Fixing the Lottery | Stats + Stories Episode 347

Dr. Matthew McIntosh is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Missouri. Before transitioning into academia, Dr. McIntosh spent nearly three decades in clinical research, bringing valuable real-world insights to his teaching and research. In the Spring of 2023, he developed the Keno Project, an initiative aimed at correcting the displayed odds of winning the Keno lottery game in state lotteries, with a focus on engaging undergraduate students in statistical research. The project's first manuscript has been accepted for publication in Significance magazine. His research interests include power analysis, sample size determination, and promoting undergraduate research in statistics. Dr. McIntosh’s recent publications in sample size calculations focus on multiple linear regression and multivariate one-sided hypothesis tests. In 2018, outside his university work, Dr. McIntosh created statisticsmatt, a YouTube channel that offers tutorials and educational content for both undergraduate and graduate statistics students. 

Joseph is a senior studying Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Mathematics at the University of Missouri. Since his sophomore year, he has contributed to the Keno Project, using statistical models to derive accurate odds for the lottery game Keno, addressing discrepancies often found on state lottery playslips and websites. His work, which has been accepted for publication in Significance magazine, marks a key milestone in his academic journey. As an active member of the Mizzou Racing team, Joseph helps design and build a formula-style car from the ground up, gaining hands-on experience in motorsport engineering. This aligns with his goal of pursuing a career in motorsport, with the ultimate aim of working in Formula 1. He has also completed several engineering internships, honing his technical skills in various areas of the field. 

Gary G. McIntosh, CLU has for the past 15 years of semi-retirement, has dedicated his efforts to establishing Allen County’s Your Community Foundation, where he currently serves as an active advisor. His team focuses on fostering community engagement and promoting growth through education and collaboration.He has held leadership roles in several organizations, including the Jaycees, Chamber of Commerce, and as both City and County Commissioner. He has also served as an at-large board member for School District 257 and as a trustee for Allen Community College.

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Episode Description

Powerball, Mega Millions Cash for Life and more. Missouri offers many games of chance that have potential benefits for the players and guaranteed benefits for the State. In fact, the Missouri Lottery has contributed about 3 to 4% of the annual State funding for public education in the State of Missouri, more than 8 billion dollars to the State since 1986. These games describe the chances that a player will win a given game, often using calculations common in a probability class, such as permutations and combinations. So what happens if you check the calculations and you find that the calculations are not correct. A tale of lottery calculations, checked and fixed, is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories.

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Coming Soon

Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University's Department of Statistics and media, journalism and film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter @StatsandStories, Apple podcasts or other places where you find podcasts. If you'd like to share your thoughts about the program, send an email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu, or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.

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Historical Data Finding | Stats + Stories Episode 334

Hanley is a professor of biostatistics in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University. His work has received several awards including the Statistical Society of Canada Award for Impact of Applied and Collaborative Work and the Canadian Society of Epidemiology and Biostatistics: Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Episode Description

We leave data behind as we travel across the internet, our preferences and purchases transforming into a veritable goldmine of information for companies hoping to convince us to buy their new product or service. We often imagine this data mining and tracking as an invention of the so-called information age, but Victorians were tracking and mining data too. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with Dr. James Hanley

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Rosemary Pennington
We leave data behind as we travel across the internet, our preferences and purchases transforming into a veritable goldmine of information for companies hoping to convince us to buy their new product or service. We often imagine this data mining and tracking as an invention of the so-called information age, but Victorians were tracking and mining data too. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is our regular panelist John Bailer, emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is James Hanley. Hanley is a just-retired professor of biostatistics in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University. His research interests include the history of public health, epidemiology, and mathematical statistics. Hanleys work has received several awards, including the Statistical Society of Canada Award for Impact of Applied and Collaborative Work, and the Canadian Society of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Lifetime Achievement Award. He's also the co-author with Elizabeth Turner, and has an article in Significance about Victorian data mining. James, thank you so much for joining us today.

James Hanley
I'm delighted to talk to you guys.

Rosemary Pennington
So your article in Significance begins with this discussion: how this grocer who is selling coffee started weighing its customers, why did they start doing that?

James Hanley
We think in the 21st century that loyalty programs are a new idea. Yeah, I feel like a lot of things. There's no new ideas, there's just old ones recycled. And this is a loyalty program. I'm sure they were very smart people trying to stay alive and keep their business alive.

Rosemary Pennington
In London, you could come and get weighed, and that was going to bring you back to the store.

James Hanley
Yes, of course, I say at the end of the article, how would you even work to when I was growing up, I grew up in a small island, off the coast of Ireland, about a mile offshore, we only got to the mainland for, you know, the big goods, and the dry goods and all that sort of stuff twice a year in the summer. And there was a guy there who sold flour in big bags. And he would put us up on the balance beam as well. And he would say to us, oh, your mother, what are you feeding this guy he's growing so well. So that was the service, basically, the little side service that cost nothing, but made sure we didn't go across, or my mother didn't go across to her father to the other street where the other merchant runs their business. So it's not a new idea.

John Bailer
I love this idea that,you know, getting your weight is something that was a service that was provided by, by people selling goods, you know, it's so easy for us in modern times to step on your scale in your bathroom in the morning to say oh no, or whatever.

James Hanley
And track it on your iPhone as well. Exactly.

John Bailer
So this was you talking about this? There's this history of measuring weight, which I thought had sort of emerged as part of your story. Could you talk a little bit about kind of where things you've, you've started to talk about where things were? How did things start to change over time with the expansion and you call democratization of self tracking of weight?

