines

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An editorial from USA Today argues for burying power lines in order to limit the effect of storms:

People served by buried lines have dramatically fewer outages, according to two studies by the Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utility companies.The idea is good enough that many American cities put most lines underground years ago, and lines for most new subdivisions are buried. Overall, though, roughly 80% of lines in the USA still hang overhead.

Such “undergrounding” of power lines can be pricey. But the figure opponents commonly cite — 10 times as expensive as stringing lines overhead — is misleading. The actual cost can be half that, or less, depending on local conditions and whether lines are buried when developments are built or when roads are being torn up anyway.

The best idea is to identify the lines most likely to get knocked down and begin by burying those. A study for Pepco, the underperforming Washington-area utility, found that while burying all lines would cost $5.8 billion and add a ridiculous $107 a month to customer bills for 30 years, burying just the most vulnerable lines would cost about one-sixth as much and prevent 65% of outages, a more reasonable tradeoff.

Even with a reduced figure for burying the power lines now, this serves as a reminder that the best time to bury the power lines would have been years ago when the developments were first built. Doing so after the fact costs more money and mars a lot of property while the burying is taking place. Putting the money into burying the lines in the first place saves a lot of hassle down the road (hence, different rules for newer developments).

An added bonus: having fewer overhead lines looks better. Imagine pristine residential or commercial streets without power lines and poles all over the place.

Exploring the meanings of Chicago’s underground Pedway

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A Chicago artist and teacher has spent years exploring and analyzing Chicago’s large underground Pedway:

You want to know the best thing about the Chicago Pedway? It’s not that, despite this Polar Vortex winter, you can cover almost 40 city blocks on the Pedway without ever stepping foot outside. It’s not that the Pedway began modestly in 1951 and now stretches through the North Loop, jogs beneath Millennium Park and ventures as far east as the mouth of the Chicago River. It’s not that the Pedway could be regarded as a kind of yardstick of municipal progress, always seeming as though it might extend just a little bit longer someday. It’s not even that the Pedway’s generally mundane, charm-free hallways offer little to see — look, another “For Rent” sign! — and therefore it works perfectly as a daily treadmill for ambulatory meditation…

Where you see putty-colored corridors leading to a job in a cubicle farm, she sees dreams of the American frontier. You pass convenience stores selling gum; Tsen, 38, a native of Cambridge, Mass., passes through a long, winding metaphor for a Chicago never realized — “the by-product of projected futures,” she writes in “The Pedway of Today,” her new, perversely compelling guidebook/consideration of the Pedway’s cultural meanings.

Indeed, Tsen, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and photography/video teacher at Wilbur Wright College on the Northwest Side, has come to see the longtime walkway as her canvas. About four years ago, the Chicago artist — and former Wendella Boat tour guide, who says travel and The Path Not Taken have become the preoccupations of her art — began offering tours of the Pedway (she has since stopped). But she never charged her audiences, she said, because the tours would also quietly double as performance art, as free-associative strolling lectures in which your guide (Tsen) would dole out not dates or landmarks but thoughts on Jules Verne, revolving doors and how the Pedway is like Florence…

Eventually she stumbled across an entrance to the Pedway in the back of the Renaissance lobby, the path itself so low-key that you can see it every day without quite recognizing it. “The Pedway struck me not as the frontier that I had been looking for but a reminder of the glamour of early cities and a promise of future frontiers.” At this point in her guide Tsen asks readers to imagine that it’s 1893 and — though the Renaissance was built a century later — they are relaxing in the lobby before returning home from the World’s Fair, where they “attended Frederick Jackson Turner’s fabled lecture ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ … still pondering his words: ‘The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American History.”

Sounds like a very interesting and interpretive tour. All sorts of large infrastructure and urban projects would benefit from people who know them well enough and are enthusiastic about what they offer to share it with others.

If Chicago tried to advertise the Pedway more, would regular users complain that too many tourists are clogging the passages a la New Yorkers and the subway?

What does a US Army version of a US city look like?

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The Telegraph looks at a new city created by the US Army in Virgina to be used for training purposes:

The 300 acre ‘town’ includes a five story embassy, a bank, a school, an underground subway and train station, a mosque, a football stadium, and a helicopter landing zone.

Located in Virginia, the realistic subway station comes complete with subway carriages and the train station has real train carriages…

There are also bridges and several other structures which can be transformed into different scenarios.

The $96 million is designed to meticulously “replicate complex operational environments and develop solutions”.

Lots of movies portrays scenes of fighting in American streets, often facing aliens, but I assume the military has some strong ideas about what works and doesn’t work military in the average American big city. How do US cities fare in battle situations? In other words, I assume most American urban planning doesn’t think much about creating defensible positions or providing ways to best move troops and supplies. Instead, it was guided by ideas of how to create certain kinds of streetscapes, how to efficiently move cars through cities, and leaving spaces for both private and public settings.

I wonder if the Army has some advice about how better to plan cities once they start going through exercises.

