Author: Kyle Dickerson

I told you so…

August 19, 2014 9:45 am

This report from Statista has been making the rounds telling everyone how Honda Accords and Civics are magnets for theft.

Now it is important to remember our discussion about Bayesian statistics and why the headline of the article and chart, “Honda Owners Are Most At Risk From Car Theft,” is simply wrong.  This data makes no attempt to account for the number of these vehicles in use when considering how likely a vehicle is to be stolen.  What this data really says is, “Of cars that have been stolen, we counted more Honda Accords and Civics than other vehicles.”  Which is slightly different and explicitly says nothing about how likely Accords and Civics are to get stolen.  Claiming that, from this data, Accords and Civics are most likely to be stolen is disingenuous at best.  You must include the “prior” that accounts for the number of Accords and Civics that exist in the first place in order to say anything reasonable about the likelihood of Accords and Civics getting stolen.

If you don’t at least know about Bayesian statistics you’ll be misled by people who, either intentionally or not, report misleading data.  And I guarantee this report is being used today to sell additional insurance coverage to someone sitting in a Honda dealer buying a car (the same way they tried to do so to me in 2007).

In which we go for a hike

July 26, 2014 9:03 pm

IMG_20140726_150526aHeather’s been asking to go camping for a few weeks now (I had mentioned the possibility at some point, which she latched on to.  She knows all about camping from an episode of Bubble Guppies.  She’ll talk about having a tent and sleeping bags and a campfire and roasting marshmallows…).  We are planning on going camping in a couple of weeks, but I mentioned to her we could go hiking sometime too.  And we talked about her riding in the child-carrier backpack.

So last weekend I got it out and we went walking around the neighborhood for a while.  Then she became slightly obsessed with going hiking.  So I said we’d go hiking this weekend.  Sadly, that promise was made before we knew it was going to be over 100 degrees this weekend.  Regardless, she was super excited to go hiking today, so I looked for some place shady that might be a little cooler.  We ended up at Redwood Regional Park on the edge of Oakland.  It was probably about 10 degrees cooler than Livermore, which was at least something and there was a lot of shade for most of the trail.

We picked up some sandwiches and headed off for adventure.  At the parking lot for the trail-head (which was packed) we ate our lunch.  Jess, not being one for hiking what with her knees not being in very good shape, opted for sitting in the shade at the trail-head reading.  Heather and I packed up and began our trek.

Redwood_hikeWe hiked just about 2.5 miles.  Heather was in the backpack somewhere from 1/2 to 2/3 of the hiking.  She loved it, though she was pretty worn out by the end (and so was I).  I had her on my back and the CamelBak on my front full of water and snacks.

IMG_20140726_144849a IMG_20140726_144755a IMG_20140726_142658a

On the way home we went to Chick-fil-A since none of us had enough energy left to think about making dinner.  Hopefully the next time we go hiking it won’t be quite so hot.

Goof

July 19, 2014 10:19 pm

This morning while helping me clean the garage Heather paused and tensed up all her muscles.  I asked her what she was doing.  She said, “I’m trying to take myself apart.”  She’s done this every so often for the last several weeks since she’s seen Frozen enough times and tries to emulate Olaf (the snowman that disassembles).

This evening she started hopping and then started getting upset because, “I can’t float anymore.”  We don’t know when she used to float, but when Jess tried to help her she said, “No, I just want to float by myself.”  We tried to explain that people can’t float.

We fear that the mantra from Daniel Tiger of “keep trying, you’ll get better” may be detrimental in these cases.

RSS Feed broken?

July 5, 2014 1:36 pm

If you subscribed to the RSS feed back when this blog was hosted on Blogger, the forwarding for that feed apparently no longer works.  I don’t know why.  It seems Google decided to break it.  So if you usually use RSS feeds, you’ll need to re-subscribe.  The links are on the left-hand panel.  The “All Posts” feed is equivalent to what you would have seen before.