James Hanley
I remember as a kid in the 1960s and 70s. The first train I took at the train station, there was a big girl weighing scales with a big circular thing showing with the hand so you put in a penny I think it showed your weight and I think for another penny they could print out a little card with a punch hole in it as to where your weight was. So it was because weighing scales came in at home I think in the 30s or 40s and 50s. They were in public places in the late 1800s. And Barry says he was surprised that weighing scales came so late to Ireland but you know they probably were 30 years or 20 years ahead and in the USA we had weighing scales on our farm but it was spring scales. We sometimes weighed our siblings, my parents with our siblings on it, how you did it. You got the diaper, which is a cloth diaper in those days, the four corners of the diaper you stuck a little hook into and then you weighed the baby to make sure the baby was going okay. So this is growing up in rural Ireland and rural America. I'm sure they had exactly the same thing. So farm instruments were very multi-purpose, and it was important to know your weight.

John Bailer
So can you talk a little bit now about what data was recorded, you know, and this in the shop where people were going to the coffee shop and getting very little?

James Hanley
I didn't actually, don't wait there, I had to cover it up inthe article because it was an agreement about confidentiality, these are only two bots to be consulted by, you and yourself. They were kept behind the counter and the ledger, all they did is they put your name down first, and they kind of opened up a chunk of the page for you. They put the date you came in, and they put your weight in stones and pounds, and to the nearest quarter of a pound, because they had the instrument right there, a really fancy instrument that was good to a quarter of a pound wood weights. We weighed ourselves on it in 2009. So nothing has and then sometimes a remark heavy boots, overcoat. And when they started weighing the women, they were always having excuses for why they were heavier, lighter, something like that. So just that, and then serially, one column, one row after the other, they just kept going. And there's one or two of them that are page long with 70 or 80 entries. Yeah, so that's how it worked, very, very little. And oh, the thing that really troubled us is that we didn't have their ages and neither did Galton. Galton didn't have their ages. And that's why he picked a very public group, there was a group of members of parliament in England, members of the House of Lords. They were living nearby in the wintertime when the government was in session. And so he could get their birthday from public sources. He needed that to calculate their age. So you didn't know their age, and most of them were adults. And you could figure if they were 50 years there, you could make a rough guess. And in the ladies ones, there's three or four, there's a few instances where the ladies brought their daughters or sons with them as well. And in one of my graphs there, you'll see that I had to kind of guess at what age the daughter or the son was, because she hadn't reached 18 yet, but I don't know her age exactly, but I kind of slid it in until she stopped growing and put it that way.

Rosemary Pennington
I was gonna ask what made Francis Galton want to study this data? Like how did he find out about it? And why did he study it?

James Hanley
Oh, Francis Galton measured everything that could move or think or do anything biologically. He started off with his, he was a measure all the time, he would have measuring instruments in his pocket walking down the street measuring the beauty of English women. He was more seriously interested in heredity. So he was growing peas early on. And then he tried to get data for children for him because he was a first cousin of Darwin. And so he got turned on to this area of when, when Darwin published his book on evolution and heredity, that's when Galton turned over into this site. He had been interested in geography and other things before he had discovered anticyclones in meteorology. He was just a polyglot, an amazing polyglot. Of course, he had some bad ideas and races on eugenics too, but who will take the good as well as the bad? So he was just interested in everything. And I think it was later on certainly a little later in than it right and coming up to the 20th century, the British were fighting overseas that were in the Crimea. They were in at the very end, they were in the Boer War, and the British Psyche was starting to lose confidence in itself, especially the thinker's and so on, that the British race was going down. So looking back at it now, I think he was trying to document that the British race was getting soft and losing, they're losing their mettle. And so I think that, in fact, we kind of say that the analysis is pretty awful. The longitudinal analysis he did, which here he had lovely longitudinal data, but he didn't know what to do with it. And his analysis is really bad. And his curves are fit by hand, you know, and he puts a straight line where they were, I'm sure at the end, for the last generation where I'm absolutely sure if he had followed them properly, it would have curved downwards as well. Because in an earlier version of the paper I wrote about what I'll be a weight over your age look like and they should dip down and you come to 60 or 70. And you should start going down. And Shakespeare even says that in his seven years of seven stages of met, most of the time, people lose weight at the end. But in the third curve, they're the one for the youngest generation. He had it going up and then it gave them a chance to complain about how this generation is out of control basically, is what he said. So I think it was political. As much as anything, he talked about our race and so on, but he collected anthropometric data cross sectionally on people in an entrepreneur metric lab set up and it, for the world, was there in England in the 1880s, I think. So he was interested in measurement of all kinds. He never calculated a standard deviation. He didn't know how well their standard deviations were there back when he'd ever calculated one, he always used the interquartile range. And half of that was his problem there. And he had very clever ways of summarizing data as well, which we can come to in a minute.

Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories, and our guest today is James Hanley.

John Bailer
So one of the things that you talked about when looking at these trajectories, when he could, when Galton could figure out an individual's measurement, would you have these measurements over time? Yeah, and then, but Galton then looked at kind of within person fluctuation. Oh, and that's between the intergenerational differences. Could you talk a little bit about how Galton evaluated this within person fluctuation?

