My Google ABC's

"Everybody lies." - Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

New Way of Getting Data

Polling people doesn't reveal what's true anymore. We all found that out when Trump became our president. The reason behind this is explained very well in the new book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.  

There are many points made in the book (so far, I'm not yet half way) that are not surprising, but a few that are.  For example, one of the depressing but not surprising realities that surface from Google searches are that

• "Parents are two and a half times as likely to ask "Is my son gifted?" than "Is my daughter gifted?"" (Reality: Girls are 9 percent more likely to be in gifted programs than boys in school). 
• "Parents Google "Is my daughter overweight?" roughly twice as frequently as they Google "Is my son overweight?"" (Reality: 28% of girls and 35% of boys are overweight).
• "Areas that supported Trump in the largest numbers were those that made the most Google searches for "nigger.""

There were a few surprising findings in this enlightening book.  Here is one example.  Select two people at random from any given news site, whether that be Fox News or ThinkProgress.  What would you think the probability would be that the two have different political views?  

My idea of the internet led me to think that it is segregated in the sense that conservatives tend to mainly view conservative sites while liberals view more liberal sites. This led to a guess that would be closer to 0% (a perfectly desegregated site would give close to 50%).  

The result: 45.2%.  

What?!? 

My ABCs of Google Searches

This idea of Google searching providing an avenue of who we really are gave me the idea of finding out who I really was by looking at my Google search history. Simply by typing each letter individually into Google, Google will fill in "suggestions" for you based on what you have searched for in the past.  

Here is a glimpse of my Google ABCs: 

a. amazon music

b. beersmith podcasts

c. cyanide and happiness

d. duolingo norwegian

e. eagle statue washburn campus

f. fractional reserve system

g. great taste of the midwest

h. homebrewing podcasts

i. international monetary fund

j. jse data sets and stories

k. kansas v. board of education

l. loop de loop decorah

m. mirepoix pronounce 

n. nonparametric statistical methods

o. ordering prints online

p. public service announcement vertical videos

q. quantasia sharpton

r. rgb for washburn university

s. sagbraw

t. top paying statistics jobs

u. us news and world report statistician

v. videos not coming up on gopro mtp client disk volume

w. wings of freedom washburn

x. xkcd

y. yo

z. zillow

This speaks very highly about how big of a dork I am.

Card Trick

If you can memorize this chart, you can do a really cool card trick.

My basic statistics class gets to learn a new thing about me each class period.  Today, they learned that I like card tricks, especially mathematical ones.  Want to try?  Grab a deck of cards.

Count out 27 cards, because that is all that is required for this trick.  The next two instructions can be done in any order.

Pick any number from 1-27. Let's suppose you picked 23 like my student did this morning.

Go through the deck and choose a card as your card. Shuffle it anywhere in the deck.  Put it in a specific spot if you want.  It doesn't matter.

Here is the math part.  You need to take the number 23 and come up with three instructions.  In my picture, I want you to notice that 23 is in the middle of its most inside block.  It's block, is in the middle of the outside block.  Finally, the outside block is the bottom block.  OK, so it isn't the bottom, it is the far right, but I couldn't put a huge vertical photo in the blog.  You will need to remember middle, middle, bottom.

Now, deal the cards face up into three piles, one at a time, alternating piles.  To be specific, the first card defines the first pile, the second card the second pile, the third card the third pile, and then deal the rest accordingly.

While you are doing this, keep an eye out for your card.  You will need your participant to do the same thing later when you are performing.  Note which pile your card is in.  Once the piles are all turned over so that the cards are face down, you place the pile in the position of your first instruction: middle.  (Yes, I know that it didn't matter if we turned the cards over for that instruction, but for top and bottom it does.)

You do this again two more times, making sure you place the pile in the intended place.

Now, count out the cards from the top until you reach the 23rd card.  That is your card.  If you find yourself going "wow, cool!" then you just enjoyed some math.

Try it again for a different number.  Say, 6.  Can you tell that the instructions for 6 are bottom, middle, top?  Each number has a unique set of instructions that forces any card in the deck to the position you want it to be in.

Cool, huh?

For a slightly different explanation and a video tutorial, you can watch that here.

Less Than a Week Left of Winter Break

Standing on the Top Platform of the State Capitol Building in Topeka

It was Tuesday, with one more week until class begins, and the alarm went off at 5am. I put on my suit and tie, had a leisurely breakfast and some coffee and went over my speech one more time. Then, I drove to the Sunrise Optimist Club of Topeka. 

