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+--- Thread: Revising Drake Equation + Numbersense + Non-Scully doesn't measure anything real (/thread-2367.html)
Revising Drake Equation + Numbersense + Non-Scully doesn't measure anything real - C C - May 11, 2016
Alien Civilization ‘More Advanced’ Than Ours May Have Actually Existed
http://www.theevolvingplanet.com/alien-civilization-advanced-may-actually-existed/
EXCERPT: [...] A recent study published in the Astrobiology journal, conducted by researchers Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan, has used newly obtained data to re-devise the famous Drake equation...
Dreadful analysis shows the importance of numbersense
http://junkcharts.typepad.com/numbersruleyourworld/2016/05/dreadful-analysis-shows-the-importance-of-numbersense.html
EXCERPT: Last year, Gizmodo capitalized on the fallout from the Ashley Madison hacking scandal and published a sensational article claiming the website that, if you haven't heard, promotes adultery, has "almost no" real women on it. The subtext is that millions of gullible, disloyal males were paying monthly fees to the website to do nothing or, cue the laugh track, to converse with "badly-designed robots." These men, according to Gizmodo, were buying a "fantasy," and "almost no" hookups were ever consummated.
That conclusion was ridiculous on its face. It assumes that men have no common sense. In fact, not one man but over 30 million men with zero common sense. (Ashley Madison has already been in business for over a decade.)
It didn't however stop the journalist from all kinds of emoting, such as:
"...the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile" [italics from the original]
In case that isn't extreme enough, she elaborated:
"Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison."
In casual conversations, I keep hearing this story. Except that the story has been debunked within a week of its publication, but as per the state of the media today, the debunking got a fraction of the press lavished on the original, dreadful piece of data journalism. Most of the outlets that helped spread the initial nonsense never bothered to print the retraction.
What the journalist faced was reality. As soon as the piece got published, a number of readers, both male and female, commented on their personal experiences with the website. There were couples who found love and eventually got married. There were female users who refuted the conclusion that Ashley Madison was "a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead." Besides, people with inside knowledge pointed out how the data were completely misinterpreted.
For those interested in "numbersense" in data analysis, it is very instructive to read both the original article and the retraction that is thinly disguised as further juicy finding. How can a data analyst avoid falling into the traps that lead them to utterly invalid results?...
Noll-Scully doesn't measure anything real
http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2016/04/noll-scully-doesnt-measure-anything-real.html
EXCERPT: The most-used measure of competitive balance in sports is the "Noll-Scully" measure. To calculate it, you figure the standard deviation (SD) of the winning percentage of all the teams in the league. Then, you divide by what the SD would be if all teams were of equal talent, and the results were all due to luck. The bigger the number, the less parity in the league. [... The problem is that...] Noll-Scully doesn't measure anything anybody really wants...