James Hanley
That's really fascinating to me. And I think because he wasn't the modeler, although he loved the normal distribution, he never calculated standard deviation. He just was there. He worked from the quantiles. But it was a genius piece to me, how he said, Imagine you're gonna, he didn't say it. But I imagine if he was telling me, so you're going home Hanley from the pub in Ireland, and it's a straight line to your house, but you wander all over the place. And he says, If you could measure the track of what you did, as a distance, and put that as a ratio over the straight line as the crow flies one, and that little ratio, I'll tell you how wavy the line is. It's magic to me when I saw it. I couldn't believe I said that you can explain this to anybody. Right? Like that road and you can do it. And when the editor of Significance said to me, Jim, you'll have to explain what that means. Because I didn't know the convoluted way and his language is convoluted. And I said, just go on Google and take two alternative routes from one city to another. And there's the you know, the highway, that's probably the straight line way. And then you can look at the local roads that wave back and forth. And if your car would just record them automatically, you could take the ratio of one to the other, and that's a measure of volatility and unreliability of data. And he called it. Yeah, so that's what he did. And he had a guy who measured that with a little machine, the same kind of a machine with a wheel that you use for measuring distance when you're doing things. So he was a genius at instrumentation and measurement. Yeah. And the only trouble I see is that the statistical properties of this estimator would be miserable.

Rosemary Pennington
I was interested, you know, being a journalism professor in that the New York Times actually wrote an editorial about Dalton's research. Why do you think that the New York Times picked up on this? You're better known?

James Hanley
No, I have to go back to what was on their desk. What were the political issues in 1884? I have a feeling because they mentioned Texas and got and Gladstone and maybe it had to do with the fact that there was something about soft and beater that were drinking beer at the time, Gladstone was trying to put import or export duties on something in England. And I suspect it was, you know, political, and they used this, they had great fun saying the British are going to go soft, and the House of Lords is going to go extinct. Right. You see that there? I think they were having fun with the British. I don't know what was going on in 1884 between the US and Britain. But you know, they always love to nudge them and needle them a little bit about the bridge, sir. You know, they think they're great, but they're going under the table. You know, I think I think it was political. Yeah, there was a lot of tongue in cheek and it but I’m not enough a historian of those days to know otherwise. But it was fun to see. And when I wrote to Mr. Berry, I didn't put this in the article. But Mr. Berry, I can tell you guys now because we're on the record differently. Mr. Berry is gone from the company. When I showed it to Mr. Berry, he thought he was the CEO and I in turn 20 whatever year we did 2014. I think he said, and I'm glad to see the British aristocracy, the British peers have not disappeared. It took Tony Blair and the other guy is finance George Brown or whatever his name is. The guy who followed him in England, it took those guys to take away the peerages in England. So there's politics everywhere. died out because I don't think people would understand.

Rosemary Pennington
I appreciate, in the New York Times, his editorial where they wrote that it even predicted the House of Lords might quote, abolish itself as its members grew thin and fragile was the culture of Bostonians. Well, I was like,

James Hanley
Yeah, double. And there was obviously somebody on the desk, you know. And what I was just interested in is how quickly news traveled across the world at that time. We're writing another historical piece on how a famous experiment in Paris, while the news, was a human medical experiment with a vaccine, how that traveled to the US, and I've tracked that, and it's great fun to see how news traveled back then. And most of the time once it got to the US, then every newspaper from here out to California just repeated it with exactly the same word. So it's a story by itself. Yeah, travel of news in those days.

John Bailer
This is such an amazing story. I mean, it's amazing to me also that there still was a Mr. Berry involved in running this company in 2014 for you to talk to.

James Hanley
Oh, they are so proud of that company that's been there for 300 years. And they let us, when we photographed the ledgers, he wasn't there. We said I'm going to arrange for you guys to be brought into the boardroom. They will have a small boardroom of the company in the back. And those bottles up in the wall of Cutty Sark, Cutty Sark was their first entry into whiskey. And they blended the whiskey. And he was a genius there as well. When they were coming home from Europe? After the war, they gave him all sorts of Cutty Sark to bring home with them. And I don't know how that, oh yeah, you have to be ahead of the curve when you're marketing with liquor and coffee or any commodity because some other guy is going to be smarter than you. So yeah, but he was very proud of all that. He said they stopped doing that, if you go now, I don't think you can be Wade, it's too much of a distraction. They're not keeping, they're not keeping up the records anymore. Yeah, but he was fun to deal with. But his clients, you see her next door, they're the queen and the king. Sorry, now the king of England, you know, they had a warrant in the video, one of the things I did is I put it on my website and it is right, the link is at the bottom of the article I put on several videos. So you can actually visit and see the scales yourself. That's actually key. Because you'll get the fun of it. You can see the people today are just as driven and proud. And then they have a video showing some of the early ledgers. They have one or two that they do behind the scenes now on a locked cabinet. But you can still see them they're all bound, they bound the ledgers, I guess after people died, I don't know how they arranged it to know how many times you've come in. But they may have transcribed the numbers again to a different ledger so that they were easy to find. And then there's an index to each book. So that you can find where your name is and then you can go in and find by page your record is on. So there's a page or half a page, whatever. But I imagine they waited until the end before they knew what the record was, finished.

John Bailer
So one of the things I noticed was that you had shared an earlier version of your paper, and it was basically tracking different birth cohorts and how weight changes in different birth cohorts. Can you give us a quick summary of what's happened in this sort of way to the present cohort and trajectory of weight gains and where?

