Professor Gary Smith Explains the Role of Chance in Everyday Life.

WHAT THE LUCK?

Why does your favorite team have an outstanding season and then struggle to replicate its previous success? You’ll look for all sorts of reasons, but it’s likely just a matter of chance.

According to Professor of Economics Gary Smith, we are hardwired to make sense of the world and underestimate the role of luck in our daily lives. In his new book, What the Luck? The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives, Smith argues that understanding the role of luck through the statistical concept of regression to the mean is the key to realizing that exceptional success is often transitory.

“Whenever there is uncertainty, there is regression. It happens in parenting, education, sports, medicine, business, investing and more. Don’t be misled by chance and surprised by regression,” says Smith.

Smith’s vision for the book began with an academic paper more than 20 years ago. He noticed that sports commentators tend to believe that outstanding performances will continue season after season. When they don’t, the commentators attribute the fall-off to laziness, a lack of focus or a sophomore slump. Along with Teddy Schall ’99, Smith showed that baseball performances regress, in that the top players in any season tend to do not as well the season before or the season after.

What the Luck? lies on two main pillars that explain why even the most skilled and talented will regress toward a norm or midpoint. For example, a student with the ability to average 80 percent on her tests, could score 90 percent on a “lucky” day or a 70 percent on an off day.

Second, of those students who do score 90, most were lucky and therefore won’t do as well on another test of the same material. They will regress. It is a mistake to conclude that the student with the highest score is the best student in the class, and it is a mistake to conclude that she didn’t study as hard when she gets a somewhat lower score on a second test.

According to Smith, the same principles can be applied to professional sports, medicine and investments. When a team wins a championship, we conclude that it is the best team and expect it to keep winning championships. When it does not repeat, we assume that it’s the team’s fault—when it may have been lucky to win in the first place. A doctor who sees a worrisome medical test result assumes the patient is sick and prescribes a treatment. When the patient improves, the doctor assumes that the treatment worked—when the patients may not have been ill in the first place. When a stock goes into the Dow Jones Industrial Average because it has been doing well, investors assume that it will keep doing well. When it doesn’t, investors attribute it to the Curse of the Dow, when the stock may have been lucky before it entered the Dow.

“If instead, we recognize that chance may play a role, we are less likely to overreact,” Smith says, “The champion is not necessarily the best team; the patient’s reading does not necessarily imply disease; and the companies entering the Dow are not necessarily the best investments.”

A prolific writer, Smith is the author of eight textbooks, three trade books, and 80 academic papers. His research interests are financial markets, especially the stock market, and the application of statistical analysis to finance and sports.

—Patricia Zurita

Author/Professor Jonathan Lethem Discusses his Writing Process.

HIGH-STAKES WRITING

Bestselling author Professor Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy, is the story of a James Bond-esque international backgammon hustler who believes he is psychic but is sideswiped by the discovery of a tumor in his face. He is then forced to grapple with existential questions, like: Are gamblers being played by life? What if you’re telepathic, but it doesn’t do you any good?

Which raises another question: Why did Lethem, a critically acclaimed novelist and essayist, choose to write about backgammon and gambling?

“I always lean forward when someone in a story or a movie goes to the casino or steps up to the pool table or goes to the online poker game. So, I began by thinking in the simplest way, ‘I want to do that. I want to write a gambling story,’” says Lethem.

Given the high stakes, gambling serves as a rich metaphor for life, he says. “The backgammon board or any kind of gambling arena is a kind of microcosmic world, it intensifies your relationship to life. But it’s also an escape; it’s a bubble you go into; it’s outside of life. While you’re there, everything else disappears,” he says.

And ultimately, life—the house—always wins, he says.

Lethem, whose nine previous books include Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, is known for his genre mixing and experimentation. He says this book is a more deliberate engagement with genre, classifying A Gambler’s Anatomy as a horror novel, though it doesn’t have the traditional scares. Lethem says he wanted to write a book where the reader can’t take his or her eyes off of the character’s night­marish descent, which is set in Berlin, Singapore and Berkeley.

Lethem’s writing process starts with what he calls “blundering around” and moves to dogged intention. Once he finds a voice that he likes, he works every day. But he says he is not concerned with hours or pages, so as much as with touching the project consistently. When Lethem gets stopped at a crossroads, he says, he will just sit there “staring at the page and tolerating the anxiety.” While so many other writers toss out lots of material and create alternate scenes that don’t end up in their books, Lethem treads carefully. “I try not to put a foot wrong. People sometimes ask you afterwards for the outtakes, asking, ‘Could we publish the deleted scenes?’ And I say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t really generate those.’ If I’m turning in the wrong direction and it doesn’t please me to write in that mode, I’d rather sit and wait,” he says.

