March 2, 2004
TRY ROCK, PAPERS, SCISSORS:
Toss Out the Toss-Up: Bias in heads-or-tails (Erica Klarreich, 2/28/04, Science News)
If you want to decide which football team takes the ball first or who gets the larger piece of cake, the fairest thing is to toss a coin, right? Not necessarily.Posted by Orrin Judd at March 2, 2004 12:20 PMA new mathematical analysis suggests that coin tossing is inherently biased: A coin is more likely to land on the same face it started out on.
"I don't care how vigorously you throw it, you can't toss a coin fairly," says Persi Diaconis, a statistician at Stanford University who performed the study with Susan Holmes of Stanford and Richard Montgomery of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In 1986, mathematician Joseph Keller, now an emeritus professor at Stanford, proved that one fair way to toss a coin is to throw it so that it spins perfectly around a horizontal axis through the coin's center.
Such a perfect toss would require superhuman precision. Every other possible toss is biased, according to an analysis described on Feb. 14 in Seattle at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Actually producing randomness turns out to be a ducedly difficult problem.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at March 2, 2004 1:57 PMShoot craps.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at March 2, 2004 1:59 PMWouldn't flipping it up with the edge paralell to the ground (presumably after using a laser leveller to assure perfect perpendicularity of the coin's sides) solve the problem?
Posted by: John at March 2, 2004 2:42 PMif the coin gets to the ground, it is random. Unless you're flipping it on sand.
Heard this on NPR the other day, and they emphasized that it only applies to a flipped then caught coin, and the effect is really small.
If you want truly random numbers, ask the IRS how much tax you owe. It's the only way.
Posted by: some random person at March 2, 2004 4:05 PMFrom the article: "The bias is most pronounced when the flip is close to being a flat toss."
Duh. Why this is considered to be noteworthy is beyond me. Is this really advancing science?
It doesn't need to be random, as long as it is unpredictable.
Posted by: ray at March 2, 2004 7:59 PMKerry's latest position on any given issue. 50/50.
I've seen this atrocity pop up here before, and so I must ask once again:
Why in the hell do you people listen to NPR?
If you're listening to keep an ear on the enemy, well, OK. But if you're listening for enjoyment or "enlightenment," well ... then I'm worried about the state of conservatism.
Posted by: tomcat at March 2, 2004 10:31 PMWhere else can you get intelligent discussion of the news 24/7?
Posted by: oj at March 2, 2004 10:38 PMWhere else can you get intelligent discussion of the news 24/7?
On the World Wide Web.
As a conservative, I've got two good reasons for avoiding NPR:
1) It's liberal. That sorta dilutes the "intelligent discussion" assertion right out of the gate. I don't mean that as a goofy-knee-jerk-Free-Republic-Lucianne.com kind of jab. I mean that as a matter of logic: Slanted coverage that includes both active bias and bias of omission is, by definition, not real intelligent.
2) It gets my tax dollars -- along with a special sanction from the government to exist in the first place. The federal government shouldn't be in the radio-station business. (I'm not talking about the doling-out of the frequency spectrum. I'm talking about the feds' specific support for "public" radio.)
If there's a demand for "intelligent discussion," let the marketplace provide it. Giving NPR your time and your ears is supporting something that conservatives should instinctively resist as a matter of basic principle.
Oh yeah, there's a third factor:
3) The NPR Voice. How anybody can listen to that monotone drone for more than five minutes -- let alone "24/7" -- is beyond me. This is America, where we're supposed to want stuff with a little oomph and heart. Let the bores be boring in Europe.
I would be fun if, even if just for one day, they allowed the Magliozzi brothers to host Morning Edition to get away from the monotone drone (though if they swapped jobs with Bob Edwards and Susan Stamberg, I would imaging Car Talk listeners would get tired pretty fast of detailing their vehicle problems to the hosts and then being told to take mass transit and stop contributing to global warming).
Posted by: John at March 3, 2004 7:45 AMBaxter Black.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at March 3, 2004 1:45 PMTomcat:
I listen to NPR for two reasons:
1. All its manifest shortcomings you listed serve to produce a state of mind sufficiently anagonistic to keep me awake on my commutes to & from work.
2. An ongoing desire to see how they are going to work in the obligatory "on location" sound track, without it being hackneyed and ridiculous. They never fail to fail.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at March 3, 2004 8:55 PMAlong that line, I particularly liked the sound clip from a French movie last week. Somebody screaming and crying in French, a great help for an anglophone audience.