James Hanley
They're like, well, we're getting a little older, a lot older, we're getting bigger, taller as well. So that's a little bit of a problem. And they didn't measure height. So you're kind of stuck with that. So that it's hard to take that now, then they did not do it. But we would get heavier, there's no doubt about that. You can see it in the one. I'll have to put that on my website. Yeah, I put that on my website. So people can actually look at the American courts. I think they're, I think you're ahead of the British there. A little bit. Yeah, a little bit. Some pretty well. The other thing that's interesting about weight is back then, being thin was scary for people. We wouldn't get married, you wouldn't be a great marriage prospect. If you were thin, you are a better marriage prospect if you were a little more rounded, and in fact, Pearson says that we pick the well rounded people and being good and strong was equated with heavy weight back then. And if you're thin, it meant you might be dying of tuberculosis or something like that. So even the perception of weight and height was the good end of the scale and the poor 100 scale has changed. So it's very different but they rounded class in those cohorts, their birth cohorts and gone through time where they were holding their own with us now. Yeah, yeah, I mean, if you look at the portraits of portly gentlemen, I guess you'd call them.

Rosemary Pennington
This is such an interesting historical story. What do you think that we now, who are teaching stats, are using stats? What can we learn from this? If our classrooms are for our own work?

James Hanley
I think first we should be interested in raw data and AI and collecting raw data, I don't think we should ever take data from the back of the book for anybody. There is no reason in the world now why we can say to everybody get out your phone, and tell me how you were exercising during COVID? How did COVID change you pull that data, mind your phone and take it out of there? Honestly, you have to make teaching of data that you have to make the data personal to the people, so it is relevant to them. And that's number one. So data and the closer to you with self it is the more relevant and the more interesting the story is, especially if it's something you don't know the answer to, you know, data about tossing coins and stuff like that, where you kind of know the answer already is not very interesting. Even the data about where you want to roughly know, or how deep the oceans are, which is another article I've done, you gotta go, it's easy to go and get those data now and do it from scratch, see the problems of getting the data to see the problems or recording them all the practical behind the scenes, things before you get to do the analysis. So data collection, to me, is primary. And I guess the other thing is showing that a lot of our life, even if we don't say it, this statistics involved in our life is statistical reasoning every day of our life, when you think of something causal or something, this is something that's so trying to make statistics relevant for young people. So if I were doing now I don't have a phone myself, but I would be getting our students to use phones for everything. I do get them to use phones to measure when we have students stand up and give a presentation, I have the rest of the class estimate the students, the presenters height, that's a really so to me being practical and bringing statistics of everyday life into the classroom and not making it a course on mathematical statistics or mathematics. That's to me, the biggest problem with the way we're teaching at the moment, is where we are teaching as mathematics.

John Bailer
You know, I find it just marvelous that the examples that you've just described, and using in your class sounds like something that Barry brothers might have done. Exactly. You're embracing anthem, anthropometric kind of measurements and, and using that as your entree.

James Hanley
It's gotten, who saw the value of them, you know, God, the other data sets I love, and I use in class sometimes, are, there's two unusual datasets where they're following climate change. And you know, you're leading or ice core records and deserting whether we're getting what's changing. But the two I love are, there's a 250 year sequence of data of when the flowers in your garden come out first, the first flower daffodils and the first everything, there's one of those from Britain, where one family has been doing it for 250 years, and a consistent basis. There's another fantastic one from Alaska. And it's a huge database, and it's hard to actually even work. You have to sample it to figure it out. It is when the ice breaks up in a certain River in Alaska. And people in Alaska didn't have a lot to do because of the wind. So they would bet on when the ice was going to melt and they put a pole in the middle of the ice in the river. They tied a line from the pole to the nearest pub, or bar, and then people bet on exactly which minute it would go, we'll be able to tell that and another story one day, it's fantastic. And now the data is so carefully done. They're exactly the minute as to what people bet on. And everyone has to be right and have it transcribed right and everything. So it's a fantastic dataset. Yeah. And it's again, you can see, I think they published it in science. You can see how the winters are advancing in Alaska. And also this is real data imaginatively, you know, it's a data mining project. But the data was collected for the lottery, it was beautifully done. Not the lottery, the competition, the data beautifully recorded, except they're all on paper. I had to scan them even to get what I did. I had to scan them out of a PDF or something. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of teaching implications using real data in class. Yeah, I'm working on another one to do with using maternal ages. You know, your mother and father's age when you were born has a lot to do with a lot of things. And mother and father's heights is what what gotten used for his first regression, your mothers and fathers heights and then your own, but there's others as well to do with your mother and father's ages when you were born and how many mutations you have now, read because of that because the older you are as a parent, the more gene mutations you pass on. So I think we need to really stay apart from getting serious about teaching statistics properly.

Rosemary Pennington
Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. James, thank you so much for joining us today. Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University's Department of Statistics and media, journalism and film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter @StatsandStories, Apple podcasts or other places where you find podcasts. If you'd like to share your thoughts about the program, send an email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu, or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.

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A Bourbon for the New Year | Stats + Stories Episode 309

Dr. Michael Crowder is a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Dean of the Graduate School at Miami University. Dr. Crowder's research interests lie in bioinorganic chemistry, including metalloenzymes, antibiotic resistance, metal ion homeostasis and inhibitor design.

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Episode Description

By the end of 2023 Bourbon is expected to be an almost 9 billion dollar industry. That’s a lot of mint julips and bourbons neat. But what makes bourbon so appealing, the chemistry behind this drink is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Michael Crowder.