Born into a creative family, as a child Lethem thought about becoming a painter like his father, or a filmmaker or cartoonist. But his mother gave him a typewriter, “which was like ‘Go,’” he says. By the age of 14, the voracious reader announced he wanted to be a writer. His enjoyment of the craft hasn’t dimmed.

“When you begin to break down all the variations that are possible and all the implications of the decisions you’re making at a preconscious level when you write sentences, even in that very basic mode, you can never stop being fascinated by it. I like trying to stay an apprentice to the task.”

Lethem, the College’s Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing, says he finds conversations in the classroom stimulating. “Seeing people trying to enact what they’re dreaming up, what they want to get on the page—trying to close that distance between what you visualize or what you hope your reader will experience and what actually lands on the page—is a very rich and very mysterious area of instability,” Lethem says.

—Sneha Abraham

Professor Char Miller Looks Below the Surface of California’s Ecological History.

NOT-SO-GOLDEN HISTORY

Professor Char Miller’s new book, Not So Golden State: Sustainability vs. the California Dream, is a collection of essays that examine California’s complex and sometimes contentious relationship between nature and humans.

Inspired by his many travels across California’s varied landscapes, and with chapters like “PetroLA,” “Razed Expectations,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” among others, Miller’s essays give the reader a look into the effects that local, state and federal policies (both good and bad) have had on the natural environment, the impact of recreation on national forests, parks, wildlife and nature refuges, and current efforts to restore what California has lost or is losing.

Covering everything from water politics to wild fires riverbeds and sage and chaparral, Miller nudges the reader to look at the Golden State through a different lens, and Miller hopes, inspire readers to look at, treat and integrate with nature in ways that are beneficial to both humans and the natural environment. In “Razed Expectations,” Miller excoriates the U.S. Army of Engineers for gutting the Sepulveda Basin and the ensuing devastation left on the terrain. In “Water Fights,” he looks at the current battle the city of Claremont is waging to gain local control over water and in “Lesson Learned,” Miller looks at the politicization of wild fires and the cautionary insights gained and soon forgotten from the 2009 Station Fire that burned 160,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest.

“I hope that people reading this start to think about our relationship to nature – and it to us. How do we protect natural habitats, animals, resources, from us?”

“The central argument of the book is that we have agency within the larger world but our actions must be consistent with systems we have to protect the natural environment. The book is an effort to give people a roadmap to act with a kind of grace.”

On field trips with students, and hikes and travels with his wife and on his own, Miller says he gets curious about why things are the way they are and looks to the past to find answers: “My writing is sparked by encounters with a particular place and time in nature that led to thinking about that space in the past.”

A prolific writer, Miller regularly publishes op-eds, blog entries and books on the West and its environmental history.

“Writing is a way of inscribing myself in the landscape and helps make the landscape comprehensible.”

Miller sees his latest book as the end to a trilogy, of sorts, of two earlier collections of essays that are framed by his own westward journey that started out in San Antonio, Texas and takes him through Arizona and ultimately to Claremont, California.

“With Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas, I am figuring out what’s going on, and On The Edge: Water, Immigration, and Politics in the Southwest is a transitional book that takes me from San Antonio to California. Not So Golden State centers on California but looks east and raises the question about a new world, of where we’re going.”

—Carla Guerrero ’06

Teeny Tiny Immortals

Biology: Professor Daniel Martinez

Providing the strongest evidence to date that some animals have the potential for immortality, new research released in December confirms the tiny hydra does not age and, if kept in ideal conditions, may just live forever.

In a co-authored paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal, Pomona College Biology Professor Daniel Martínez caps a decade of research into these centimeter-long freshwater polyps with a knack for longevity.

The paper titled “Constant mortality and fertility over age in Hydra” shows hydra could live in ideal conditions without showing any sign of senescence—the increase in mortality and decline in fertility with age after maturity, which was thought to be inevitable for all multicellular species.

Working with James W. Vaupel of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany, Martínez  duplicated earlier findings regarding hydra immortality, but on a much larger scale. That scale, Martinez says, is key to the study’s significance, along with the fact that the hydra showed constant fertility over time, defying expectations for most organisms.

The latest study took 2,256 hydra from two closely related species and conducted experiments in two laboratories (at Pomona College and the MPIDR) over an eight-year period, doubling the amount of time from Martinez’s previous experiments showing hydra living for four years.

“I do believe that an individual hydra can live forever under the right circumstances,” says Martínez. “The chances of that happening are low because hydra are exposed to the normal dangers of the wild—predation, contamination, diseases. I started my original experiment wanting to prove that hydra could not have escaped aging. My own data has proven me wrong—twice.”