Confronting the problems with p-values

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Nature provides an overview of concerns about how much scientists rely on p-values “which is neither as reliable nor as objective as most scientists assume”:

One result is an abundance of confusion about what the P value means4. Consider Motyl’s study about political extremists. Most scientists would look at his original P value of 0.01 and say that there was just a 1% chance of his result being a false alarm. But they would be wrong. The P value cannot say this: all it can do is summarize the data assuming a specific null hypothesis. It cannot work backwards and make statements about the underlying reality. That requires another piece of information: the odds that a real effect was there in the first place. To ignore this would be like waking up with a headache and concluding that you have a rare brain tumour — possible, but so unlikely that it requires a lot more evidence to supersede an everyday explanation such as an allergic reaction. The more implausible the hypothesis — telepathy, aliens, homeopathy — the greater the chance that an exciting finding is a false alarm, no matter what the P value is…

These are sticky concepts, but some statisticians have tried to provide general rule-of-thumb conversions (see ‘Probable cause’). According to one widely used calculation5, a P value of 0.01 corresponds to a false-alarm probability of at least 11%, depending on the underlying probability that there is a true effect; a P value of 0.05 raises that chance to at least 29%. So Motyl’s finding had a greater than one in ten chance of being a false alarm. Likewise, the probability of replicating his original result was not 99%, as most would assume, but something closer to 73% — or only 50%, if he wanted another ‘very significant’ result6, 7. In other words, his inability to replicate the result was about as surprising as if he had called heads on a coin toss and it had come up tails…

Critics also bemoan the way that P values can encourage muddled thinking. A prime example is their tendency to deflect attention from the actual size of an effect. Last year, for example, a study of more than 19,000 people showed8 that those who meet their spouses online are less likely to divorce (p < 0.002) and more likely to have high marital satisfaction (p < 0.001) than those who meet offline (see Nature http://doi.org/rcg; 2013). That might have sounded impressive, but the effects were actually tiny: meeting online nudged the divorce rate from 7.67% down to 5.96%, and barely budged happiness from 5.48 to 5.64 on a 7-point scale. To pounce on tiny P values and ignore the larger question is to fall prey to the “seductive certainty of significance”, says Geoff Cumming, an emeritus psychologist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. But significance is no indicator of practical relevance, he says: “We should be asking, ‘How much of an effect is there?’, not ‘Is there an effect?’”

Perhaps the worst fallacy is the kind of self-deception for which psychologist Uri Simonsohn of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues have popularized the term P-hacking; it is also known as data-dredging, snooping, fishing, significance-chasing and double-dipping. “P-hacking,” says Simonsohn, “is trying multiple things until you get the desired result” — even unconsciously. It may be the first statistical term to rate a definition in the online Urban Dictionary, where the usage examples are telling: “That finding seems to have been obtained through p-hacking, the authors dropped one of the conditions so that the overall p-value would be less than .05”, and “She is a p-hacker, she always monitors data while it is being collected.”

As the article then goes on to note, alternatives haven’t quite caught on. It seems the most basic defense is one that statisticians should adopt anyhow: always recognizing the chance that their statistics could be wrong. It also highlights the need for replicating studies with different datasets to confirm results.

At a relatively basic level, if p-levels are so problematic, how does this change the basic statistics courses so many undergraduates take?

IKEA in China allowing all sorts of activities in addition to shopping

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IKEA in China is allowing patrons to hang out:

Sociologist Sangyoub Park forwarded us a fascinating account of Ikea’s business model … for China. In the U.S., there are rather strict rules about what one can do in a retail store. Primarily, one is supposed to shop, shop the whole time, and leave once one’s done shopping. Special parts of the store might be designated for other activities, like eating or entertaining kids, but the main floors are activity-restricted.

Not in China. Ikea has become a popular place to hang out. People go there to read their morning newspaper, socialize with friends, snuggle with a loved one, or take a nap. Older adults have turned it into a haunt for singles looking for love. Some even see it as a great place for a wedding.

This stands in contrast to efforts in some McDonald’s in the United States to limit how long patrons can stay. But, this stance might be ingenious for more companies:

1. It may raise the image of the company. It is a cool place to be. Oh yeah, you can buy stuff there as well.

2. In areas that lack public spaces, these retail locations can serve an important function.

3. It may just lead to more sales. Unfortunately, stories like this often don’t include this information.

Chicago’s race and class differences on display in fight over Obama Library

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Six groups are vying for the Barack Obama Presidential Library in Chicago:

The library is “such a prize that nobody is going to yield power to anybody else,” veteran Chicago political analyst Don Rose said.The squabble also puts Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, in the difficult position of trying to present a single, unified bid, lest the feuding weaken the city’s odds against rival campaigns to put the library in New York or Hawaii…

The main point of tension is between the University of Chicago, where Obama spent 12 years as a constitutional law professor until his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate, and a group advocating for Bronzeville, the city’s historic center of black culture, business and politics.

“They think that they can get whatever they want,” Bronzeville organizer Harold Lucas said of the university. “If you compare the cranes in the sky and that opulent growth of this university to the surrounding, predominantly African-American community, it’s a travesty. It’s a clear tale of two cities.”…

There are also two potential bids on the Far South Side, one led by Chicago State University and the other by a group promoting the historic Pullman neighborhood. It was in those areas that Obama established his earliest roots in the city as a community organizer in the mid-1980s, setting up job training programs and defending the rights of public housing tenants.

The University of Illinois at Chicago, on the Near West Side, is also taking a shot, as is a real estate developer pushing the former U.S. Steel Corp. site on the southeast lakefront.

Lots of interested actors and a number of them could make a good case that the library would help economic development – even the University of Chicago says their plan would be to build the library off-campus so it would help a neighborhood. This seems like a classic situation for some backroom deals and a growth machine perspective where those with more political and business power will end up calling the shots.

Is this a true test of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s abilities as a mayor? It will be interesting to see how he moves among all of these options.