+Full Transcript

Rosemary Pennington
By the end of 2023, Bourbon is expected to be an almost $9 billion industry. That's a lot of mint juleps and bourbons. Neat. But what makes bourbon so appealing? The chemistry behind this American spirit is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics minus stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's Department of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist John Bailer, emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is Michael Crowder. Crowder is a professor of chemistry and Dean of the Graduate School at Miami University, Crowder’s research interests lie in bio inorganic chemistry. And he's also really into the science behind bourbon. Mike, thank you so much for joining us today.

Michael Crowder Thank you, Rosemary.

Rosemary Pennington I love bourbon as one of my favorite, you know, alcoholic drinks. And I wonder, how did you come to this interest in bourbon?

Michael Crowder Well, so when I was a kid, I was very fortunate to live in a town where a lot of my extended family lived right there in the town. And every Thanksgiving and Christmas, our families would come together. And these were pretty impressive things. The men had to wear a coat and tie, including the boys, oh boy. And the women would wear dresses, and everybody would bring food. And it was time to just sit back and enjoy each other's company. I remember vividly that the men would often retire to one of the front rooms. And in those front rooms, there would be bourbon flowing. And it was usually Virginia gentlemen, in early times, which I look back on now and say, Wow, we could have done a little. But they wouldn't be in there. There was some cigarette smoking going on. But they would be drinking bourbon and discussing exactly the topics that you shouldn't be discussing with family, religion and politics. And I remember as a boy, I was always kind of terrified, because there will be voices raised and everything. But I couldn't wait to be invited to go and be with the men. And when we were probably, I have a twin brother and a cousin that's the same age, and we were probably invited when we were 13 or 14 years old. And they gave us a little glass and they waved the bourbon over and put some ginger ale and ice in it. And we felt very special. None of us said a word the first couple of years. And then they got to the point where they couldn't shut any of us up. But I look back on that as one of my favorite times. And it was around bourbon. It was about fellowship. And it was about enjoying each other's company. And so I look back very fondly on that. And then if you go ahead forward into the future a little bit. When my father was passing away from cancer, I would drive to Virginia every weekend. So that's about a 10 and a half hour drive each way. And I would pour him a bourbon, and we would sit down and just discuss things. And so those two things, it was around fellowship and enjoying each other's company, is really where my love of bourbon started. And so I knew I was destined at some point to maybe do research on it. It would just take a few years. Yeah.

John Bailer
Yeah. So I'm sitting here picturing you holding a glass of bourbon. And so I'm saying, you know, Mike, what are you doing? And you said, I'm doing research.

Michael Crowder
That's exactly right. And actually, I've gotten to where I really appreciate the time I take, and I say I know that oh, the palette of every bourbon is different. And I found that even my mood and what I did that day and what I ate that day will change the way that I actually experience bourbon. And I always start out neat with it, and then always add ice to it to see if the bourbon can hold up to the ice, and not all of them can.

John Bailer
So what is a bourbon?

Michael Crowder
Yes, so bourbon is an American spirit. It is the distinctive American spirit. It is a whiskey. And so all bourbons are whiskies but not all whiskies are bourbons. Bourbon has a very strict definition associated with it as defined by law. It needs to be made from at least 51% corn, and the recipe for bourbon, for any distilled spirit, is called its mash bill. So it must have 51% corn and then almost all bourbons have some percent, maybe 10% malted barley. And there's science reasons for having malted barley. And then the flavoring grain can either be wheat or rye. And all those have to, of course, add up to 100%. A second very important part of bourbon is that when it is distilled, it can only be distilled to 160 proof or less. And so the reason for that is, is that at 160 proof, there are still other chemicals called congeners that are in the bourbon. And they actually add to the flavor of bourbon. When the distilled spirit is put into a barrel, it must be at 125 proof or less. And then when it's bottled, it needs to be at least 80 proof or higher. And so there's a bunch of different distinguishing parts of bourbon and you have to follow those laws in order to be able to call your product a bourbon. One thing that most people believe is that they believe the law says that it must be aged in a barrel. And that is not the way the law is written. What it says is it has to go into an unused, charred oak container. It never uses the word barrel. And another thing that many people don't realize is that they think that bourbon must be made in Kentucky. And 95% of the world's bourbon is made in Kentucky. But it has to be made in the United States or in United States territory to be called a bourbon.

Rosemary Pennington
So what gives bourbon its flavor? I love whiskey, just generally very broadly. But I'm not a huge fan of scotch. It's one of the whiskies that I just can't get into. And people are always kind of surprised about that because I like bourbon. Well, I like whiskey generally, what gives bourbon its flavor? How do whiskies sort of get their flavor? And what is it about bourbon that is so special?

