In this blog i will be summarizing/analyzing pages 202-end of How Randomness Rules Our Lives. In this section Mlodinow describes the very complicated idea of assymetry. Basically you cannot predict what will happen when you are in the midst of doing something but after the fact it is exceptionally easy to criticize and say that you should've known better. Mlodinow gives many examples for this law. Such as the stock market, when you look at a chart of the most succesful managers ranked in order from most profitable to least, an analyst can saw why some did good while others did bad. However that same analyst cannot predict beforehand which managers will do good and which will do bad. This is why statistics is so important in everyday life. Because given this scenario we would be able to tell which managers would have a higher probability of doing better beforehand but we can never be 100% sure. So there is always risk and the study of statistics/probability is greatly needed to succesfully interpret the data without completly screwing up. As Mllodinow says, "i was warned not to think that i could predict or control the future" (218). Mlodinow clearly shows us that the future is a thing that cannot be predicted but can be anticipated and be prepared for.
As for pearl harbor even though the U.S. had extensive reasons to believe that Japan was preparing for an attack, why would we think pearl Harbor? The japanese had ordered their spies to do the same thing in numerous places all over. And the probability that they would attack Pearl Harbor was just an insignificant amount, however that amount still exisited therefore allowing for it to happen. "Blame is always passed around in unfortunate events" (208). Mlodinow shows readers through the 3 mile island melt down that when chance is involved and negative things happen people are allways forced to take the blame. The truth is that the 3 mile island nuclear reactor was up to date and working fine, but unfortunatly it recieved a water leak that turned of the cooling system of the reactor which enable the backup system to start which had been turned off by a janitor. So it really the janitor's fault? No it is all chance's fault.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Q3 Blog post 5
In this blog post i will be analyzing and summarizing the book The drunkard's walk, How Randomness Rules Our Lives pages 186-202. To open this section Mlodinow discusses how our views of randomness are quite inaccurate. Mlodinow uses the examples of Statscian George Langer. Langer had an expiremental lottery in which half of the subjects could choose what lottery card they got and the other half were assigned. The way you won was if your card's double was selected in a pot. He then gave the subjects a chance to trade/sell their cards. The people who choose their cards sold their cards for 4times more, even though they had the exact same probability of winning. Misconceptions such as this are extremly common in everyday life. Another such example is when presented with the number set 2,4,6,8 what is the pattern? Most people say that the numbers are increasing even numbers. However Mlodinow points out that just because there isn't an odd number in there it doesn't mean that it has to be even. As the number set could be 2,3,4,5. The cause of this misconception is explained quite well by Francis Bacon, "the human understanding once it has adopted an pinion collects any instances that confirm it" (189). This goes to show that when humans have an idea they will support it instead of trying to discredit it.
The next topic that Mlodinow touches on is how all this randomness affects our lives. "The only way i have to describe the way that randomness truly affects our lives is the title of this book, The Drunkard's Walk" (195). For example why had the U.S. not been prepared for pearl harbor? Given all the facts leading up to the event, we intercepted messages stating that spies should divide the harbor into 5 sections and classify them, then the Japanese change their radio signals when they shouldn't (this ussually signals a large scale operation) then we intercept more messages telling all diplomats to burn all of their official documents! And a large majority of U.S. officers knew about this. The explanition is due to the law of assymetry which basically states that you cannot predict random events before they happen. I will delve into more detail in my next blog post.
