Oobleck and the Gulf Disaster

February 7, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Oobleck is not high-tech chemistry. The name comes from Dr. Seuss, and making the stuff is child’s play – mix cornflour and water – which is why grade-school kids are familiar with it. Also why YouTube has lots of videos of people running on water. (Mythbusters got in the act too.)

Now it turns out that Oobleck might have stopped the BP underwater gusher in the Gulf. Mud, the usual “top kill” substance, was useless because the flow of oil was so rapid. But oobleck’s “non-Newtonian” (Seussian?) properties might have done the trick. (Wired has the story here.)

Jonathan Katz, a physicist, apparently suggested oobleck to the Department of Energy team that was assembled three weeks into the disaster.

Katz did some quick math and saw that a half-cornstarch drilling mud would suppress the turbulence and sink in one coherent slug. Unfortunately, no one listened.
“I have no idea why they didn’t pay attention,” said Richard Garwin, a retired IBM physicist who was also part of the DOE-convened team.

In 1986, the mystery of the Challenger disaster stopped being mysterious and became instantly understandable when Richard Feynman dropped a rubber O-ring into a glass of ice water. This wasn’t rocket science. Or rather, it was rocket science, but it was the part that a third-grader could understand.

These weren’t failures of science (let’s assume that the oobleck theory is correct). Maybe they weren’t even failures of scientists. More likely they were failures of organization. We need to know more about how the structure and culture of organizations keeps some ideas from getting very far, or from getting in the door at all . . . until it’s too late.

The Wisdom of Crowds XLV

February 5, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s become almost a tradition here at the SocioBlog: A big football game that generates widespread betting, and we once again consider “the wisdom of crowds” – the idea that the collective guess of the crowd (those people interested enough to take a stand) will be superior to the that of any one expert or group of experts.

I’ve been skeptical about this idea, at least with regards to football betting. This blog was only a few months old when I first posted about it (here), and readers who took the hint and went against the crowd won a sweet bet on the Bears. I’ve revisited the hypothesis a few times (here and here), including last year’s Superbowl (here), when the crowd was heavily backing the favorites, the Colts, driving the line from 3½ points up to 6. But the Saints won the game outright.

This year, the line opened with the Packers favored by 2½ or 3 points* and has not budged. The betting is equally divided, which is good news for the bookies. They’ll make their 5-10% no matter which side wins.

The only movement has been on the under/over line – the combined total points by both teams. That line opened at about 46, and went down to 44½. My guess is that this early shift represented “the smart money.” Now the line is gradually going back up, and may be as high as 46 by game time. Apparently the public is looking for a high-scoring game.

If you’re a contrarian, if you lean towards the wisdom of bookmakers rather than the wisdom of crowds, you’ll take the under and be happy with a 23-21 final score. It’s not a bet I would be eager to make however. The trouble with betting the under, as a gambler explained to me long ago, is that you sit there watching the game rooting for nothing to happen.

Go Steelers.**

UPDATE: The under/over line did not move much. Apparently, there was no strong crowd consensus, though if there was an imbalance, it was towards the over, which turned out to be the right choice. Final score: Packers 31, Steelers 25. The Packers played well; the Steelers made some costly errors.

* As of this writing (Saturday night), if you want to bet the Steelers plus the three points, you have to give up odds of 120-100 (i.e., you get $100 if you win; you pay $120 if you lose). If you take only 2½ points, you can get odds as low as 105-100. And conversely, if you bet the Packers, you pay more to give only the 2½. But it looks as though the line is inching up. By game time, I expect most bookmakers will have the line at 3.

** It is a bit more difficult to root for Pittsburgh this year – not-so-gentle Ben and his deserved rating among fans as the Superbowl’s most disliked player, James Harrison as #1 in being fined by the NFL. And according to yesterday’s New York Times, the Steelers are even on the wrong side of the concussion issue while the Packers are on the side of the angels.

Graphing Ideas about Marriage (Me vs. USA Today)

February 3, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

As someone with the visual aptitude of gravel, I shouldn’t be edging into Flâneuse territory. But when I saw this graph in USA Today this morning, I was frustrated.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)
Responses, by age group, when asked if they want to marry:

SOURCES: Match.com/MarketTools survey of 5,199 men and women who either have never been married or are widowed, divorced or separated.

I found it hard to make comparisons from one age group to another. In the online edition, the layout was better – all in a row – and the addition of even a single color helped. (Odd that USA Today, the newspaper that led the way in using color, gave its print readers the graph in only black-and-white, or more accurately gray-and-gray.)

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

I thought I’d try my own hand with my rudimentary knowledge of Excel.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

What do you think?

ASA v. ACLU?

February 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I feel like the eighth guy in the Asch line-length experiment (video here .) since on one central issue I find myself siding with Glenn Beck and against the ASA.

For those who were out of the room and missed the commotion, Beck has been vilifying Frances Fox Piven, a 78-year-old sociologist who for decades has written and spoken about poverty and welfare. She has been a target of Beck’s before. This time, after she suggested that the unemployed take to the streets to demand government action that creates jobs, Beck called her an “enemy of the Constitution.” (more here)

Piven received hate mail and some death threats, presumably from Beck’s followers, who also posted truly vicious comments directed at Piven on Beck’s website The Blaze. The ASA called on the Fox network

to control the encouragement of violence that has run rampant in recent months. . . . . The right to free speech does not ever include rhetoric that encourages violence against one’s opponents.

It’s the free speech part that bothers me. I guess I’m more ACLU than ASA. Yes, the world would be a better place if Beck weren’t Beck. His faux-naïf, just-a-guy act barely hides the reality that he’s a nasty piece of work. And some of his fans are even nastier. What he says is often wrong – inaccurate, illogical, even nutty. But Beck didn’t call for violence. He just said that Piven is a terrible person who has dangerous ideas and says bad things.

If what Beck said “encourages violence” and is therefore not protected speech, then nobody can be allowed to say that someone has done something really bad (let alone being “the worst person in the world”). You could probably find equally venomous name-calling directed at academics like John Yoo. I mean, calling someone a war criminal is a fairly serious accusation. Possibly, those accusations made some readers so angry that they sent Yoo death threats. (If so, it would be altogether fitting, given his rather tolerant position on death threats.) Were those articles about Yoo at Salon, the Atlantic, and elsewhere “encouraging violence”? Were they therefore not protected free speech?

As someone said, you can’t blame an idea for the people who believe in it. After the Arizona shooting, people went scurrying around trying to show that the shooter had been inspired by books from the opposite side. Marx, Ayn Rand, and possibly Hitler were on Loughner’s reading list (so were Peter Pan and The Phantom Tollbooth). But even if we could pinpoint a particular book or TV show, even if Loughner had said, “The Manifesto made me do it,” the book and its writer still have the protection of the First Amendment. And that’s a good thing.

So the ASA is right to ask Beck to tone it down (not that it will have any impact on Beck even in the unlikely that he is listening). But they are wrong to imply that his rhetoric is not included as protected free speech.

In the Asch experiment, the subject – the eighth guy to offer his opinion – always felt uncomfortable when the other seven people saw things differently from what he saw. That’s how I feel, and it’s which is why I’ve hesitated to post this.