Michael Crowder
Yeah, so I'm not a huge fan of scotch either. And right, I'm sorry, John. But the reason is that very often scotch, first of all, there is no corn, and scotch, it has to be malted barley, and some of the most famous scotches in order to dry the malted barley, they use peat and would heat the peat and use that to drive out the water. So it wouldn't continue to do its chemistry inside those seeds. And that imparts a flavor on it. And that chemical, we actually can detect that chemical. It's called phenol ethanol. And it has the flavor of band-aid adhesive, also should be in marketing. Yeah, that's usually not a very good thing. But there's that same chemical in bourbon too. And then also in scotch there, it stays in barrels much longer than most bourbon suits, typically. And so there's a lot more of those flavors coming out, too. And there's a whole range of chemicals that you can detect in scotch as well, they're in there in bourbon too, but not as high as levels as you do in scotch. With bourbon, one of the things that always people get is that sweetness, and that's coming from the corn. And corn is very important for the flavor profile of bourbon. You also, though, from the barrel aging, you have pulled chemicals out of that barrel. And, and then also remember, we only distilled to 160 proof or less. So there's other chemicals that yeast makes during fermentation. And those chemicals are there. But that's still not even the full story. Inside that barrel, there is all sorts of chemistry going on with oxygen. So the distillate in that barrel will actually evaporate out of the barrel over time. And when that does, oxygen comes in, and oxygen gets activated. We don't know the chemistry behind it, but it will react with those compounds from the wood and then from the yeast to make new compounds. Many of them are flavor compounds. And that's what you really love: things that are in there that have green apple taste, and they're things with banana taste in it that are actually some of them are made by yeast, but some of them were made in the barrel.

John Bailer
So I read in some of the background that we had looked at that something like 70% of bourbons final flavors are from the interactions with the where they're stored in the barrel?

Michael Crowder
The barrel actually introduces, most people would argue, about 70% of the flavor. And so a good thing for you to try is that occasionally, you can find it at the store, there are things called white dog that you can find. And so that is a distillate that never touched a barrel. And so you should actually do a little experiment and taste that and then taste an age barrel. What you're tasting? The difference is what came out of the barrel and the chemistry that occurred in the barrel. Yeah, so it's awesome. It's very complicated, too.

Rosemary Pennington
When I was working in public radio, one of my favorite stories was about home brewing in Alabama, because in Alabama, you could not sell high alcohol beers. And so you could brew them yourself. And so I used to hang out in this brew store for like, a whole day with these guys who were brewing beer. And one of the people was a theoretical chemist. And he told me the only real chemistry he ever did was when he was brewing his beer. And so I wonder what exactly, when you are studying bourbon and looking at it, what are you looking at? How are you studying this spirit besides sort of smelling it and tasting it?

Michael Crowder
Yeah. And so and that's an excellent point. And I will tell you that at these big distilleries, they have blenders and master distillers who can taste and smell chemicals at levels that there is no instrumentation that can detect it at that level. They have trained their palates there and their nose is to be able to detect things that are just unbelievable. And so a lot of the bourbon science was very, it's a lot of art to it. At one time, it was making the right choices, which barrels needed to be combined with other ones. And there was such an opening of, well, what's the science that's going on here? Why is that in some cases, barrels that are put in a brick house, they go up in proof over time, and other ones go down? And proof over time? What's happening there? And if you go on Bourbon Trail trips, they will invariably tell you that wrong, they'll say, Oh, the proof always goes up in a barrel. That's not true at all. It depends on the barrel. And it depends on where it is in the brick house. And so when I used to take a group of Miami students down to Moonshine University in Louisville, we taught a fermentation class. So it was Luis Actus, Chair of microbiology. Tom, Chris started that with us. And then we had faculty from chemical engineering, from chemistry, psychology, biology, microbiology, and we would teach this fermentation class each year in the fall. And it was 6pm to 9pm on Wednesdays, because we did field trips. We would go to breweries, and work with the head brewers. And then we even went to some distilleries while we were doing this class. And at the end of that fall semester in winter term, one of Miami's alums Dave Defoe owns Flavor Man down in Louisville, and he opened up his own distillery and learning center called Moonshine University. And the general public can go to this and where you can actually learn how to do distillation over for a four or five day period. And Dave actually gave the tuition to the Miami students that went and you know, they bring in expert people in the bourbon industry, and they come in and teach you how to distill. There were people from legal that would come in and talk about the legal aspects of distilled spirits. Marketing is huge, particularly in vodka. Vodka is vodka, and it's ethanol and water and just a tiny little bit of other stuff. And so how do you make yours distinctive? And so I would sit in every year that we went, and I would listen to these people. And I was thinking to myself, you know, why does that bourbon taste different? And so we actually, after several years, brought a sample back to Oxford. And we went to Ohio State, they have this enormous piece of equipment. And with all equipment, it's always a bunch of abbreviations. And it's called an F T ICR. Mass Spec. So it's an enormous instrument, about a $15 million instrument. And it can detect chemicals at tiny amounts, parts per billion amounts. And we took white dog and put it into the FDA. And they looked at us like we were crazy. They were really excited that we had come and the white dog, remember, when you do distillation, you're purifying a beer, that's essentially what you're doing. When you homebrew, you make a product that looks identical to what they put on the distillation column. And so you have purified this beer. And yet we could detect at least 10,000 chemicals in a white dog. And so imagine how many you can detect when you put bourbon in there. And we could see, we don't know, even a small fraction of what those chemicals are. But what it turns out is different bourbons have different amounts of these different chemical holes in them. And that's what distinguishes one bourbon from another.

Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories. And today we're talking with Miami University's Mike Crowder about what makes bourbon so good. So that's my opinion. Like it's not a verifiable fact. I have done bourbon distillery tours and the thing that the stills are always so incredible to me. But so many of them are copper or have some amount of copper in them. Why is copper important to this process?