The next topic that Mlodinow touches on is how all this randomness affects our lives. "The only way i have to describe the way that randomness truly affects our lives is the title of this book, The Drunkard's Walk" (195). For example why had the U.S. not been prepared for pearl harbor? Given all the facts leading up to the event, we intercepted messages stating that spies should divide the harbor into 5 sections and classify them, then the Japanese change their radio signals when they shouldn't (this ussually signals a large scale operation) then we intercept more messages telling all diplomats to burn all of their official documents! And a large majority of U.S. officers knew about this. The explanition is due to the law of assymetry which basically states that you cannot predict random events before they happen. I will delve into more detail in my next blog post.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Q3 blog post 4
In this blog post i will be summarizing and analyzing the Drunkard's Walk how Randomness Rules our Lives pages 146- 185. In the first half of these pages Mlodinow clearly depicts how randomness in social data is actually not chaotic but very oderly "social data seemed to produce qauntifiable and predictable patterns" (152). He goes on to give us examples that seem to be complete chaos but instead are extremly orderly, as a density curve would show. You can take for example a sample of people who are driving cars one year and then count up the miles. Then the next year you can conclude that those miles will be reasonably the same, even with people completly changing what they are going to do, lets say a young girl who used to drive to school everyday gets married and stops moving. Then the milage should go down, however a young man becomes a truck driver and starts driving more often. These two would theorecticaly cancel each other out and since we take the population of a large place, (given that there isn't a significant increase in the drivers between the two years) they will equal out to be about the same. Later on in his book Mlodinow goes to show us the first person who recognized this and started to plot it. Quetelet was his name and he took samples of everything, the chest size of scottish soldiers, to the number of murders in france with what type of weapon it was committed. He found that all of these distributions were bell-shaped and represented a "normal" curve. This curve is now the basis for all statistical studies. The first recorded time this was used to a person's advantage was in the 17th century when a mathematician noticed that his baker was advertising his bread as 1000 grams and he averaged only 950. He plotted the weights of the bread he bought for a year and realized he was being cheated. Later he plotted the weights after complaining and realized that the graph was skewed to the right, meaning that the baker had been giving him a lot of heavier loaves. He complained and the baker changed his ways again.
In the second part of this reading Mlodinow talks about how random paterns are very common and confuse almost every person they come upon. To start off he talks about table turning. This is the process in which people contact the dead and turn a table after awhile the table starts to turn by itself. Scientists began to study this and realized that the people would subconsciensly start to turn the table they thought it would turn. When all the people thought it would turn in one direction they would all subconsciensly start to move the table in that direction. After much study scienctists realized that more often than not the poeple sitting at the table would all think that it would turn the same way. Mlodinow now points out that people analyze incorrectly based on percieved patterns all the time. Just as with seeing your imagination fills in the gaps. When a person looks with their eyes each eye is missing large portions of what is really there and the picture is highly pixilated, however our brain meshes the two eye views together and depixilates the image based on what it would guess is there from the combined information. Our brain does this also with statistics on things causing confusion and misconception. To counter this misconception scientists have developed a mthematical style to find patterns in samples, " To combat this misconception that people have the greater mathematicains came together and formulated a grand idea" (178). This grand idea is based on the curves from earlier and it measures the probabiblity of an event hapenning.
In the second part of this reading Mlodinow talks about how random paterns are very common and confuse almost every person they come upon. To start off he talks about table turning. This is the process in which people contact the dead and turn a table after awhile the table starts to turn by itself. Scientists began to study this and realized that the people would subconsciensly start to turn the table they thought it would turn. When all the people thought it would turn in one direction they would all subconsciensly start to move the table in that direction. After much study scienctists realized that more often than not the poeple sitting at the table would all think that it would turn the same way. Mlodinow now points out that people analyze incorrectly based on percieved patterns all the time. Just as with seeing your imagination fills in the gaps. When a person looks with their eyes each eye is missing large portions of what is really there and the picture is highly pixilated, however our brain meshes the two eye views together and depixilates the image based on what it would guess is there from the combined information. Our brain does this also with statistics on things causing confusion and misconception. To counter this misconception scientists have developed a mthematical style to find patterns in samples, " To combat this misconception that people have the greater mathematicains came together and formulated a grand idea" (178). This grand idea is based on the curves from earlier and it measures the probabiblity of an event hapenning.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Q3 blog post number 3
In this blog i will be summarizing/analyzing pages 105-145 of Leonard Mlodinow's the drunkard's walk. It starts off where we left off, Pascal's death. We carry on with Thomas Bayes, a mathemetician and minister who lived during the 18th century. Bayes' greatest contribution to probability are his theories on conditional probability. That is what are the chances of something happenning if something else happens. The easiest example is this, what is the probablity that a family has 2 girls if they have 2 kids and one is girl? 1/3, because there are three combinations whith 2 kids and one girl (the sample size) and only one has 2 girls. another one of Bayes great laws is the law of large numbers or the golden theorem, " This law is the simplest law that was ever developed in probability" (121). As the book states it is pretty easy to understand, the larger the number of trials conducted the closer to the real mean you will get, and the more accurate you test will be. An example is this, if you flip a coin 10 times how many will be heads? how about if you flip it 1 million time? the second time the mean will be much closer to half of the number of trials. This effects everyday life and by simply applying this to other scenarios we can see that it really can help us out.
