When I left Dartmouth, I set up my alumni email and then promptly forgot about it until today. This is a bit of an apology for not replying to the 125 messages that you all have sent to me over the last 2 years. Whoopsie.
Well, they don’t say what games are being played, but lazy students have a new excuse in their arsenal now that surgical residents in a Phoenix AZ hospital are now being required to play Wii games as part of their training.
Q: Can a video game really help somebody improve as a surgeon?
Smith: We used cyber gloves which computerize hand movements of surgeons and we put those on surgeons. We have data on that. We put them on people playing the Wii. There is a very, very high correlation between the two and this is documented statistically.
I remember reading earlier this year an article on how marble madness was a particularly good training exercise for fine motor control - to noone’s real surprise. Those clever little accelerometers.
I have a statistics question that I need some help with. It’s really a question of “what is the statistical importance of a deviation from a fit?”
Let me illustrate with plots:
1. Here we have some data and a line fit to the data. Everyone I’m sure agrees that this is a good fit.
2. Now, the same data and fit, but with one point that’s off by 1-sigma. 1-sigma events happen all the time (well, roughly 1/3 of the time) so we’d still assume that the fit matches the data well.
3. Now we have a point that’s 2-sigma from the fit. Assuming a normal distribution, that should only happen by chance ~5% of the time, so we start wondering if the deviation of that point is actually a significant event.
4. Now, the real question. Instead of a single deviant point, we have two points. Both of them are 1.3-sigma from the fit. If taken individually, there’s a ~20% probability that each one does match the fit. However, we “know” that they’re correlated in that the depression of both points is related to something physically going on. How would I determine how statistically significant this depression is?
Needless to say, my real data isn’t faked and is more complex than the example, but I need to figure out the same sort of answer. I’d appreciate any help that anyone can offer. And I apologize for using my astronomer’s imprecise statistical descriptions.
Otherwise known as: Happy Birthday to MBH! Hooray birthday!! Hooray beer! Hooray trucks! Hooray Padres!
So, yesterday was the first time that I didn’t go to work on Memorial Day in a long long time, if ever. In fact, I wasn’t allowed to go to work (well, not go and get paid for it). While I appreciate the taking of a day to honor those who have served our country and paid with their lives, I’m not entirely comfortable with how the “day off” has turned into a day of beer and grilling and baseball, much as I like those things.
This NYT article echoes this sentiment and provides a bit of history of the holiday, for those interested.
Having not served in the Armed Forces, I feel like I need to be careful, but my personal feeling about Memorial Day is that I’m not comfortable just not showing up for work, hosting a party, getting misty-eyed during the national anthem shown on TV before the game, but that’s about it. We as a nation do a shitty enough job taking care of those veterans who make it back with a heartbeat - I think those that don’t deserve a bit more remembrance, y’know? On the East Coast I would always try to make it down to DC to visit the Vietnam Wall for Remembrance/Memorial Day; somehow that seems more appropriate.
That said, were I to number among the fallen, I would want my kids, wife, family and friends to have the day off and have a good time, maybe place some flowers on my grave while on their way to take in a minor league baseball game. Hmm, that sounded a bit morbid, but I think the sentiment is clear.
So, even though the major credit card companies do not concede any wrongdoing, a class-action lawsuit against them is in its final stages, which means that you have ~10 days left to claim $$ from them.
This stems from the foreign currency fees charged by Visa/Mastercard/etc, so click here if you used your credit card overseas between 1996 and 2006. I haven’t finished it yet -updates today or tomorrow, but I am told that the best way is to call first and get a claim number, then finish it up online. (But it has to be done/completed by May 30th!)
There are three different options: if you didn’t travel much, then you just get $25. Or you can total up your time spent abroad, or if you spent a lot and have absurdly good records, you can enter the amount that you spent abroad.
A recent quote from The Superficial:
“… It was sort of magical, you know? Like seeing the Aurora Borealis. Or, no, wait, that’s bush league. I got it: A really awesome chicken wing shaped like Abe Lincoln that you try to tip a stripper with. Swish! Count it! Northern Lights, you just got served.”
- The Superficial
It hurts having my research be so degraded… Then again, maybe the rest of the post makes up for it.