Michael Crowder
Yeah, so copper is essential. So one of the big reasons is are those big tall stills that you say they're called coffee stills, and they were actually invented for scotch. Yeah. And then they were kind of adopted and or stolen by the industry. However, we want to say that borrowed perhaps that's right. Copper is a great metal for a couple of reasons. One is that you can hammer it into different shapes. And so that was very big. It's also a great conductor of heat. And so you could heat these copper kettles up if the heat moves in and out of your solution or whatever it is that you're trying to heat pretty easily. But it turns out, it has a chemical essential part of it too. And that is, when yeast does its biochemistry, when it's making alcohol for us during fermentation, it makes hundreds, maybe 1000s of other chemicals. And one class of those chemicals have the element sulfur in them. And so we all have experienced some of the sulfur compounds like when you walk by where skunk is man, that's a sulfur compound. But the sulfur compounds, we can detect tiny levels, that's why we ended up putting them in natural gas. So if we smelled that, that sulfur containing compound, we know get out of there. Well, the yeast produces these compounds too. And if they made their way into your glass of bourbon, it might not be a very nice experience. And so what happens is that the sulfur containing compounds react with the copper. And what happens is that the copper changes, it loses electrons and the sulfur then the smell of it actually goes down. And the copper then is released into your distillate. And so over time, the inside of those still start to pit. And they have to be sometimes resurfaced or new copper put in them. And I think that copper is actually very, very important for something that occurs in that barrel too, although we haven't proven it yet. It's a hypothesis I have. I mentioned earlier that oxygen comes in that barrel and the chemicals inside the barrel react with each other. And it's through oxygen chemistry. But oxygen does not react very well with compounds that have carbon in them, like a lot of the compounds in that barrel. You need something to catalyze that reaction. And I suspect that copper is a major player in this. Because in biology, copper reacts with oxygen in lots of different biological systems. I suspect it's playing a part inside that maturing and aging in the barrel as well.

John Bailer
So Mike, as I'm thinking about your description of all this, I'm picturing kind of this flow of the inputs, the outputs, and then the user experience with the bourbon. And so from the inputs. I've heard you talk about the idea of the corn and the amount of corn or maybe where the corn is sourced from yes, there's the malted barley, the flavor grain, but also there's the water and then the nature of what kind of water you're putting in which certainly the scotch, yes, producers think a lot about that as well. But then there's also storage, then there's also humidity, there's also conditions of storage. So you have all of these inputs. And then I've also heard you now talk about 10,000 plus different chemical chemicals that can be measured in the bourbon. And then there's the taste, yes, the user experience with this. So as you know, given the Stats and Stories gig we're doing here, yeah, you know, what's this process of thinking about these chemicals? How do you? What are some of the things that you've done when you've looked at kind of inputs related to outputs, or how you've used outputs to explore a comparison of the different bourbons?

Michael Crowder
Yeah, well, so this is something that has really not been done very much. I did find just in the last two weeks, some papers that are never really referenced that were in these studies were done in the 1940s. And so we've just come off a prohibition. And the company that didn't that ended up owing what we now know is Buffalo Trace, did a large study where they looked at hundreds of barrels where they put new distillate into those barrels, and they were making chemical measurements over time, and those from the individual barrels. Now, they didn't have the analytical equipment that we have now. But they were looking at things like, did the acidity go up in those barrels? And they do go up quite quickly. And that could also be aware that she catalyzed those reactions in the barrel too. And there were a whole bunch of other things that they measured as well. And then it was like, crickets, there's really not much done, if you fast forward. And I would say that some of the distilleries are doing it, but I would bet most of their research is tucked away somewhere and it's proprietary. But Buffalo Trace back in about, I'm gonna say about 15 years ago, believe it or not, bourbon was not very popular then. And they were the bourbon industry was struggling. This is the 80s, and even a little bit into the 90s. And, you know, they were struggling, their market share was going, vodka was winning out, wine coolers were beginning to come in. It was a whole bunch of other options. And there was a lot of fear in the bourbon industry. In fact, the whole reason that Blanton's ever came forward was because the distiller there was told you need to come up with a new product. And he said, Let's try the single barrel. And it was a big gamble. Oh, and the single barrel then turns out to be a very, very popular type of bourbon. And so they had a lot of capacity on their lines at that point. So they started this project called the Single Oak Project. And it was, and you can read about it on the Buffalo Trace website, but what they were really after, and it was something that you didn't list, but it's a huge variable in bourbon, or the trees. Yeah. And so depending on where the tree lives, what things it pulls out of the soil, how tight, how close the rings are, there's all these different, you know, permutations that can affect that bourbon at the end. And what they ended up doing was they did a set of experiments, they harvested almost all of their white oak from the Ozarks. And this is all described on that webpage. And then what they did was that they used two different recipe arrays and a wheat mash. They put the bourbon in at I think 125 proof and 105 proof or so it was a different proof. They put them in two different types of brick houses. One that was very much like the Blanton's one that has the old metal and another one in a concrete one. And it turned out to be 192 different barrels. And what they did was aged it eight years, and then they bottled them. And at a time, you can actually go and buy them secondhand or on the secondary market now, 375 ml bottles of single oak specific barrels, and they let a group of tasters taste them. And it turns out for whatever reason the tasters preferred barrel number 80. So they know the recipe for that. And so they actually have barrels at 10s of 1000s of those barrels aging right now. And they're going to release those in 24-25.

John Bailer
Oh, wow. So Mike, one story that you told me kind of in a different context was an analysis that led to a surprise. Yeah. And I was wondering if you could share that story with us.