In the next chapter Mlodinow goes on to tell us the when he wrote a paper for his son's english class (who is in 10th grade and Mlodinow was editing but got carried away) only got a 93 he was infuriated. He then later learned that one of his colleaues (has a Phd in english and writes for the new york times) did the same thing but only got an 80%. Then two students turned in the same paper and one scored a 90% while the other only got a 79%(Mlodinow 136). How can this happen? We see that with thourough analyzation that when teachers grade numerous papers each day they get more tired and grade harder as they go on, or the grade later and get sloppier. So in fact your grades are all part of probability. But because of Bayes' golden theorem this is not true, as the more papers you write and get graded the closer to the true value of your work you will get. So grades have an amount of variance (atleast english grades) and this can change the scales roughly 10 % in either direction. He caries on to tell us that all measurements including human calculation contain error and there is alw to counter this error.
In the next chapter Mlodinow goes on to tell us the when he wrote a paper for his son's english class (who is in 10th grade and Mlodinow was editing but got carried away) only got a 93 he was infuriated. He then later learned that one of his colleaues (has a Phd in english and writes for the new york times) did the same thing but only got an 80%. Then two students turned in the same paper and one scored a 90% while the other only got a 79%(Mlodinow 136). How can this happen? We see that with thourough analyzation that when teachers grade numerous papers each day they get more tired and grade harder as they go on, or the grade later and get sloppier. So in fact your grades are all part of probability. But because of Bayes' golden theorem this is not true, as the more papers you write and get graded the closer to the true value of your work you will get. So grades have an amount of variance (atleast english grades) and this can change the scales roughly 10 % in either direction. He caries on to tell us that all measurements including human calculation contain error and there is alw to counter this error.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
q3 blog post number 2
In the second analyzation/summarization of the book, The Drunkard's Walk, i will be analyzing and summarizing pages 60- 104. Mlodinow starts off by picking up where he left off in history, the next man to work on probability. (the first man was discussed in the original blog). This man was Blaise Pascal. He was a genius, his most famous work was the pascal's triangle. The concept of the triangle was actually created earlier by a chinese man and later discussed by Cardano, but Pascal managed to arrange it in a nifty format for which we give him all the credit. Later in Pascal's life he had a drastic 2 hour experince in which god talked to him. After this encounter he changed his life by giving up the corrupt logic and became a good christian. However in his last work, Pensees, he gave the rational reason for believing in god, "suppose you conced that you don't know wheter or not god exists and therefore assign a fifty percent probability to either proposistion. How should oyu weigh these odds when deciding whether to lead a pious life? If you act piously and God exisxts, Pascal argued, your gain- eternal happiness- is infinite. If on the other hand, God does not exsist, your loss is small, the sacrifice of piety" (76). By selling all of his secular items Pascal shows the world that he has truly become a devout man. However his greatest contribution to religion was not through his piety but rather his intelligence. Had he completly given up on rationality (like he said he did) he would've never been able to come up with such a complete answer to the religious question.
After Pascal's death the study of probability fell into the hands of simon newcomb, tha man who discovered benford's law. But before we delve into that subject i would like to talk about a fact that Mlodinow cleverly points out. Everytime there is a lottery there is one winner and by studying traffic patterns and accident rates approximatly one "loser" (person who dies)!! this is an insane fact, so you have the same chances of winning the lottery as dying when going to buy your ticket... kinda sad. Another crazy story that Mlodinow brings up is the story of the lottery losing. A group of australian realized that the virginia state lottery was offering a 27.9 million dollars in prizes with only 7.06 million combinations. So they bought all the combinations and made a nice profit, the moral of the story is that if you are talanted enough at statistics you can make easy money. Benford's law which was proven by Simon Newcomb states that in certain sequences lower numbers have a higher probability of showing up. The probability that the first number is a one is about 30 percent, a 2 is about 18 percent, and so on and so forth. it is easier to think of it this way, in a book the lower the page number the more likely that the page is more used. The farther you get from the front of the book the less used the pages look. This principle is applied everyday to test for fraudelence in the bussiness world.
