Rob

Eldnar Randle: Did he know?

2015/08/26 By Rob 2 Comments

Eldnar Randle was born in Delano, California in 1892 and died in 1973 in Oregon. For most of his working years he was an auto mechanic. But he shared a distinction shared by only 1 in over 700,000 Americans. Any guesses? A clue: Look closely at his name.

Yes, Eldnar Randle was given a palindromic name. It reads the same backwards and forwards. This phenomenon is quite rare. A search of the 88 million names in the Social Security Master Death File (SSMDF) shows only 119 cases, including:

Leon Noel (many examples)
Welles Sellew
Grey Yerg
Ekard Drake
Ronoel Leonor
Rello Oller
Nilrah Harlin
Nella Allen
Revilo Oliver
Ronnoc Connor
Folke Eklof
Marlys Sylram
Elah Hale
Gnal Lang
Lemar Ramel
Ecallaw Wallace
Rednal Lander
Ellen Nelle
Oirolf Florio
Italo Olati

The question that came to mind was, how many of these were intentional, picked by the parents specifically to be palindromes, and which ones were just pure chance? Given names are often picked to honor some relative, often a parent or grandparent. Picking an unusual name, never used in the family before, probably has a story behind it. Some of the names certainly look a bit far-fetched. Ecallaw Wallace? But others sound quite natural, like Nella Allen. And Eldnar Randle? It is hard to tell. Looking at the 1900 census I see his father was a farm laborer and his mother a housewife. Both were literate. None of the other children had unusual names. But somehow he received the invented named “Eldnar.”

Riew Weir? No, I don’t think that would have worked.

Are there any other examples of world play in names that it is worth looking for among the 88 million names in the SSMDF? Anagrams? Something else?

Analysis of World Chess Champion Opening Repertoires

2015/02/25 By Rob 6 Comments

A quick test run of the FactoMineR package for R. This package focuses on multivariate exploratory data analysis, such as Principle Components Analysis (for numerical data) and Correspondence Analysis (for categorical data).

In an earlier blog post I took a look at a large collection of chess games and tried to quantify the “first move” advantage in chess, in terms of ratings. This time I’ll use the same large database of chess games, and look at opening repertoires. A chess opening is a set of moves that a player uses at the start of the game in an attempt to steer the game to positions familiar to the player, and which align with that player’s style and preferences. Such openings have descriptive, often colorful names, like King’s Gambit, Sicilian Poisoned Pawn, or Nimzo-Indian Defense, as well as a standard code, from the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings, like B07, C44 and E80. There are 500 such “ECO” codes, from A00 to E99.

I extracted games from all World Chess Champions, from Steinitz (1866) to Carlsen (2014) and calculated the percentage of the games for each player in each ECO code. So each player’s opening repertoire is represented as a vector of 500 weights, summing to 1.0. I then used FactoMineR’s PCA() method to extract principle components from this dataset. The first two components extracted together represent around 42% of the total variance.

Plotting the Champions against these two dimensions shows some intriguing patterns, bringing together players by era:

Further insights can be gleaned by plotting how these two components weight the various openings. To make it easier to read I grouped some of the ECO codes and used descriptive names for the better-known openings. From this we see that the first component appears to distinguish the player’s use of open games (1.e4 e5) in the positive direction versus semi-open and closed games in the negative direction. I’m having a harder time reading a real-world meaning into the second component. Maybe a reader sees something here?

Something to remember in all of this is that the choice of opening in a game is a result of the moves of both players. Players try to influence the opening, steer the game toward their advantages and preparations and against those of their opponents. But neither player has 100% control over the opening, aside with some fringe moves like 1. h4. However, players, especially world-class caliber players, do specialize in certain opening systems, and it is fair to speak of their repertoires.

Update:

The comment from Dana Mackenzie prompted me to try out another feature of FactoMineR, the ability to chart supplemental variables. These are variables that are not used in doing the underlying PCA calculation but can be shown in the charts, to see how they align with the extracted components. For example, I could add catagorical variable for each player to represent their nationality and then plot that, to see if there are national schools of practice regarding openings. Or, as I’ll do here, add a year variable the year the individual won their world championship, to see how this aligns:

We can see by the length of the line here that the Year has a strong correlation with these two components, mostly with the 1st component.

The Power of Brand and the Power of Product Redux

2014/10/28 By Rob 4 Comments

Last year I did a three-part blog (“The Power of Brand and the Power of Product”) describing a simple model of product adoption and market share, and showed how the parameters of that model could be determined using a single survey question. I used the open source productivity suites, OpenOffice and LibreOffice, as examples. It is now time to update that analysis with the most-recent survey data. (If you want to look up the original posts, here are the links: part one, part two, part three).

To recap the methodology, I conducted a survey using Google’s Consumer Survey service, which uses sampling and post-stratification weighting to match the target population, which in this case was the U.S. internet population. In other words, the survey is weighted to reflect the population demographics, for age, sex, region of the country, urban versus rural, income, etc.

The question in the survey was:

What is your familiarity with the software application called “OpenOffice”?