Michael Crowder
Yeah. So when we started doing our analysis of bourbon, when I saw 10,000 compounds and knew that there was no way we were going to be able to figure out what all of those were, I said, we need to go to a technique that's less sensitive. So over in the chemistry department, here at Miami, we have tons of instruments called nuclear magnetic resonance instruments. It's like an MRI when you go except for instead of putting a person in the magnet, we put little vials of bourbon. And with those, we could actually detect and actually determine the concentrations of 17 chemicals. And I said, that's a more manageable number. And so what we did was, and I had one grad student that was just absolutely amazing. She took NMR spectra of 250 different bourbons that we bought commercially, and then analyzed them for the chemical concentration of those 17 chemicals. And, and we tried to get as many bourbons as we possibly could, but in our library there. We were definitely slanted toward Blanton's, because that was my favorite. And when we started seeing, we did some statistics on these very rudimentary ones because we weren't very good at this. And we could cluster the bourbons and we found out that we could tell which distillery made each bourbon. We couldn't tell which bourbon it actually was. And so we reached out to some data analytics guys at a company called Mind's Eye in Dayton. And this is this kind of stuff that, John, they love to do and they keep saying, Oh, these datasets are not big enough, and it said, two years. I wouldn't say that. And so I had seven plantain samples in our group. And then one of our collaborators in Mind's Eye, he actually had three, but he refuses to wait in line to buy his plans. He instead pays for it and gets it, you know, he goes and picks it up. And so we ran the analyses, and I was giving a talk in Lexington about two years ago. And I was showing the data and was showing the clustering and everything. And then I say now here's a blow up of the blends. And there were nine dots there. There were nine Blanton samples. And so a guy in the front row said, I thought you said there were 10 Blanton's samples in your group. And I said yeah, we thought there was, but one of them wasn't Blanton's. And the whole place started mumbling. There were 300 distillers in this room. And they were mumbling and it was all this. And so I was going to try to build up the story. But the guy on the front row didn't want to wait. He says, Well, what was it? And I said it was not created by 12 Zero. And the whole place really went nuts. And it turns out that and this one sample that we thought was Blanton's, it's, its little data point fell right on top of Knob Creek 12 Euro. And so what happened is one of those purchase bottles that this guy got sort of second hand, it was an imposter. It was a fake. And our data could show that.

Rosemary Pennington
Oh, that's incredible. Yeah, the mythic, the mythic bourbon, right, is Pappy Van Winkle. It's the one that everyone is after, is it worth chasing down?

Michael Crowder
I need a sample of that far collection just to have the spectra and be able to have the data. I think if that's something you want to do, absolutely, you should do it. You can occasionally find it in restaurants. And so instead of paying $2,500 for a bottle, it might be better to pay 154 pour and see if you really like it. And remember that the 23 year old Pappy has been in a barrel for 23 years. It is very oaky, it's very dry and astringent, it dries your mouth out. And it's not always a pleasant experience for some bourbon drinkers. I think it's fantastic. But that's the problem with a lot of bourbon, you get to where oh, man, I love this one. And then you can't find it. Yeah.

Rosemary Pennington
Yeah, I was thinking about this idea and the experience of the taste. And you know, there's expectations if you have oh, I know this is very expensive, but I'm just curious about if you have all these blind tastes evaluated, you know, sort of had these rated. And if people can then take those chemical makeups and then map that to kind of what a tasters experience is if you were blind to brand?

Michael Crowder
Yeah, so I received a grant from Buffalo Trace to do NMR on all 192 barrels in the single oak project. And so we did that. And then we're working with the data analytics people at Mind's Eye. And that's exactly what we're trying to do, to map the chemical profiles to the preferences of the consumer. And that is enough data for these people to work with. It is a ton of things. And we have found that even so the Buffalo Trace, people use an instrument called GC to actually analyze for chemicals. And there's not always good overlap or good match from what the NMR says and the GC does. So that's even another issue with data that we've got to figure out what we're doing with.

Rosemary Pennington
Well, that’s all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Mike, thank you so much for joining us.

Michael Crowder
Thank you guys. It's been great.

Rosemary Pennington
Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University's departments of statistics and media, journalism and film and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter @statsandstories, Apple podcasts or other places where you find podcasts. If you'd like to share your thoughts on the program, send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu, or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.

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The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics | Stats + Stories Episode 299

Bianca Walsh is a technical assistant for the Director of the National School of Statistical Sciences (ENCE) at IBGE.  She is currently the co-lead of the Statistical Literacy task team of the Global Network of Institutes for Statistical Training (GIST), and has been an active member of the Training, Competencies and Capacity Development task team for the UN Big Data Project since 2021. She is also member of the technical board of the Regional Hub of Big Data in Brazil, specifically conceiving and promoting capacity-building events in the area.

Ana Laura Azevedo is a Journalist with experience in social media management, video scripting and management, data journalism, press relations and internal communications. Currently, she is an analyst at the IBGE's Center for Information Documentation and Dissemination (CDDI), in the area of Journalism / Social Networks.

Agláia Tavares is a Journalist with experience in social media management, data journalism, press relations and internal communications, and children’s books. Currently, she is the manager of Content and Promotion Management (GECOP) at IBGE's Center for Information Documentation and Dissemination (CDDI) since 2022.

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Episode Description

Brazil’s 2022 census shows its population is well over 203 million people with the most populace states in the southern part of the country.  The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics is responsible for the nation's census, as well as the gathering of other official statistics. Today three members of IBGE are joining us for this episode of Stats+Stories. 

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Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.