After Pascal's death the study of probability fell into the hands of simon newcomb, tha man who discovered benford's law. But before we delve into that subject i would like to talk about a fact that Mlodinow cleverly points out. Everytime there is a lottery there is one winner and by studying traffic patterns and accident rates approximatly one "loser" (person who dies)!! this is an insane fact, so you have the same chances of winning the lottery as dying when going to buy your ticket... kinda sad. Another crazy story that Mlodinow brings up is the story of the lottery losing. A group of australian realized that the virginia state lottery was offering a 27.9 million dollars in prizes with only 7.06 million combinations. So they bought all the combinations and made a nice profit, the moral of the story is that if you are talanted enough at statistics you can make easy money. Benford's law which was proven by Simon Newcomb states that in certain sequences lower numbers have a higher probability of showing up. The probability that the first number is a one is about 30 percent, a 2 is about 18 percent, and so on and so forth. it is easier to think of it this way, in a book the lower the page number the more likely that the page is more used. The farther you get from the front of the book the less used the pages look. This principle is applied everyday to test for fraudelence in the bussiness world.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Q3 post one
In this blog post i will be summarizing and analyzing the Drunkard's Walk How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, pages 1-60. Mlodinow starts readers off by telling them about a man who won a huge sum of money by thinking that 7 multiplied by 7 was 48. And then continues on in saying how everyone makes mistakes like that but they are most of the time less noticable, even though they are just as significant. In the first few chapters Mlodinow clearly spells out the basic laws of probability and points out in numerous occasions that human logic is completly flawed when it comes to probability. One example constitutes a CEO working in hollywood. For the first 5 years she managed to pull her filming company up and was paid hansomly for doing so, but on her sixth year she didn't manage to well. Because of that she was fired. However Mlodinow shows us through probability her dissapointing sixth year was just unlucky. Her first five years were above average and due to statistics, Lansing (the director/CEO) would have to equal out to her mean. Another more common example is when a person does good and they get rewarded or a person does bad and get punished. Usually the next day the person who did good does worse and the person who got punished does better. This is because when the person did exceptionally well or bad they are far away from their average and naturally they are going to get closer, so the reward/punishment doesn't really effect their behavor positivly or negativly.
In the final chapter Moldinow attempts to explain the most random phenominom ever. Imagine this you have 3 doors and one has a car behind it and the others have nothing. You pick a door and a person reveals that one of the doors you didn't pick has nothing behind it, is it in your best interest to switch or stay with the original door? It is always in your interest to switch. For this problem you must consider all possible out comes. THere are 2 outcomes, in one scenario you chose the lucky door one your first try, 1/3 chance. In the other scenario you didn't choose the lucky door, 2/3 scenario and a person reveals that all of the other non-car doors. It is kinda hard to explain but i will do my best. It is much easier to explain if there are 100 doors, and only one has a car behind it. lucky guess scenario is 1/100 and the other scenario (where all the doors are open except 2, the one you have chosen and the one the person doesn't open), is 99/100 where you don't choose the lucky door and now you are presented with 1 other door. The reason for this is because the person opening the doors de-randomizes the game. He does this because he will never reveal the door with the car behind it. When this was first published in a journal by a very intelligent women, almost all professors on statistics were outraged at her and told her that she was incorrect and crazy. Later she proved this mathematicaly and some still didn't believe her. Mlodinow finishes this chapter by talking about the father of statistics, Geralamo Cardano. He was an italian doctor who was very poor during the middle ages and his father was killed by his brother in the inquisition. However he managed to reach fame and fortune by saving money through gambling, (he would only gamble when in his favor, and he knew probability well enough to make money). Then he became a wealthy physician, but later in life lost his fortune because of a scandal involving his son. His work on statistics wasn't earthshaking due to the lack of math symbols, but he is recognized because he was the first one to do any work with statistics.
