Screwing your lawyers may bit be a good legal strategy

by oskay

Court documents reveal that Dell ignored capacitor problems and knowingly sold faulty computers
[Via Edible Apple]

Dell CEO Michael Dell famously opined many years ago that Apple should give shareholders their money back and close up shop. Since then, Apple and Dell have been on two completely different trajectories. As Apple continues to pile up money thanks to one revolutionary product after another, Dell has struggled to maintain the impressive profits it raked up just a few years ago.

And just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, Ashlee Vance writes for the New York Times that Dell is in extremely hot water over selling faulty computers it had reason to believe were prone to malfunctioning.

In one particular example, Dell had sent the University of Texas a number of machines that began to malfunction when given difficult and processor intensive math calculations. As it turns out, the desktop PC’s sold to the University were replete with “faulty electrical components that were leaking chemicals and causing the malfunctions.”

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Knowingly selling computers with faulty parts may not be beyond the pale. at least companies get busted for this all the time. Companies make a business calculation of how much the cost to fix them vs. dealing with a lawsuit and went ahead.

But this one has a little twist that brought a smile to my face:

Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute.

Nice. That must have been a fun meeting. ‘”You mean we bought 1000 of these bad computers? How about you fix them for us?” “Well, if we fixed yours, we would have to fix all 12 million of them. We are paying you to make sure that does not happen.” “Oh. Yeah. Right.”

Faulty capacitors have been a real problem with electrical equipment over the last few years. I mean when you have your own Wikipedia page you are something real! Cheap is not always better. I’d bet that Apple bought the good capacitors.

Soccer is like throwing dice

Following my previous post on soccer and statistics, I did a little looking to see if anything more recent was available. Turns out something more recent is available. Soccer: is scoring goals a predictable Poissonian process? Here is a key paragraph:

Neglecting the minor differences between a Poissonian and binomial distribution and the slight tendency towards a draw, a soccer match is equivalent to two teams throwing a dice. The number 6 means goal and the number of attempts of both teams is fixed already at the beginning of the match, reflecting their respective fitness in that season.

They used data from the German Bundesliga and used goal differential as a measure of fitness. Essentially, ou could then predict which team would wi simply by having them roll rolling dice, with a 6 being a goal and the number of times they get to roll being dependent on their fitness.

Of course the randomness is what gives all of us fans hope. It means that even if or team is not as fit as the other, we still have a chance to win.

They also make the point that for sports where many goals are scored – such as basketball – the random fluctuations would be reduced and the stronger team would most likely win.

Science and Soccer

by stevendepolo

Does the best team win the World Cup?
[Via Why Evolution Is True]

There’s a dearth of evolution news during the holiday break, so I thought I’d call attention to a oft-discussed problem with the World Cup and a little known paper that suggests a solution. The debate (which, as a football neophyte, I won’t attempt here to resolve or even contribute to) centers on whether the arrangement of World Cup matches is the best way to determine the best team.

To win the World Cup, a team need win only six or more games out of seven against a variety of teams, and to clinch victory it need win only a single game against an opponent it hasn’t previously met in the tournament. This is in strong contrast to American games like basketball or baseball, in which the two final teams are pitted against each other in a series of games, so that you have to win more than one (four in the case of the baseball World Series) to become champion.

There are two interrelated problems here. The first is that the championship is decided with a single game, and the second is that the number of goals that a team must score to win is relatively low—sometimes just one—so a win can reflect luck, or the events of a single day, rather than a persistent and repeated superiority over an opponent. (The American football championship, the Superbowl, is also decided by a single game, but it typically involves several goals and many points.) Can we really be sure that the victor in a single World Cup game is the best national team in the world?

This problem was taken up in 1966 by John Maddox, in an piece he wrote for Nature called, “We wuz robbed” (you can download it by going to this page). If you’re a scientist, you’ll know that Maddox was the plain-spoken and controversial editor of that journal, where he served for two terms (1966-1973 and 1980-1995). He died last year. 1966 was, of course, the only year that Brits ever won World Cup, in a 4-2 final with Germany that featured the only “hat-trick” (three goals by one man; in this case Geoff Hurst) ever performed in a World Cup final.

Maddox fitted the number of goals among all teams in that year’s World Cup to a Poisson distribution. This is a statistical distribution that occurs if there is a constant but very low probability of an event (say, a goal) occurring in a small interval (say, one minute of a game). If the probability is constant, then the distribution of events over a longer interval (say, goals in a 90-minute game) should fit the Poisson. Here from the article is Maddox’s compilation of each team’s World Cup goals, and the expected distribution from under Poisson expectation whose mean is equal to the average number of goals scored by a team (1.234 in this case).

The fit looks pretty damn good, and I confirmed this by doing a chi-square goodness of fit test, which gave the result χ² = 5.73, df = 6, 0.5 > p > 0.4, which isn’t even close to a significant deviation from the Poisson expectation. (I’m told that Mike Whitlock and Dolph Schluter show a similar Poisson distribution of more recent soccer scores in their statistics book The Analysis of Biological Data.)

