32/42--better than the "average individual", lower than the professionals and the median answer. I was basically at chance on the last group, where the descriptions were wordier and described more complex experiments. The entire process felt like being a psych experiment, including the choice of whether or not to continue. So presumably it was one.
3: They basically say as much.
I stopped at 10. "14.7 out of 21"
3: I assume it would invalidate the experiment if I actually read the details.
34. Three of my misses were when I went against my heuristics of guessing ideological studies, studies with difficult to measure outcomes, and studies relying on self-reporting would not replicate.
36/42, not bad.
I can't shake the feeling that I have just contributed a data point for some other experiment, though.
34 out of 42. Helped by some familiarity with the reproducibility crisis.
22/42. I wish I could say I had been flipping coins.
I did as well as professionals! I think this was because I'd read a good bit about all those "priming" studies and how they don't replicate very well, so basically I just assumed that if a study didn't involve priming it was replicable.
In conclusion, I loathe Shankar Vedantam.
36. All my wrong answers I was too skeptical.
I don't work at a university anymore, so I decided it wasn't my problem.
34. Both too skeptical like Sifu and too lazy (mostly) to read the full study descriptions. I'm always vaguely saddened about priming, because I remember charming conversations with a friend's wife, who is now a professor in a social science and did much of her graduate work on priming (ie does bubbling in the F bubble cause girls to underperform on standardized math tests).
||
I was flattered into running a 5 part discussion series for faculty and staff at Heebie U, and I'm preparing for the 2nd discussion.
The problem is that because I've blogged here for 10+ years, I have a *very* finely attuned sense of what generates conversation and what doesn't. (Obviously I'm wrong sometimes, and also sometimes I post something knowing it won't generate conversation. Nevertheless.)
This topic is not worth 5 discussions by any stretch. You could lecture on it and generate 5 classes worth, and if these were your students, you could leverage your goodwill as their instructor to get them to grudgingly play along and think of something to say and contribute. But this is my peers, and they are only going to talk if they want to, and the first discussion had way too much *crickets* and I burned through all my planned discussion questions within the first third.
I keep going back and forth with the organizers and since I'm not willing to say I HAVE A LOT OF EXPERIENCE HERE AND THIS IS A TERRIBLE PLAN, I just keep receiving gentle encouragement. I am suffering greatly.
Just say "pacing" very slowly, like take a couple minutes with it, and walk out.
17: You might have to relax the "stay on topic for the first forty minutes" rule.
Email everyone a joke about reproducibility and cancel it.
Start every session with a recording of "Beth I hear you calling" to kill time.
I have a math problem. According to the news, we got four inches of rain over the weekend. But my neighbor didn't bring her trash can in on Saturday morning and it was out in the rain until about a half hour ago when I put it in for her. There was over a foot of water in it. Granted the slides slope a bit inward, but not anything close to 300%. So, did we get that much more rain than the news says or did my neighbor dump water in her trash can? According to my basement, probably we get more rain than the news says the area got, but I don't think it was twelve inches.
To be 3 times the surface area, it'd have to have sqrt(3) ~= 1.73 times the radius (or diameter), which would be noticeable. I dunno. Strong winds increasing the effective catchment area? There's probably pretty high variability based on location, too--NWS weather report lists 3.07 inches (beating the record of 1.77 set in 1911), but that's probably only over 24 hours (although we didn't have much rain before 5pm yesterday).
I got 18 out of 20. I could have gotten 20 out of 20, but I hedged my bets on two of them.
Were the trash cans along a wall or anything that could maybe deflect extra water?
Also, I need to tell you all the terrible discussion topic, I think, for full sympathy: civility on a college campus. It's the worst! So boring who cares!
I mean, it's fine. It's just that nobody has much interesting stuff to say about it. It just fundamentally does not hold my interest for more than one discussion.
25: Not really, but kind of in line with a gutter. About six feet away, but maybe during a downpour, it gets streaming and it goes that far.
I've shit bigger pieces of civilly onto this campus this week than every committee you've ever been on, combined, since their inceptions.
Civility is just another way of saying, "People who park like fuckheads will go unpunished."
27 really illustrate how brilliantly set-up you were. If they won't take a polite expression of disinterest, you either have to do it their way by default or be uncivil, thus demonstrating the need for more talk on civility.
How did you measure the depth of water in the trashcan? If you just looked at it refraction can be a liar.
27: Maybe you should start with incivility, Texas university edition: https://longreads.com/2018/09/06/having-the-wrong-conversations-about-hate-activity/
Might foment a bit more discussion if you accuse the audience of complicity . . .
I did not measure the water with a ruler, but i had to dump the water out. It was way too heavy for four inches of water.
Did you double-check your unit conversions?
34: Huh, that author is here in Heebieville.
Even four inches deep is plenty heavy: in a 22-inch diameter can that would weigh about 55 pounds.
37: Yeah, I thought of you when I read it. It sounded like she maybe resides in Austin and teaches in Heebieville.
What's the smallest container that can provide an accurate measure of rain? I've always wondered.
17: the answer should be clear from your experience here - just allow the discussion to wander gently off topic. Maybe bring some board games along.
What's the smallest container that can provide an accurate measure of rain?
The standard measure has a five-inch-diameter opening one foot above ground level.
the answer should be clear from your experience here
After 40 minutes, start telling people who they can't masturbate to.
After one session of the series, they and you are allowed to change the subject. Talk about something more interesting, like measuring rainfall.
43: Cheaper for you to just paint the gauge on your wall.
It just keeps fucking raining. If a see a guy with a leek on his hat or a detective with a $700 jacket, I'll have to assume I'm in Wales.
36/42, and on one of those I mistakenly pressed the wrong button. Used the same heuristic as Frowner.
That'd be interesting as a probability problem: model the rain as a set of N of uniform i.i.d. spherical (hrm, cylindrical is probably easier) events of equal radius r falling vertically over some area A; the gauge is circular of radius R. If the gauge's circle and the cross-section of a raindrop intersects, the gauge takes in water proportional to that intersection. How big does R have to be relative to r to have, with high probability, 2piR^2*water height in the gauge to be comparable (within a few percent) to the height of the entire volume of all N rain drops distributed over A, assuming very large N?
If r and R in close in size, edge effects are going to dominate. If we be perverse and consider R << r, edge effects go away but the distribute of the result is probably a lot more variable. Or maybe not, since we assume a huge N, but our assumptions would start to break down since surface tension would have a big effect.
Yesterday it rained so hard I couldn't hear audio playing on a laptop I was typing at. Then it kept doing that for two hours.
If we be perverse and consider R
Sounds like the "r"s got the better of you and you've turned pirate.
Anyway, the Mon River's flow rate is two orders of magnitude higher than it was last week, and is currently around four times the rate of its previous record on this date (going back eightyish years). It's at 76900 ft^3/s as I type this; the fastest I've ever gone out on it was a swollen spring day when it was around 30k ft^3/s, which was stupidly fast.
Good thing it'll probably end overnight, but that's not going to be enough time to dry out the ground if we get hit by a weakened Florence next weekend.
I think if Florence falls on you damp ground will cushion the impact.
Florence only moves westward in the northern hemisphere.
And the umbrella I literally bought yesterday? Broken.
(Not from force of rainfall, just from being crap.)
Florence only moves westward in the northern hemisphere.
Are you calling Florence a ho?
Actually she moves westward in the south, too. I was mixing up the clockwise/anticlockwise thing.
Cyclone in the streets, anticyclone in the sheets.