Leos suffer from weak digestion. They do, don't they?

Great old story from the Economist about a very common statistical error. Cherry picking.

Hospital admission data from Canada shows that Leos are likely to have gastric trouble and Sagittarians are more likely to break their arms. Both results are statistically significant...if your statistical technique ignores the fact that with 24 comparisons 2-3 are likely to be significant at the 95% level due to pure randomness.

I unconsciously resisted absorbing this idea during stats training...probably because I'm usually very keen for the results of my tests to be significant. Yet when one is doing dozens of tests (as I often am) results that appear significant are often just noise.

This example hammered the point home...probably because I am very receptive to the thought that astrology is a vicious scam. Cultural context: astrology in India isn't just harmless fun. The truth is that Leos are no more likely than anyone else to have gastric trouble. And my mom's painful feet are because of poorly designed footwear, not her Virgo birth sign.

Scrabulous vs Scrabble

Five reasons I like Scrabulous more than Scrabble.

- I can check the official word list quickly and easily. This levels the playing field a bit when a beginner like me who was never very good with spelling is playing old pros like my sister

- I don't need to do the arithmetic to work out how much a word is worth

- I can play with family and friends who live on different continents

- I can complete games with my wife. We almost never have blocks of time big enough for a whole game. Leaving the board in place is not an option in a house with two kids

- I can make a move between meetings to break up a work day

Paris je t'aime

Great fun.

18 clips about love in Paris. By different directors, about different aspects of love, set in different parts of Paris. United only by the spirit of the city, which permeates every clip. Sounds a bit like a film school project. Very cool project.

Each film clip works a poem. Not a novel. There isn’t enough room to establish a character or situation.

Yet, no richness is lost. These are like re-enactments from the Ramayana. Each character, each situation in a love story has been worn so smooth with repetition that one can step right into the narrative without needing to find bearings.

Cultural Learnings of Eng-a-land for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Hindustan

A summit has been summoned in Kirkcaldy. The problem: asbo seagulls.

Geeks, meet the jocks

Michael Medved on the value of an education:

That piece of parchment from New Haven or Cambridge does indicate that you've competed with single-minded effectiveness in the first 20 years of life....the driven, ferociously focused kids willing to expend the energy and make the sacrifices to conquer our most exclusive universities...are likely to enjoy similar success...

Competed, single-minded, driven, ferociously focused, energy, sacrifice - these words could be used to describe sports people. Not gifted amateurs, but the tough competitors who win ugly.

Among my peers, the sportsmen/ games captains have certainly gone on to be as successful as the university toppers. There is something in that old Thomas Arnold belief about sport building character...

Culture is a Beast

Tigers hunt alone. They stalk their prey through dense jungle, relying first on stealth and then on a burst of incredible power. Wolves hunt in packs. They chase their prey down through open terrain, encircle, harass and exhaust their prey, before killing and feeding as a pack. The social organization of animals, their cultures, are determined by their survival strategy. Animals evolve to do what it takes to get food without becoming food.

Tigers don’t stomp. Wolves don’t graze…even if they are made to sit through a thousand PowerPoint presentations.

Organizations are like animals. They evolve to do what is necessary for their survival, and very little else.

All that is obvious, right? Apparently not. The alchemy of “leadership”, armed with the sword of PowerPoint, can transform organizations into the object of the heart’s desire…never mind how the organization actually makes money.

My top management tip: beware the man in the Armani suit who teaches the elephant to be stealthy.

Or teaches the snake to fly. Hey…a snake who learns to fly is a dragon. That’s the metaphor which will super-charge my next change management program.

Attack of the Asian female clones

Glorious giants of the Appalachians are being killed off by insignificant-looking Asian females. And this has nothing to do with outsourcing, job losses, small towns, bitterness, guns or religion.

The Eastern Hemlock, a glorious native American tree that grows to a stature of 100m, the Sequoia of the Appalachians, is being wiped out by a tiny parasite, an aphid called the Woolly Adelgid. This has been observed and mourned in the New Yorker (I found the story thumbing through a back issue), the New York Times (way back in 1991) and in various pamphlets accessible with a Google search. However, what doesn't seem to have attracted comment is that the attacker is fatally flawed.

The aphids first came to America on decorative Japanese trees which were planted at Maymont, a public park in Richmond, VA. All the male aphids died. They feed exclusively on spruce sap and the males could not digest American spruce. A few females survived. Sans males, they had to reproduce by cloning. So, the threat to the Eastern Hemlock comes from clones of a very small number of individual female aphids. The clones were fantastically successful because they could colonize the Eastern Hemlock. As a predator gets established in America, or worst-case, as the Hemlock populations in the wild die out, the clones will also die. Clones are evolutionary dead-ends.

Should conservationists freeze Hemlock gene-plasm to re-populate the Applachians once the Woolly Adenids clones inevitably die? Makes sense. Just be sure to freeze a diverse pool of Hemlock gene-plasm. And establish an Eastern Hemlock worshipping cult whose rituals will remind initiates to perform this sacred task when evolution plays out and the clones finally die.