What your major says about your family members

I came across a study that reports:

We surveyed an entire class of high-functioning young adults at an elite university for prospective major, familial incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders, and demographic and attitudinal questions. Students aspiring to technical majors (science/mathematics/engineering) were more likely than other students to report a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder (p=0.037). Conversely, students interested in the humanities were more likely to report a family member with major depressive disorder (p=8.8×10−4), bipolar disorder (p=0.027), or substance abuse problems (p=1.9×10−6).

Since my older daughter majored in engineering and the younger in humanities, that must mean that our family has a good chance of developing a fairly good set of neuropsychiatric disorders, no?

Has global warming tapered off?

Observational or experimental data, if plotted on a graph, consist of a set of discrete points. There are potentially an infinite number of lines that can be drawn through those points. In some cases, the data itself suggests an overall rising or lowering trend but whether the relationship is a simple linear one or more complicated is not often easily discernible with the naked eye. We have to impose a curve based on prior expectations of [Read more…]

Benford’s law and cooking the books

Suppose someone presents you with some data in the form of numbers in tables. These numbers may have been used as evidence to support some contention. Can you judge whether those numbers are authentic without actually repeating the entire study?

There have been cases in the past where people have reviewed other people’s data and found suspicious numeric patterns that would have been unlikely to occur naturally. One of the famous cases is that involving Cyril Burt’s studies of twins that purportedly showed that genetics played a far greater role in a person’s development than had been previously thought. In 1974, soon after Burt’s death in 1971, Leon Kamin analyzed Burt’s data and found that they were likely not correct because the statistical correlations he reported stayed stable up to the third decimal place, despite being obtained from different sample sizes. The odds of that happening naturally are extremely low. (Not in Our Genes by R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin (1984) p. 103.) [Read more…]

How many times can you fold a piece of paper in half?

Such a question had never occurred to me but if asked, my initial response would have been “A lot”. But I would have been wrong. It turns out that the number is surprisingly small and that I had (once again) been misled by the deceptive power of geometric progression.

I’ll let readers have the fun of guessing for themselves (assume that you can have a piece of paper of any size to start with) and then they can read this New Scientist report about a group of students who worked on this question for seven years before breaking the previous record.

It turns out that there is some fascinating physics involved in crumpling paper.