prior probability

When to use the passive voice

Posted on August 1, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

As faculty editor of the UCF Undergraduate Journal, we are constantly on “passive voice search & destroy missions” when we edit manuscripts: hunting for awkward sentences written in the passive voice and converting them into simple and straightforward active voice sentences. We thus found this short essay (hat tip: Eugene Volokh) on when to use the passive voice quite helpful. It was written by Geoffrey Pullman, a professor of general linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. [By the way, did you like how we snuck in the passive voice in the previous sentence?] In brief, Prof. Pullman identifies two situations in which it’s not only perfectly acceptable but also desirable to use the passive voice: (i) the trouble-saving passive and (ii) the pussyfooting passive. In the first case, the writer doesn’t want to get bogged down in minor details, while in the second, the writer needs to purposely avoid having to point the finger at someone or something. Here is an extended excerpt from Pullman’s essay explaining this taxonomy (edited by us for clarity):

And when is the passive more compact and direct? One class of such cases comprises [the] “trouble-saving passive.” If you were to take a sentence like Smith was arrested, indicted, and found guilty, but the money was never recovered and try to wrestle it into the active voice, as so many writing guides insist you should, you would have to find subjects for all the active verb phrases. You’d need subjects for arrested Smith (the police department? the county sheriff?), and indicted him (a grand jury, as in the U.S.? the Crown Prosecution Service, as in Britain?), and for found him guilty (a judge? a trial jury?), and for recovered the money (the detectives? some bank or post office? the people whose cash had been stolen?). Implementing this pointless and clumsy elaboration would make the sentence nearly twice as long. [By contrast, there is] “the pussyfooting passive,” which … “is essential in journalism” because “often the writer does not know who did something or is not free to say who did it, but he wants to say it was done.”

Image Credit: Maria Baez

Posted in Academia, Bayesian Reasoning, Culture, Language | 1 Comment

Musical mortality

Posted on July 31, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Check out this fascinating actuarial analysis of the life expectancy of popular musicians (broken down by musical genre) prepared by Dianna Theadora Kenny, a professor of music and psychology at the University of Sydney. According to Prof. Kenny, accidents are one of the main causes of death among musicians, especially for men: “For male musicians across all genres, accidental death (including all vehicular incidents and accidental overdose) accounted for almost 20% of all deaths. But accidental death for rock musicians was higher than this (24.4%) and for metal musicians higher still (36.2%).” The table below provides an even more comprehensive statistical picture:

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Kangaroo distribution maps

Posted on July 29, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

https://i0.wp.com/i.imgur.com/1vS8sC4.png

Hat tip: superegz, via reddit

Posted in Maps, Nature | Leave a comment

“Choking and Excelling at the Free Throw Line”

Posted on July 28, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

That is the title of this excellent empirical study by Darrell Worthy, Arthur Markman, and Todd Maddox. In case you’re wondering, their data set was comprehensive: it consisted of all free throws attempted during the last minute of all regular-season and playoff games in the three seasons of 2002-03, 2003-04, and 2004-05. The authors conclude that players tend to shoot worse than their career average when their team was behind or ahead by one point. (By the way, their elegant paper is only six pages long–five, if you exclude their bibliography! But if you’re pressed for time, fellow blogger Phil Birnbaum wrote up this helpful overview of the paper as well.) On a more personal note, although the paper was published way back in 2009, we stumbled upon it for the first time late last night while we were playing on the Internet during a bad bout of insomnia. Sometimes it pays to stay up late!)

Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Probability, Sports | Leave a comment

Starfleet mafia?

Posted on July 27, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Although we haven’t seen the new Star Trek movie yet (Star Trek Beyond), in today’s post we want to pose the following question about the fictional world of Star Trek: who pays for Starfleet? According to Wikipedia, “Starfleet is a service maintained by the United Federation of Planets [in the fictional universe of Star Trek] as the principal means for conducting deep-space exploration, research, defense, peacekeeping, and diplomacy.” But this definition begs the “who pays?” question. Who pays for this expensive “service”? Our friend and colleague Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, offers this intriguing conjecture: the men and women of Starfleet are interplanetary tax collectors. To put it less politely: Starfleet operates an interplanetary protection racket! In the words of Professor Somin: “The human-dominated Star Fleet military is the only visible Federation military force, and is perhaps tasked with collecting tribute from the nonhuman planets for redistribution to Earth. But as long as they pay their taxes, which subsidize Earth’s welfare state and Star Fleet itself, they are largely left alone to govern their domestic affairs as they see fit. The Federation is essentially a big protection racket. Like the Mafia, it provides ‘protection’ in both senses of the word: external security, and also ‘protection’ against its own depredations.” (If you want to do further research on this question, you can find links to additional conjectures here.)

Who pays?

Posted in Economics, Law, Science Fiction | 1 Comment

Strategic dating

Posted on July 26, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Roy Lugasi and Hod Gerlitz co-founded a new dating app called Weepo that allows users to monitor the male-to-female ratio at a bar or nightclub. According to this fascinating report by James Covert, writing for the New York Post, “The big idea … is mainly to cut short the prolonged chats that have long plagued other dating apps—ending, too often, with no date at all. ‘With all those other apps, you have to go through a conversation where it takes two or three days to meet up,’ [Roy] Lugasi told The Post. ‘With this app, you’re practically guaranteed to meet somebody tonight.'” In other words, finding someone to date is a time-consuming task. Most dating sites don’t really reduce the search costs of dating by much because finding a match on a computer or smart phone does not substitute for going out on a date. Thus, from an economic perspective, the main purpose of a dating app like Weepo is to significantly reduce the search costs of dating by actually bringing like-minded users together in the same place in one step. For what it’s worth, we also found this statement of interest from the N.Y. Post story: “’A lot of girls are going to the more high-end clubs’ like Tao, No. 8 and Marquee, which typically require stiff drink prices and steep covers, according to [Hod] Gerlitz. Young guys, meanwhile, gravitate toward no-cover bars—particularly those with cheaper drinks.”

image credit: embarrassingtreasures.com

Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Culture, Economics, Web/Tech | Leave a comment

Contagion theory of violence

Posted on July 25, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Check out this provocative open-access paper titled Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings (Towers, et al., 2015). Here is an extended excerpt (footnotes omitted): “We fit a mathematical contagion model to the data sets, with model terms that take into account temporal trends due to possible exogenous non-contagion factors, and a contagion term that takes into account the fact that a school shooting or mass murder may temporarily increase the probability of a similar event in the immediate future. We model the contagion process assuming an exponential decay in contagiousness after an event. Contagion models have been applied to financial markets, spread of YouTube videos on social networks, burglary, civilian deaths in Iraq, and terrorist attacks, but this is the first instance in which these models have been applied in the context of mass murders and school shootings.” Hat tip: Tyler Cowen, via Marginal Revolution.