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How Correlated Are You?

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Re: How Correlated Are You?

#41

Post by giraffe_lady »

HPsquared wrote: post #12
mo_42 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do somehow because of my inherent interest in understanding the world. However, this got me intro communication issues with my former boss. Apparently, this person was not interested in what words (or combinations of words) actually mean but rather simply just how they're used frequently. Every new combination of words was utterly confusing to this person. As a conclusion, I try to figure out how people process lan…

Most people are still on step 1 (learning what the individual words mean). They don't get to the stage of learning how the different words fit together.

Y'all are insufferable good lord. People know how the words fit together. Everyone speaks fine.

Not everyone needs to be a big gas etymology nerd about it and in fact nerdly insistence on what a word "actually" means contra its everyday use is an extremely common error. One that wouldn't be made by someone with even the slightest interest in the domain of linguistics, rather than just feeling smarter than people.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#42

Post by ckdot2 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #38
ckdot2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you consider that? The article states that all the calculations were based on the ANSUR-II dataset. If the values in that dataset were wrong, of course the results of the calculations may not be correct.

That's not really how measurements work though. All real-world measurements have precision associated with them. It's not a matter of measurements being correct or being wrong. As GP hints at, since you don't measure an arm the same way you measure an ear, it's reasonable to expect the errors to have different characteristics.

Of course we can expect errors, I don't doubt that. That's what I mean with "wrong". But still, how should the author consider that if he doesn't know about the precision nor quantity of errors? I just don't think that's the topic of the article. The article is about correlations in the dataset, no matter, if the dataset may contain errors.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#43

Post by HDMI_Cable »

Nevermark wrote: post #34
svnt wrote: post #32

Not having reviewed the full list of measurements, everything other than ear protrusion mentioned seems to involve bone structure. The ears, especially their protrusion as measured, have little or no relationship to bone structure. The other measurements with low correlation to bone structure also have low correlation across the collection of measurements. Ear protrusion probably has some relationship to other develo…

There is another measurement for men that involves a body part without bone structure. Perhaps this report settles once and for all, what proportion of normally more visible measurements are true correlates with that measurement.

Interesting, it seems like then that the old wives tale—that height, foot size, or hand size—should not correlate with that measurement in men.

According to the literature (RIP my search history), height is weakly correlated with it [1], while the ratio between the second digit and fourth digit is moderately correlated [2]. Weirdly enough, the 2D:4D ratio has to do with bone lengths, but is still correlated with that measurement.

--- [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/ijir201153 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#44

Post by HDMI_Cable »

FredPret wrote: post #31
amelius wrote: post #25

No mention of the one size every man is interested in most.

It would be interesting if there's a correlation with other things made of cartilage like the nose and ears. It's interesting to note that we humans evolved vastly bigger penises than the other monkeys (silverback gorillas are much larger than men but sport 1.25-inchers) due to women having much more choice / social capital than female gorillas.

I'm not sure if female social capital in gorillas is the reason for the shorter penis size. Because in other primates, like bonobos, for example, where females predominate and have lots of choice, penis size is still small.

I think the main reason why is because sex is used in humans for pair-bonding, and many human cultures have much more monogamous lifestyles—raising children together for example. Sex in humans is less for procreation than in monkeys, so larger penis sizes became more adaptive.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#45

Post by 555watch »

ckdot2 wrote: post #42
marginalia_nu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really how measurements work though. All real-world measurements have precision associated with them. It's not a matter of measurements being correct or being wrong. As GP hints at, since you don't measure an arm the same way you measure an ear, it's reasonable to expect the errors to have different characteristics.

Of course we can expect errors, I don't doubt that. That's what I mean with "wrong". But still, how should the author consider that if he doesn't know about the precision nor quantity of errors? I just don't think that's the topic of the article. The article is about correlations in the dataset, no matter, if the dataset may contain errors.

I think the previous poster claims that different measurement process yields different measurement errors (spread). Since correlation coefficient is a function of spread, if the measurement errors are random, even if the underlying relation is the same, it suffices to increase the spread a little bit and get a subsequently smaller correlation coefficient.

Confidence bounds for every correlation coefficient would add value and _might_ change some of the interpretations.

E.g.: "its average correlation with the other measurements is only 0.03, which is not just small, it is substantially smaller than the next smallest, which is ear breadth, with an average correlation of 0.13."

If the former is 0.03 +- 0.02 and the latter is 0.13 +- 0.07, we could claim that both are equal to 0 (or just equal).

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#46

Post by NeoTar »

cassianoleal wrote: post #9
tigerlily wrote: post #8

A colleague once pronounced correlation "co-relation" and it made more sense so now I say it that way sometimes. Anyone else do that?

Do people not try to work out the ethymology of words? Everything makes more sense when you know where words came from and how they came to be. :)

It's interesting speaking to German's about their language sometimes, and the way that as a language leaner I perceive words differently to how they do as a native speaker.

For instance consider the word for a wedding 'Hochzeit' - in order to remember the word I broke it down into 'hoch' (high) and Zeit (time) - so a wedding is a 'high time' of your life.

Some Germans seem to have never viewed the word in terms of it's components, and this is a revelation to them!

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#47

Post by AeiumNE »

HDMI_Cable wrote: post #44
FredPret wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting if there's a correlation with other things made of cartilage like the nose and ears. It's interesting to note that we humans evolved vastly bigger penises than the other monkeys (silverback gorillas are much larger than men but sport 1.25-inchers) due to women having much more choice / social capital than female gorillas.

I'm not sure if female social capital in gorillas is the reason for the shorter penis size. Because in other primates, like bonobos, for example, where females predominate and have lots of choice, penis size is still small. I think the main reason why is because sex is used in humans for pair-bonding, and many human cultures have much more monogamous lifestyles—raising children together for example. Sex in humans is…

I thought it was because apes fight by grabbing and tearing, so with that evolutionary pressure applied you basically end up with the minimum effective protrusion.

Also, this is why I plan to avoid fighting apes or at least try to wear some good pants if I do.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#48

Post by krollick »

badcppdev wrote: post #26

"6,000 adult US military personnel (4,082 men and 1,986 women)." .... "Despite the presence of reservists in the sample, it is still not an approximation of the US Civilian population" This dataset is from the US military so please remember that when you think about generalising these results to the rest of the world. Since everyone is talking about it Ear Protrusion 'might' be strongly correlated to height IF you do…

I wonder how many significant dimensions a principal components analysis would identify for that data set, and if one of them would correspond to male/female.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#49

Post by gnulinux »

triceratops wrote: post #39
tigerlily wrote: post #8

A colleague once pronounced correlation "co-relation" and it made more sense so now I say it that way sometimes. Anyone else do that?

I genuinely have no idea how else you'd pronounce it. "Core-elation"?

I pronounce it a bit like "cor-relation", in IPA like /kor.re'lei.ʃən/ but also perhaps like /ko:.re'lei.ʃən/ ("coh-relation"), and almost never like /ko.re'lei.ʃən/ (~="co-relation"), or never like /ko:r.re'lei.ʃən/ (~"core-relation").
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