As one of the world’s leading scholars on hydra phylogeny and the evolution of aging, Martínez in 2010 received a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for research on the mechanisms underlying lack of senescence in members of the genus Hydra. In 2013, he received a grant from The Immortality Project at UC Riverside to study the implications of hydra’s lifespan on medicine and increasing human longevity.

“Hydras are made of stem cells,” Martínez says. “Most of the hydra’s body is made of stem cells with very few fully differentiated cells. Stem cells have the ability to continually divide, and so a hydra’s body is being constantly renewed. The differentiated cells of the tentacles and the foot are constantly being pushed off the body and replaced with new cells migrating from the body column.”

The project was labor-intensive and, at times, tedious. Each hydra had to be individually fed three times a week. The man-made freshwater in which the hydra lived needed to be changed three times a week. “Many, many hours of work went into this experiment,” says Martínez. “I’m hoping this work helps sparks another scientist to take a deeper look at immortality, perhaps in some other organism that helps bring more light to the mysteries of aging.”

—Carla Guerrero

What’s in a Name?

Economics: Professor Gary Smith

The study landed just in time for the 2014 hurricane season, and it created quite a weather system of its own.

A team of university researchers had found that female-named hurricanes are deadlier, and they posited that this was due to sexism—people didn’t take hurricanes with female names as seriously. They concluded that changing a severe hurricane’s name from Charley to Eloise “could nearly triple its death toll.”

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, drew international media attention. They also drew skepticism from some observers and academics who questioned the methodology.

Economics Professor Gary Smith digs more deeply into those doubts in his new paper, “Hurricane Names: A Bunch of Hot Air?,” published in Weather and Climate Extremes. In addition to questioning the methodology, Smith uses new data to provide the most extensive look at the controversial findings so far. Smith finds the hurricane names conclusion is “based in a questionable statistical analysis of a narrowly defined data set” and does not hold up when looking at a more inclusive set of data or at a fresh set of data.

His skepticism was heightened by the study’s conclusion that there is no female-male effect for less severe storms. If the sexism theory is true, he says, it ought to be most apparent for storms of questionable danger.

“It is implausible that an imperiled public’s response to a potential storm of the century—with catastrophic warnings broadcast by news media that feed on sensationalized reporting—depends on whether the name Sandy is perceived to be a feminine or masculine,” notes Smith.

Smith found that the original study’s conclusions depended on the inclusion of pre-1979 data, a period when all tropical storms were given female names. Hurricanes happened to have been stronger during these years and it is likely that infrastructure was weaker and there was less advance warning. It is more scientifically valid to analyze storms since 1979, when weather officials started assigning alternating female and male names before the hurricane season begins.

Smith also found that the statistical analysis was flawed and that the authors estimated at least a dozen models, which he calls a sure sign of tortured data. Smith tried to replicate the original research by 1) looking at a wider set of data and 2) looking at a fresh set of data.

The original study, Smith notes, excluded tropical storms that did not meet the wind-speed threshold to be labeled hurricanes, as well as storms that stayed off the coast and did not make landfall in the U.S. It also excluding deaths that occurred outside the U.S. When a wider set of data is considered, the study’s conclusions don’t hold up, says Smith.

For a second test, Smith looked at Pacific storms—the original research only considered Atlantic storms—and again found no difference in fatalities from female-named and male-named storms.

The Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona, Smith teaches finance and statistics and pursues research on topics such as housing prices and stock prices. Author of Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics, Smith also has a penchant for looking more deeply at implausible research findings, such as the report (published in the British Medical Journal) claiming that Japanese and Chinese Americans are susceptible to heart attacks on the fourth day of every month because in Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese, the pronunciation of the words for “four” and “death” are very similar.

Smith laments that, “Statistical analyses are indispensable for evaluating competing claims and making good decisions. Unfortunately, the credibility of useful analyses is undermined by studies that torture data.”

—Mark Kendall

Supervolcanoes

Geology: Professor Eric Grosfils

Almost 10 years ago, Geology Professor Eric Grosfils published a scientific paper on the stability and rupture of small magma reservoirs, challenging the current theory behind what triggers volcanic eruptions. One key finding was that magma buoyancy plays almost no role as a trigger. Grosfils’ research today continues to expand upon that work and influence the field of volcanology.

A new study published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, led by Patricia Gregg of the University of Illinois in collaboration with Grosfils and Shan da Silva from Oregon State University, shows that the same is true for the much larger systems that feed supereruptions.