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What this all means is that if two teams are equal, the number indicate that 72% of the time, one of them will lose just through randomness and not due to any real skill differences. The odds are that any winner in the final did not do so because they were a better team than the other.

So Maddox suggests that both teams play until one exceeds the expected Poisson distribution. Thus keep playing until one team has many more goals than the other so that the randomness of the game can be reduced.

Won’t ever happen but a fun statistical examination of the game.

This was doen in the mid 60s/ There have bee a lot of changes in soccer since then. I wonder if the statistics still hold?

I refuse to beleve in a God that lies to us

by digital cat 

The resurrection of Omphalos
[Via The Panda's Thumb]

I’ve said in several venues that should the theocrats win, the next day blood will flow down the aisles and under the pews (one hopes only metaphorically, though that’s by no means guaranteed). We see that metaphor scenario playing out in a number of venues in contemporary Christianity. Ken Ham rails against theistic evolution, arguing that its acceptance of an old earth/universe erodes the authority of scripture, and now Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (William Dembski’s former employer), all but accuses Francis Collins’ BioLogos Forum of apostasy (or so Darrell Falk interprets it) on much the same grounds, while endorsing the venerable appearance of age notion to account for the data of physics, geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology.

More below the fold

In 1857 Phillip Henry Gosse published Omphalos; an attempt to untie the geological knot, in which he argued (among other things) that the reason that the world appears to be older than implied by the Bible is that it was created to look old. Gosse distinguished between a diachronic interpretation of the geological record–it happened in time as the evidence suggests–with what he called a “prochronic” interpretation: God created the world at some time in the middle of its history and gave it the appearance of age, creating by fiat (false) evidence of (a non-existent) past history. And he really meant that, to the point that he illustrated it with what amounts precisely to Last Thursdayism:

Let us suppose that this present year 1867 [sic: I suspect this is a scanning error] had been the particular epoch in the projected life-history of the world, which the Creator selected as the era of its actual beginning. At his fiat it appears; but in what condition? Its actual condition at this moment: – whatever is now existent would appear, precisely as it does appear. There would be cities filled with swarms of men; there would be houses half-built; castles fallen into ruins; pictures on artists’ easels just sketched in; wardrobes filled with half-worn garments; ships sailing over the sea; marks of birds’ footsteps on the mud; skeletons whitening the desert sands; human bodies in every stage of decay in the burial-grounds. These and millions of other traces of the past would be found, because they are found in the world now; they belong to the present age of the world; and if it had pleased God to call into existence this globe at this epoch of its life-history, the whole of which lay like a map before his infinite mind, it would certainly have presented all these phenomena; not to puzzle the philosopher, but because they are inseparable from the condition of the world at the selected moment of irruption into its history; because they constitute its condition; they make it what it is. (pp. 352-353)

Now compare Albert Mohler, speaking at the Ligonier Ministries 2010 National Conference, in a transcript prepared by BioLogos:

I want to suggest to you that it is our responsibility to give an answer when we are asked the question “Why does the universe look so old?” In the limitations of time, it is impossible that we walk through every alternative and answer every sub-question. But I want to suggest to you that the most natural understanding from the scripture of how to answer that question comes to this: The universe looks old because the creator made it whole. When he made Adam, Adam was not a fetus; Adam was a man; he had the appearance of a man. By our understanding that would’ve required time for Adam to get old but not by the sovereign creative power of God. He put Adam in the garden. The garden was not merely seeds; it was a fertile, fecund, mature garden. The Genesis account clearly claims that God creates and makes things whole.

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This is the sort of logical pretzel that many theologians twist themselves into. In order to consolidate the scientific evidence we have before us and their religious belief in the inerrancy of the Bible they subscribe to Last Thursdayism – that God created the entire Universe with a purposefully misleading age.

But the Bible states that God does not lie (Hebrews 6:18). So how can God create an entire Universe that is a lie if it is impossible for God to lie? How do these people reconcile this contradiction? They seem to require a lying God, which is impossible, in order to fit their version of the Bible to reality.

What we have here is not a problem between science and religion but between one religious sect and science. As stated by Richard at The Panda’s Thumb:

What these folks are running into is the same problem that has plagued religions since centralized religious authority was invented: there is no mutually agreed and principled way to resolve disputes among competing interpretations of religious texts. And so we see interminable theological arguments leading to denominational schisms and (in the extreme) to sectarian warfare. BioLogos already interprets Mohler of accusing it of apostasy, and it looks like he fears that it is potentially sliding slowly down the slippery slope to (gasp!) theistic evolution, which Mohler describes as “the consummate oxymoron.”

Some religions have fewer problems with science. Catholicism has no need to for these sorts of contortions as it does not require belief in a world that is 6000 years old. The problem science has is not with religion as a general concept but with specific sets of beliefs that are terminally contradictory with science.

Science can never be fully reconciled to religion because there will always be some sect that is not amenable to reason. Better to stick with those that deal with scientific data rationally and just let the others fall by the wayside.