I have never heard of it
I am aware of it but have never used it
I have tried it once
I use it only sometimes
I use it on a regular basis

With 1502 responses, the results were:

I have never heard of it	61.3%
I am aware of it but have never used it	13.3%
I have tried it once	7.6%
I use it only sometimes	10.3%
I use it on a regular basis	7.5%

The same question was asked about LibreOffice, with results:

I have never heard of it	82.3%
I am aware of it but have never used it	5.8%
I have tried it once	4.4%
I use it only sometimes	3.1%
I use it on a regular basis	4.3%

Now these numbers are somewhat interesting on their own, but what is far more interesting are the derived metrics, which look at things like:

What is the name recognition of the product?
Of those who have heard of the product, what percentage actually give it a try? This is a measure of marketing effectiveness.
Of those who have tried the product, what percentage actually continue to use it? This is a measure of user satisfaction.
What percentage of all respondents use the product? This is a measure of market share.

Full details on how these other metrics are calculated, from this single survey question, can be found in Part One of this series.

Here are some charts to show how these metrics have evolved over the 2 1/2 years I’ve worked with this survey approach:

Those who know me know that I am partial to OpenOffice, an open source project that I contribute to. So I am extremely pleased to see it continue to advance in all fronts. Since coming to Apache, OpenOffice’s name recognition has grown from 24% to 39% and the user share has grown from 11% to 18%, while keeping user satisfaction constant. This is a testament to the hard work of the many talented volunteers at Apache.

ISO/IEC JTC1 Approves ODF 1.2 PAS Ballot

2014/09/17 By Rob Leave a Comment

OASIS ODF 1.2, the current version of the Open Document Format standard, was approved by ISO/IEC JTC1 National Bodies after a 3-month Publicly Available Specification (PAS) ballot. The final vote for DIS 26300 was: 17-0 for Parts 1 and 2, and 18-0 for Part 3.

Of course, this is a very good result and all those involved, whether TC members and staff at OASIS, implementors, adopters and promoters of ODF and open standards in general should be pleased and proud of this accomplishment.

This was a team effort, obviously, and I’d like to give special thanks to Patrick Durusau and Chris Rae on the ODF TC for their special efforts preparing the PAS submission for ballot, Jamie Clark from OASIS for putting together the submission package and Francis Cave, Alex Brown, Murata Mokoto and Keld Simonsen in JTC1/SC34/WG6 for their continued advice, feedback and support.

Since comments were received by Japan and the UK, we now start the comment disposition process. The SC34 Secretariat will determine whether a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) is required, or whether the comments can simply be handed to the Project Editor for application to the specification prior to publication. One way or another, there will be a little more work before publication of the ODF 1.2 International Standard.

The OASIS ODF TC continues work on ODF 1.3, with renewed vigor. After nearly a decade of involvement with ODF, and many years leading the committee, I’ve stepped down. The TC has elected Oliver-Rainer Wittmann, a long-time TC member, ODF implementor and a familiar face at ODF Plugfests, to take over. I’m currently exploring other areas related to open innovation (open standards, open source, open data, open APIs). If you know of anything interesting, https://linkedin.com/in/rcweir.

An inquiry into the topological ordering of casual American male dress

2014/08/07 By Rob 1 Comment

The dressing and arming of a warrior is a common set scene in epic poetry, e.g., Iliad 2:

He put on a soft khiton,
fine and newly made, and put around himself a great cloak.
Under his shining feet he fastened fine sandals
and around his shoulders he placed a silver-studded sword.
He took up the ancestral scepter which is always unwilting.

The structure and contents of such scenes have been well-studied by scholars, e.g., Armstrong 1958, and even parodied, as in Pope’s mock epic The Rape of the Lock:

Now awful Beauty puts on all its Arms;
The Fair each moment rises in her Charms,
Repairs her Smiles, awakens ev’ry Grace,
And calls forth all the Wonders of her Face;
Sees by Degrees a purer Blush arise,
And keener Lightnings quicken in her Eyes.
The busy Sylphs surround their darling Care;
These set the Head, and those divide the Hair,
Some fold the Sleeve, while others plait the Gown;
And Betty‘s prais’d for Labours not her own.

However, the dressing of the 21st Century casual American male appears to lack rigorous analysis, a deficiency I hope to remedy, at least in the area of furthering understanding of the dependency constraints of this activity.

It is well-known that underpants must be donned before pants. Despite the intriguing experimentation by Rowan Atkinson no practical alternative has been found. Similarly, socks must be put on before shoes, pants before shoes, and both pants and shirt before the belt can be buckled.

Illustrating the topological ordering as direct graph, we have the following:

2014-08-05 14.37.06 — Dependency analysis

Within these constraints many dress orderings are possible, some of the more common ones beings:

underwear, socks, pants, shirt, shoes, belt
underwear, pants, shirt, belt, sock, shoes
underwear, shirt, pants, socks, belt, shoes

Orderings like the above are familiar to most people. However, there are many other possibilities, some perhaps worthy of further exploration:

socks, shirt, underwear, pants, shoes, belt
shirt, socks, underwear, pants, belt, shoes

It will also be appreciated by those practiced in the art that the two socks need not be put on together. This permits extravagant ordering like:

left sock, shirt, underwear, pants, belt, right sock, shoes
right sock, underwear, pants, left sock, shoes, shirt, belt

There is also nothing that prevents a Towers of Hanoi approach for those with time to kill, where -X indicates that X is to be removed:

pants, shoes, shirt, -shoes, socks, -pants, underwear, pants, shoes, belt

Hopefully the above gives ideas for further exploration and experimentation. Although we do not dress and arm ourselves to fight the Trojans, our morning ritual can be equally an epic experience!