Sizing Saga

So over the last couple of months, I've been trying out ordering shirts and pants from these on-line Thai tailors where you send them a set of detailed measurements, they sew the item to those specs, then mail them to you. Then once the items arrive, you hope that you measured right and they tailored it correctly. Shirts have been a good experience; for some reason, off-the-rack shirts are sized with 2 parameters, collar cicumference and sleeve length. From there, everything else is supposed to follow. It should be clear why this isn't really that accurate. Plus, the smallest sleeve lengths carried in stores are usually slightly too long for me. Pants, on the other hand, are sized by both waist and length, so for the most part, off-the-rack is pretty close to the detailed measurements approach.

For a long time, I had no idea how women's' clothing was sized, although recently learned that they're done primarily by number. Just 1 number. That seemed pretty inaccurate to me, and seems to lead to a tremendous industry of immense effort trying to find designers with suitable sizing, chasing down brands and stores searching for that magic mix of appealing design and matching fit.

There were two related articles recently in the New York times on this topic which greatly amused me. The first article is a first-person story (NYT-DressingRoomHope.pdf in the stash) related the main article with such amusing choice lines as:

"Like many women, my experience shopping for pants is often an exercise in futility... after 15 minutes of yanking and zipping, I return the whole pile of ill-fitting clothing, and leave the store annoyed and empty handed."

The main article (NYT-FitLogicWomensClothing.pdf) covers a new method of sizing women's clothing with some amusing euphemisms like:

"According to Fit Technology, more than 90 percent of women over 35 fall into three body types: straight silhouette, curvy and pearlike, which the company labels 1, 2 and 3."

"The creation of vanity sizes -- intentionally smaller than an objective size, to flatter the buyer — has introduced pure guesswork into shopping. A size 10 from one clothing manufacturer is a size 8 from another and a 12 from still another."

I love "pearlike" and "vanity sizes."

On the more serious side, thre is also an interesting (although not unexpected) prisoners dilemma situation described by these two quotes:

"Then there is the reality, however counterintuitive it may be, that retailers and clothing makers thrive off sizing confusion. Consumers who find a brand that fits are likely to stick with it and a standard sizing system would encourage them to visit other stores."

"36 percent return a product every year because it does not fit. Those returns equal 12 percent of all clothing sales. As a result, industry executives say, women shop at fewer stores and buy fewer clothes than they would if sizing were more transparent."

White Burgundy Tasting

Went w/ Rourke after work to Vino, Vin, Wine on California St. in Palo Alto. All were white burgundies except as noted. This place does boatloads of tastings, a different one nearly daily.

1. Bernard Movey 2004
Tart and fruiting, slightly bitter/grapefruit finish. Oakier and dustier as it got air.

2. 'Les Champlains' Simon Blanc 2002
Buttery nose, popcorn but tart. Weird. Very interesting, buttery finish.

3. Bourgogne Aligote Arnaud Ente 2003
Tart grapefruit, bitter finish

4. 'Clos du Chateau' Puligny Montrachet 2004
Less tart, fruity. Very Puligny. At $25, very reasonable. Probably the one to get. Rourke agreed.

5. 'Heautes Coters de Nuits' Meo Camuzet' 2002
"Corn" nose, dusty taste, buttery finish. Tastes kinda bad, but good finish.

6. Roulot 2003
Fruity nose, Smooth, not tart, bitter/grapefruit finish

7. Denis Montet 2003
Preserved plum nose, not tart at all, still hints of fragrant preserved plum

8. Arnaud Ente 2003
Not tart, smooth, slightly woody

(Red, not white burgundy). Cote Rotie Jasmin 2002
Tannic, spice nose, tart. Shiraz-ish but lighter. Long finish.

Snakes on a Plane

Actually, this title was probably not a good choice, since it just feeds into the idea of "grass roots" Internet blog publicity... but oh well.

Heard a program on "All Thing's Considered" (link to audio) on NPR today that totally cracked me up. Since it's NPR, it's easy for you to listen in too! (If the direct RealPlayer link doesn't work for you, try going to the page for the piece and click the "Listen" button.)

Apparently there's all kinds of fan products around this movie, even though it's not scheduled to be released until August of this year. One's curiosity can be mostly satisfied by the article on Wikipedia and the links contained therein.

Raillery

I watched that recent "Pride and Prejudice" movie, starring Keira Knightly, over the weekend and found it pretty good. The cinematography was very interesting and less "Hollywood", which I guess is to be expected since studiocanal is listed in the production credits. One thing that stood out for me when watching this movie was the manner in which the characters often conversed. It was all very polite (at least verbally), but some of the banter stood out in the way it lacked... well... it's hard for me to put a name on it. I guess the best word to describe it would have to be a Japanese term I learned while taking Prof. Whitman's linguistics and culture class. Much of the banter seemed to lack in tatemae, which I suppose could be described as a kind of social politeness.