The long-held idea is that the buoyancy in magma, which has lower density than the rock around it, begins to create pressure and push against the crust until it breaks, permitting magma to move upward and feed an eruption. These pressures, however, contribute in only minor ways relative to other factors. “Buoyancy doesn’t appear to be the trigger for such eruptions as others have argued,” says Grosfils, suggesting that previously identified factors, including external fracturing during roof collapse, remain the critical drivers for supervolcano eruptions. “We know that really big magma bodies accumulating at shallow levels in the crust can feed large explosive eruptions like the past climactic events at Yellowstone or Long Valley,” explains Grosfils. “All of us are interested in discovering what it takes for a system like that, just sitting there happily minding its own business, to begin erupting. What happens in the reservoir and surrounding crust that allows the materials to escape and feed a large, catastrophic volcanic eruption?”

“There are still many aspects to triggering supereruptions that we still do not understand. Our recent investigation helps to rule out one potential eruption triggering mechanism, buoyancy, but there is still a lot of additional work to be done to better constrain the mechanisms that trigger supervolcano eruption,” says Gregg.

Given the additional work left to figure out what sets off supervolcanoes, the opportunities for students to explore and learn are plentiful, and Grosfils’ collaborative nature and mentorship has already inspired some students to continue the work.

Recent Pomona graduate Robby Goldman ’15, is one of those students. He will be working with Gregg the following academic year pursuing volcano dynamic models on a large scale as a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s geodynamics program.

A geology major at Pomona, Goldman worked with Grosfils and another geology student, Jack Albright ’16, on a project modeling magma chambers in three-dimensional space using the finite-element modeling software COMSOL Multiphysics. The goal of that research was to better understand how the formation of large, cauldron-shaped depressions known as calderas, are influenced by pressure changes in the underlying magma chambers. Their research was presented at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last spring in Houston.

Goldman is now headed to New Zealand on a Fulbright grant to continue his work in an ancient volcanic system, and he says his work with Professor Grosfils directly influenced his decision to apply for the Fulbright grant.

Adds Gregg, “Working with Professor Grosfils is incredibly enriching. His patience and generosity of time, acting as a critical sounding board as we work through the physics and dynamics of our volcano models, makes doing science together fun and exciting.”

—Carla Guerrero

Adan Amaya knows that to travel the world, you don’t necessarily have to go very far. Known for his outgoing personality, Amaya enjoys meeting students, faculty and staff in his daily rounds with Pomona’s mail services team. And when he’s not delivering the mail, he’s at Oldenborg Dining Hall using his passion for language to travel the world himself.

Born in El Salvador, Amaya moved to San Bernardino 35 years ago. His 20-plus years of experience as cook made it easy to find a position with Scripps dining services in 2007, but he was soon ready for a change. He is now in his eighth year at Pomona, where he exercises his love of language every day at Oldenborg.

“Rita Bashaw [Director, Oldenborg Center] approached me one day and invited me. I really was kind of shy because I don’t have experience being around students, but I said ‘I’ll be there.’ I started going, and after that I liked it. I’m always there, every day.”

Amaya speaks four languages—his native Spanish, English, Greek and Italian—with more to come. On Wednesdays, he’s at the beginner Italian table, while on Thursdays, he goes Greek. He spends the rest of his lunches at the Spanish table, helping beginner and intermediate students with their conversation skills.

“I’m committing myself because I love it; it’s my passion to be there with the students because the students really want to learn Spanish, so I can give them a little motivation to practice and have conversations.”

Even before arriving at Pomona, Amaya was exploring his capacity for languages. His first goal upon coming to the United States from El Salvador was to learn English, but then his language learning took a turn. His cooking experience brought him into work with a Greek family as cook, manager, and eventually supervisor in their southern California restaurants. To advance in the business, he says, it became necessary to learn Greek. Between two trips to Greece (once in 1998 and again in 2000) and 10 years of studying, Amaya has mastered the language.

When he left the restaurant business, he didn’t stop there. “I do speak Italian too, but Italian is easier than Greek,” he says. “Italian is very easy because once you master Spanish, you can go ahead and do Italian.” What’s next for Amaya? French, he reveals, and a little farther down the road, Portuguese. “I always have a little space for learning something,” he adds.

When Adan isn’t traveling the world through language, he’s probably, well, traveling. He makes the trip back home to El Salvador twice a year; he has even brought Pomona students along with him, including a Chinese student he met during his Oldenborg lunches.

“He showed up to the Spanish table with his little Spanish,” recalls Amaya. “I said, Bob, do you really want to master Spanish? In order to do that, you have to put some passion into it. I’ve been seeing his improvement over two years, and he took the courage to go with my family back to El Salvador. That’s one of my greatest experiences.”

From his trips to Greece to his travels around Central and South America, Amaya is no stranger to exploration. His next destination: Roatan Island, Honduras. For someone who naturally likes to wander, he was surprised to discover he feels right at home with Pomona’s mail services team.

“I never thought that I would stay for very long. But since I’ve stayed at Pomona and seen how the environment is related to the work, and how you move around with people, I’ve liked it. I’m going to hang out here at Pomona for a long time.”