In the final chapter Moldinow attempts to explain the most random phenominom ever. Imagine this you have 3 doors and one has a car behind it and the others have nothing. You pick a door and a person reveals that one of the doors you didn't pick has nothing behind it, is it in your best interest to switch or stay with the original door? It is always in your interest to switch. For this problem you must consider all possible out comes. THere are 2 outcomes, in one scenario you chose the lucky door one your first try, 1/3 chance. In the other scenario you didn't choose the lucky door, 2/3 scenario and a person reveals that all of the other non-car doors. It is kinda hard to explain but i will do my best. It is much easier to explain if there are 100 doors, and only one has a car behind it. lucky guess scenario is 1/100 and the other scenario (where all the doors are open except 2, the one you have chosen and the one the person doesn't open), is 99/100 where you don't choose the lucky door and now you are presented with 1 other door. The reason for this is because the person opening the doors de-randomizes the game. He does this because he will never reveal the door with the car behind it. When this was first published in a journal by a very intelligent women, almost all professors on statistics were outraged at her and told her that she was incorrect and crazy. Later she proved this mathematicaly and some still didn't believe her. Mlodinow finishes this chapter by talking about the father of statistics, Geralamo Cardano. He was an italian doctor who was very poor during the middle ages and his father was killed by his brother in the inquisition. However he managed to reach fame and fortune by saving money through gambling, (he would only gamble when in his favor, and he knew probability well enough to make money). Then he became a wealthy physician, but later in life lost his fortune because of a scandal involving his son. His work on statistics wasn't earthshaking due to the lack of math symbols, but he is recognized because he was the first one to do any work with statistics.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Final Blog post for Q2 reading
In the final blog for the outside reading book "A Few Kind Words and A Loaded Gun" i will be analyzing pages 390-end. Smith Just found out that his son was hung by an unknown group of people and is completly overwhelmed. He blames himself for the death but later realizes that it wasn't his fault and that he is going to try to get back at whoever did it, " I may not have killed him but i will kill whoever did" (Smith 403). This insight to smith's connection to a son he bearly knew shows readers that he is still loyal to his family. This raises my personal level of respect for him because if he still has some of the values he started with he might be able to recover the other ones. Later after he gets off of his sentence a little early for good behavior, (which he didn't think he would get), he trys to make a living writing. However he can only make a gew quid that way so he has to become a street sweeper. He soon gets tired of this job and started doing the occansional job to get some money. Whith this half-crime half-normal life we see a little improvement in smith's character but later it falls apart. He gets some old friends together and they form a professional robberry firm. The "Flying Sqaud" (Bank robber police specialist) soon start to trace the firm's actions and nickname them the laughing bank robbers because on christmas they robbed a bank with santa hats and wished the tellers a merry christmas.
Now smith's thoughts return to his old age (40ish) and his lack of enjoyment from robbing. He realizes again that robbery isn't his game anymore and quits. He manages to get a job brick laying from his brother-in-law and is able to live off of that. However when brick laying isn't needed he does the odd smash and grab to get by. One day when he was getting ready to leave for some laying a bunch of black sedans and a van pulled up in his drive way. Natural instinct told him to speed away and that is exactly what he did. He managed to get the "flying Sqaud" in a high speed pursuit for fifteen minutes but then he is cornered and he is forced out of his car. A dozen armed officers surround him and give him the usual talk smith instantly responds ""#*$& YOU!" on cue as if i were an actor, to old to play the part" (smith 445). Smith finally understands that his life was wasted and now he is to old to do what he should've done, be a father. The book ends with a chapter called regrets and tells readers how he would've lived his life differently. Razor Smith is currently serving a life sentence in the london prison system, where he writes books and columns.
Citation- on prior blogs
Now smith's thoughts return to his old age (40ish) and his lack of enjoyment from robbing. He realizes again that robbery isn't his game anymore and quits. He manages to get a job brick laying from his brother-in-law and is able to live off of that. However when brick laying isn't needed he does the odd smash and grab to get by. One day when he was getting ready to leave for some laying a bunch of black sedans and a van pulled up in his drive way. Natural instinct told him to speed away and that is exactly what he did. He managed to get the "flying Sqaud" in a high speed pursuit for fifteen minutes but then he is cornered and he is forced out of his car. A dozen armed officers surround him and give him the usual talk smith instantly responds ""#*$& YOU!" on cue as if i were an actor, to old to play the part" (smith 445). Smith finally understands that his life was wasted and now he is to old to do what he should've done, be a father. The book ends with a chapter called regrets and tells readers how he would've lived his life differently. Razor Smith is currently serving a life sentence in the london prison system, where he writes books and columns.
Citation- on prior blogs
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