Experimentaholic discovers a new force in the universe!

Leg day. There is nothing worse than leg day.

So ever since my semester ended, I have been spending more time at my gym. I generally don’t have much time for working out during the semester, but summer means time to try and avoid the ravages of time by exercise. Once you turn 25 apparently you lose a pound of muscle and gain a pound of fat per year. Lord knows I’m fat enough already to know that I don’t need another pound of fat come January, so there I go. But the other day I was really annoyed about going, since it was leg day.

Leg day is the day everyone hates, the day when you throw several hundred pounds on the barbell and do squats, or hold dumb bells and do lunges. Arm day is easy. Leg day just blows. But one thing I have noticed recently is that most men skip the leg exercises. They have skinny legs but massive chests and arms, which is obviously because they only do chest and arm exercises. But women don’t seem to skip those leg exercises – there are generally many women doing the ass and thigh machines. With one exception.

Over a month ago, when I started to go to the gym more regularly, I ran into this woman named Kelly. Kelly is stunningly beautiful. Tall, dark hair, gorgeous eyes, she could be mistaken for an actress. (She is actually a fashion model and aspiring actress…I know this only because we once got into a conversation because we were both wearing the same university tee shirt.) Kelly is one of those women who does her leg exercises quite regularly. And suddenly one day I noticed something rather perplexing about the nature of the universe. First, I noticed Kelly was doing her leg exercises. But then I noticed that there were several men, also doing leg exercises. I thought, “Wait a minute – that section is usually empty!” The next day…same thing. The following day, yet again.

Then, I had an epiphany. Maybe there is a new physical force in the universe, akin to gravity, that emanates solely from Kelly. Let’s call it the Kelly Field. It is a physical force that somehow attracts men to go to the leg section of the gym and work away those chicken-legs. I felt like Newton, but instead of an apple that struck me, it was a dumb bell.

I began to wonder how I could test whether Kelly was the source of a new force field that should be further investigated by more empirical studies, or whether this effect was merely due to chance or coincidence. So I designed a little experiment to test the hypothetical existence of the Kelly Field. Whenever I saw Kelly doing leg exercises, I counted the number of men and the number of women who would also be doing leg exercises. But after about two seconds of thinking, I realized this is not a very good experimental design: One needs a control condition. Maybe it is the case that when anyone – not just Kelly - goes into the leg section, that it attracts men to that section of the gym. So I had to have an alternative hypothesis…the existence of a Experimentaholic Field. If it were the case that anyone going to the leg section would attract men, then when I go to the leg section I would find just as many men working their legs as when Kelly was working out in that section. So I simply began to count the number of men in the leg section when Kelly was working out there, and the number of men when I was working out there. I eliminated a possible confound by never doing leg exercises when Kelly was doing leg exercises. Unlike other men, I was somehow unaffected by this force field, or at least could resist it at times.

At the end of three weeks, I had tallied the following totals over the course of 10 observations of Kelly and Experimentaholic. Below is a chart with the actual counts

Kelly: Men = 20, Women = 14

Experimentaholic: Men = 3, Women = 18

As can be seen in the contingency table above, there were far more men doing leg exercises in the presence of Kelly than in the presence of Sean. But this could be due to chance, right? How can one tell?

Well, the British statistician Karl Pearson saved the day when he came up with the formula for the Chi-Square test. Chi square allows you to determine whether there are associations among binary variables are likely to be due to chance. I ran the test, and found that the Chi Square test showed that the probability of such a large discrepancy in the number of men versus women working on their legs in the presence of Kelly versus Sean being due to chance is extremely low…like one in ten thousand. So the effect is real: there actually is a Kelly Field.

I wonder about the mechanism behind the Kelly Field. Does it work like gravity, and that its effect is a function of the squared distance between Kelly and men? Or is it something more like magnetism? Will we someday be able to throw out the theory of the Kelly Field and replace it with a Quantum Kelly Relativity Theory? Or a String Theory of Kelly? Only further investigations into the Kelly Field will provide us with these answers.

Currently I am working on my manuscript for the journal Science about this.

Actually, I’ll get to it once I get back from the gym.

I'll have some love with that microscopic $9.95 piece of salmon

A student of mine once did an experiment using this web site called "Craig's List Missed Connections." Basically, it is a site in which people post notes to the universe that say things like, "I saw you walking down the street and you glanced at me. You were wearing a red hat and a green scarf...coffee?" And so if you think you are this person you can email this individual back and hopefully begin a life of love and lust together. That, or realize you have absolutely nothing to discuss over coffee.

Recently I was reading this site (perhaps perversely to see if someone posted something about that guy in the coffee shop cursing SPSS under his breath when the p value for his most recent experiment is greater than .05.) One thing I’ve noticed in passing through these listings is how there are many posts about missed connections at Whole Foods - the local hip foodstore in my neighborhood.

But this has gotten me into wondering…what is it about Whole Foods that inspires people into longing? Is it something about the air of an organic, expensive grocery store that makes people lust after strangers? Is it that only well-to-do people who can afford well-to-do people’s clothing and well-to-do people’s makeup and well-to-do people’s hair styling can afford shopping at the place? Or is it a unique place in this world - a world in which we communicate so often over the internet that we no longer know how to approach a stranger and say hello, but have to go back to our internet world and post a little "I think I saw you looking at me, but I am not sure and I'm oh so insecure!

(Here I would like to add that such people should read the excellent paper by Clark and Hatfield (1989) in which they had experimenters go around Florida State University's campus and randomly ask strangers if they would go out on a date with them that night. Something like 60 percent said yes! Could be something unique to Floridians, though.)

I wanted first to determine if there was an effect at all. I did a quick search and found that in the past 45 days on craigslist there were none less than 37 postings of missed connections at whole foods. But right next door to whole foods is a regular old supermarket known as Superfresh. How many quick glances and subtle smiles have been exchanged there? Only 8. And this includes all the Superfreshes in the city.

I figured I would try different cities. Let’s try Ann Arbor, Michigan, which I know has a Whole Foods because I used to shop there. They also have Kroeger’s, the Ann Arbor equivalent to Superfresh. 1 hit for whole foods, none for Kroeger. I tried Chicago…5 for whole foods, 1 for Dominick’s (there are dozens of Dominicks out there)

What is the probability that this could be due to chance? I'll stick to the Philadelphia one because it has the most data. Imagine that it were purely due to chance that sightings would occur at Whole Foods and at Super Fresh. Then the expected probability would be .50 - a fifty-fifty chance. What we observe is 8/37 or a 0.21 percent sightings at Superfresh. What are the odds that this is due to chance? Luckily, we have the good old binomial test to tell us the odds. The actual probability that this could be due to chance is 0.000007687045. That's a very small odds! There is something fishy going on, and I don't just mean the salmon I ate for dinner. That I bought at Whole Foods.

I suggest you experimentaholics and statistiphiles try this in your own cities. And if I see a post for that guy talking about Chi square at the produce section, I’ll know I’ve finally been missed.