For example near the beginning of the novel, Jane falls ill while visiting Netherfield, Mr. Bingley's manor (he's actually just renting it but close enough). Jane stays there to recover, and Elizabeth drops by to see how she's doing and ends up staying as a guest for a bit. In this scene, Elizabeth is sitting in a room, reading, while Mr. Bingley, his sister, and Mr. Darcy are having a conversation in the same room. Darcy is talking about the qualities he looks for in women and Elizabeth seems so incensed by his words that she can't continue her reading and bursts in:

"Then," observed Elizabeth, "you must comprehend a great deal in your idea of an accomplished women."

"Yes; I do comprehend a great deal in it."

"Oh! certainly," cried his faithful assistant, "no one can be really esteemed accomplished, who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved."

"All this she must possess," added Darcy, "and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading."

"I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any."

"Are you so severe upon your own sex, as to doubt the possibility of all this?"

"I never saw such a woman, I never saw such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe, united."

It seemed quite presumptuous for a guest in someone's house to suddenly break into a conversation in such a forceful manner. Maybe it's an artifact of my own cultural upbringing, but I can't imagine doing something like that while a guest in the home of someone with whom I was barely acquainted and was currently taking care of an ill sibling. I think that even in the presence of the most heinous remarks, the most I might do within this setting would be to depart. However, I found the repeated instances of conversation such as this, quite amusing and that it created a really good opportunity for actors to express themselves in performance adaptations. Did people in this era really converse like this? I dunno, but it is amusing for the reader, which is good enough for me.

But then, yesterday, while I was in Phoenix, I was listening to a show on NPR there that's not broadcast on my local NPR station. The guest on this show was Stephen Miller who was promoting his new book, "Conversation: A History of a Declining Art." One of the subjects he covered was the declining art of raillery, which he says was a common form of conversation in the 18th century, but is almost completely absent in modern conversational style. He described raillery as a kind of good natured repartee or perhaps even a light-hearted argument, where the participants verbally jousted with each other over some topic but always with a light-hearted and pleasant manner. There was an immediate connection between this subject and the movie I had watched just a few days prior. I started to wondering if the manner of conversation that had so stood out in my mind was characteristic of that time period and what kinds of social consequences that had in interpersonal relations.

So of course, I had to go find a Borders to visit between the end of the work day and the airport and try to get the two books. "Pride and Prejudice" was obviously no problem, but I was not terribly surprised that they didn't have Stephen Miller's book. So I bought what I could get and will have to order what I couldn't on Amazon.

And then on the plane ride back, I was watching ep. 14 of SAC2 for the third time. (I'm watching SAC2 a second time, but I'd watched ep. 14 an extra time cause I really like it and showed it to Ben and Catherine.) There was some interesting related topics in there too, but that will have to wait for another time.

Amusingly Trivial

From ANN today, "A Most Bizarre 6-Fingered Story".

A very light article about manga trivialities. There's something about the way the story is structured, where the author goes to great lengths to develop and support a thesis that happens to be relatively trivial, that greatly amuses me.

There is one particular quote that I hadn't heard before and is an interesting data point for the record:

Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy) initially had 4 fingers. It is well-known that the inspiration for Atom came from early Disney films, and a character called Mickey Mouse.

Mickey Mouse had 4 fingers, so Atom was drawn with 4 fingers as well. Later, when Mr. Tezuka met with a Disney employee who had worked on Mickey, he asked why Mickey only had 4 fingers, to which he got the following response:

"Because if you animate him with 5 fingers, it looks like he has 6 fingers when he's moving."

After that, Atom was drawn with 5 fingers.

Of Surveys and Scheduling

From exec-l, it seems like Fall nominations just happened. The following-year Fall scheduling process that happens in the previous Spring is pretty much the most important planning event of the year. In many respects, it is the only real planning event of the year, which strikes me as error prone since the showing's schedule is determined by a consensus mechanism with no set direction or goal, but I digress (this isn't the topic I want to talk about). Accepting that scheduling is done with a pick-your-own-goal kind of multi-unknown-purpose theme, I've always wondered that a least for my own goals and for the unknown (but likely overlapping) goals of other e-board voters, what kind of information would allow us to each come up with our own best possible decision.

