IT’S BEEN quite a summer for science, what with the arrival of a six-wheeled, nuclear-powered, laser armed robotic laboratory on Mars and the ‘revelation’ from the Encode Project that the large sections of the human genome previously dismissed as ‘junk DNA’ actually serve vital functions.
Seriously, given the efficiency and economy of so many biological systems, did anyone other than a halfwit really think that 80% of the genome was merely baggage?
The last month has also seen a certain sporting spectacular held in London which, as regular readers will be aware, was itself the subject of a little experiment. LabHomepage noted in July that a group of German academics had predicted the final medals tally for the Olympic Games, based purely on statistical data.
They considered recent trends in national performance, the amount of money invested, and other factors such as the home advantage. They did not include ‘irrelevant data’ such as the fitness of athletes. I’m sure you are all very eager to see how those predictions compared to the actual outcome.
The fact is that the statisticians got it 100% right – for Canada and Azerbaijan. For the other 170 countries included in their table, the variation between predicted and observed performance was little short of embarrassing. None of the top 20 countries occupied their predicted position in the table, not even the two for which the medal count proved accurate.
What is more astonishing is that the economists, from Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, didn’t even correctly predict the total number of medals to be awarded – and that was something they could have simply looked up. They weren’t out by a couple, but by over 150 –more than 15% of the total.
This doesn’t tell us very much about sport, but it does tell us something about academic economists and their grasp on the real world.
I hope you find the LabHomepage website, and this weekly newsletter, useful. Comments and feedback are always welcome: thesecretlabproject@gmail.com. Please help us build our circulation base by forwarding this to any friends that might like it, and suggest they subscribe at http://eepurl.com/itOV2
best wishes
Russ Swan
editor, LabHomepage.com
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