{"id":250,"date":"2008-03-25T15:02:56","date_gmt":"2008-03-25T19:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=244"},"modified":"2008-03-25T15:02:56","modified_gmt":"2008-03-25T19:02:56","slug":"disaster-in-the-making-and-averted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/03\/25\/disaster-in-the-making-and-averted\/","title":{"rendered":"Disaster in the making, and averted"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to the New York Times<\/em>, I am unlikely to be a successful researcher in my chosen field of operations research. The reason? No, not due to an insufficient mathematical grounding, or a fuzzy understanding of methods of symmetry breaking for integer programs, but rather due to a social effect: I like to drink beer. I particularly like to drink beer with other academics. Here at the Tepper School, there is a Friday Beer group that goes out at the end of every week, and drinks.. yes.. beer. At OR conferences, I am likely to be found in the bar talking with friends (and adversaries!), and have often evaluated a conference on the quality of that bar and those conversations. In fact, as President of INFORMS, I took it as a platform that people should drink more beer together (actually, I advocated a stronger understanding of social capital<\/a>, but it is a rather thin line). But the New York Times<\/em>, via a Czech ornithologist<\/a>, says that is a problem:<\/p>\n

\n

What is it that turns one scientist into more of a Darwin and another into more of a dud?<\/p>\n

After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists \u2014 beer.<\/p>\n

According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper\u2019s quality and importance.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Oh no! I still have aspirations to be OR’s answer to Darwin and Einstein. Am I ruining my chances by partaking in the golden nectar? Is having my “conference preparation” be limited to checking out the brewpubs in the area fundamentally flawed?<\/p>\n

Fortunately, there are people out there who spend time debunking such myths, and lithographer Chris Mack was on the job. In a brilliant piece of work<\/a>, Chris provides an excellent summary of what can go wrong in statistical analysis. He sees a number of problems with the analysis:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Correlation is not causation. Perhaps it is poor research that drives one to drink (as alluded to in the Time article), or there is a common factor that drives both (a nagging spouse or an annoying dean, perhaps).<\/li>\n
  2. There aren’t many data points: just 34, and the r-squared value is just .5<\/li>\n
  3. The entire correlation is driven by the five worst-performing, and heaviest drinking, researchers.<\/li>\n
  4. It is likely those five are drinking with each other, messing up the independence assumption of linear regression.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So, as Chris says:<\/p>\n

    Thus, the entire study came down to only one conclusion: the five worst ornithologists in the Czech Republic drank a lot of beer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Whew! That’s a relief. The next time operations research gets together with lithography, I owe Chris a beer.<\/p>\n

    Thanks to, ironically, my drinking buddy Stan for the pointers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    According to the New York Times, I am unlikely to be a successful researcher in my chosen field of operations research. The reason? No, not due to an insufficient mathematical grounding, or a fuzzy understanding of methods of symmetry breaking for integer programs, but rather due to a social effect: I like to drink beer. … Continue reading “Disaster in the making, and averted”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs-and-web","category-social-capital"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}