The biggest problem (really a very common biggest problem), is the issue of unknown factors. In particular, most people have not personally seen all the shows and require external influence in order to come to a decision. A close second, is that it's hard to figure out what the results of that decision might be. The first issue is self-explanatory. The second is more complicated. Let's say I had a goal of trying to pick shows that would increase the size of the audience, equalize the gender balance, and increase the level of education of the audience. For audience size, I might think that more popular shows (e.g. higher ANN ratings) would be more attractive, but at the same time what if everyone has seen those shows already and would be driven away? For gender balance, I might think that shoujo-genre shows would be more attractive, but what is the mechanism by which females would learn about and choose to attend? For education, I might think that more "fringe" shows (e.g. Tale of Genji or Angel's Egg) might broaden peoples' horizons, but it might also drive them away.

Ben started the reviews site in the e-board repository last semester, which seems to get people significant information about shows they have not seen, in an easy centralized manner. There seems to be interest in this, and if people get in the habit of contributing and reading it, people's general level of knowledge should increase. But summaries only get us part of the way there. Dossiers are often written to attract people to a show, focusing in on aspects that would convince a person to start a show. While there is some attempt to structure things to balance present and future expectation (e.g. with the "how strong is the second half" question), in reality, the general motivation will be to induce an unknowing person to start the show, not a person in the middle of watching the show to finish. To some extent, the quantitative ratings statistics carry some of this information. A higher rated show is more likely to have a satisfying start and finish (since others found it satisfying), plus we also get a sense of what the overall public feels about the show. Thus, someone evaluating the show could combine the numerical rating with their own attraction of elements of the show and weigh them during a voting decision. However, these numerical scores carry their own problem. How do we know how these ratings by unknown thousands of people on the internet relate to how CJAS members will react? (People won't like a show just because we show it. Say you have a bunch of people who don't like comedy. If you inundate them with comedy, they won't learn to like it. They'll just leave.)

Of course, these issues are nothing new. But, I was re-visiting the topic of surveys recently, and realized that the answers to a lot of the issues could be found in existing survey data. So, I took the FA03, FA04, and SP05 survey data and did some analysis on the derived statistics for each show. In particular, for each show, I analyzed the following variables:

• Fall mean rating
• Fall std. dev.
• Fall # responses
• Spring mean rating
• Spring std. dev.
• Spring # responses
• ANN # ratings
• ANN # people indicating they've seen part or all of the show
• ANN arithmetic mean
• ANN arithmetic std. dev
  
• ANN weighted mean
• ANN Bayesian score
• Was the show shown as a series (0/1 dummy variable)

My analysis is not yet complete, I've done a Pearson's-R correlation table and some initial regressions. There are some interesting results that I want to note before I dig for more data and write up a more detailed analysis:

• Moderate (0.5 <>
• High correlation with high significance between Spring mean and ANN Bayesian score
• No relationship between Fall # responses and ANN Bayesian score
• High correlation with high significance between Spring # responses and ANN Bayesian score
• Low (0.3 <>
• High correlation with high significance between Spring # responses and shown as a series
• No relationship between Fall mean and Fall # responses
• High correlation (R > 0.7) with high significance between Spring mean and ANN # rating

The differences between Fall and Spring are particularly notable, but also preliminary. There is one big problem, I can't find my SP04 survey data. Thus, my Spring semester data set is small (n=11). Another issue is the stats having to do with # responses. By itself, # responses isn't necessarily that meaningful except to determine statistical significance and perhaps do chi-square tests between shows. What I really want to use this for is a "butts in seats" estimate for a given show, under the assumption that you only rated a show if you saw it. Thus if you didn't see a show, you didn't rate it. But in order to measure these "drifters," who enter only for their favorite shows and then leave, I'm assuming that we surveyed everyone who walked in that night, w/o missing anyone. If we only survey at the beginning and at break, there will be a significant time-based bias. For these particular semesters, I'm pretty confident that the survey results are pretty thorough, since I administered them. For future semesters, I'm hoping that surveyors have been and will be similarly aggressive administering the survey.

Caveats aside, it's quite interesting that series drive increased # responses so much more in the spring than in the fall. It's also interesting that ANN ratings drive # responses significantly in the spring, but not the fall, and also that those same ratings are much more correlated to CJAS ratings in the spring than in the fall.

When I did some preliminary work on regression models to predict the CJAS rating based on ANN data, it was interesting and shocking to me that the multiple-R on my best multiple regression on Fall mean was in the 0.6-ish range, whereas it was in the >0.9 range on the Spring mean. This would suggest that the ANN data are a good predictor of the audience's impression of a show after seeing the whole thing, but not as good a predictor of the audience's first-half reaction.

What I eventually aim for is getting some statistically significant model that can predict the audience's reaction to a show based on factors we can discover or control at the time of scheduling.