Once I mingled with them for a while, drank some more coffee, and they went through some announcements and drawings for a few different raffles, I was introduced as the morning speaker. Then, I gave one of the most passionate talks of my life about the Represent.US movement. 

There was a naysayer in the crowd, which was great. Although this caught me off guard, I eventually got him to admit out loud that he really didn't care about what the general public thought. It was too bad that this admission wasn't during my talk (it was in private afterwards), but I got it out of him nonetheless. It was a great learning experience, and I will be better prepared for the next talk. And the next one after that. 

After just giving a talk in Atlanta at my math conference on Friday, it hit me that I've been getting a lot of public speaking in lately. According to Warren Buffet, I'm getting some good practice with the number 1 skill that will increase my worth by 50 percent. 

After my talk, I changed into something a little more comfortable and went to the office to work on getting my classes ready. Somewhere around noon, I needed a break. 

I thought to myself, "Hmmm. I've never been to the Capitol. When's the next bus?"  

Over at the northeast corner of campus, I struck up a quick conversation with someone waiting for the bus. The bus arrived quickly. My campus ID gets me anywhere in Topeka for free on the Metro. I really love this since it provides an easy avenue to reduce my carbon footprint. 

The Kansas State Capitol Building has about five floors to explore. One of the highlights was this mural of John Brown outside the Senate Chamber. It is called Tragic Prelude by John Steuart Curry.

Kansas is very proud of John Brown. This picture is recreated in many different murals in businesses around Kansas. Take Wichita Brewing Company or John Brown's Underground in Lawrence as a few examples. 

The literally breathtaking highlight of the Capitol visit was to get a Dome Tour. I was the only person on the tour, so it turned out to be a private one! The tour guide must go on the tour with me, however, which meant that she had to ascend the 296 stairs to the top with me. I kind of felt bad when she started breathing very heavily.  Like I said, it was literally breathtaking. 

It was also figuratively breathtaking as the opening picture suggests. When I walked out on the platform, it was hard to combat the vertigo. In the year and a half that I've lived here, I had no idea that you could go outside on the platform on top of the Capitol!  

When you come to visit, and the schedule isn't packed, can guess where I'm taking you?  

On a complete side note, it got to 60 degrees today in Topeka. That means a bike ride has to occur since I'm trying to ride 2017 miles in 2017. Well, 1995.5 to go! 

How to Raise a Nation's GDP

It was Sunday evening, May 15th, and I was finishing up my first weekend of being completely done with the Spring 2016 semester, and my first year at Washburn. Sitting there in my newly arranged living room (that can now seat four comfortably), I finished reading the last page of Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

It was one of the most eye-opening, and important pieces of work that I have ever read.  I'm so far behind, too, as this book came out in 2009.  Why hasn't anyone recommended this to me before now?

Educate Women

That's the simple answer to the title of this post, but the next question is a lot more difficult to answer on a global level than you realize: How do we educate women?

The authors do a great job of telling amazing stories of individuals, sometimes absolutely heartbreaking. They realize the importance of story telling over giving you the statistics of how horrible conditions are for women worldwide. Whether you agree with our psychology or not, we react more to stories of the hardships of an individual person than we do about a statistic that hundreds of thousands of people are suffering.

You will get sick to your stomach. You will get angry. At times, you will cry for joy.

The book will throw you head first into the world of forced prostitution and sex trafficking, and how although more prominent elsewhere, it is happening in your own backyard.

You will learn about the importance of maternal health on a global scale, and how horrible the U.S. is in this category as a developed nation. We have no excuse.

You will learn how iodizing salt is one of the cheapest ways of educating kids, and keeping them in school. Seriously. I'm not going to tell you how iodizing salt can accomplish this here because you should read it. Seriously.

You will read about some truly remarkable people and organizations already doing things that can help.

How can you help? The first and maybe the last step for you is simply to educate yourself, and read the book. Watch the documentary. Whatever. If you are informed, you can talk about it, and by talking about it, someone else may move to a further step.

A Chinese proverb says that "Women hold up half the sky."  What is sad is that this has never actually been true, because men have never let them.  Men have kept them under foot and have "clipped their wings" at an early age so to speak, which reminds me, you should also read I am Malala, a book that I borrowed that phrase from. The world will be a better place if we take the necessary steps so this is true in every possible sense.