The National Chicken Council predicts Americans will eat more than 1.25 billion wings on February 5 as they watch the New York Giants battle it out against the New England Patriots.

That’s a lot of wings. Later on in the story we learn that 111 million people watched last year’s Big Game, so this year, let’s guess that 115 million will watch. And of those 115 million, according to the story, only 23% will eat wings. In other words, something like 27 million people will eat 1.25 billion wings.

Or 46 wings per person.

That’s 4,600 calories, using a conversion factor found here. (Typical adult consumes 2,500 calories a day, and Thanksgiving dinner runs between 2,000 and 4,000.)

Whattaya think?

Arcane statistical analysis, the business of making sense of our growing data mountains, has become high tech’s hottest calling.

That’s the New York Times. Further:

At North Carolina State, an advanced analytics program lasting 10 months has, since its founding in 2006, placed over 90 percent of its students annually. The average graduate’s starting salary for an entry-level job is $73,000. Its current class of 40 students had 185 applicants, and next year’s applications are already twice that. In 2009, Harvard awarded four undergraduate degrees in statistics. Two graduates went into finance, one to political polling and one became a substitute teacher. There were nine graduates in 2010, 13 last year. They headed into Google, biosciences and Wall Street, as well as Stanford’s literature department. Globally, LinkedIn recently found that from 2009 to 2011 the new jobs with titles related to “analytics” and “data science” grew by 53 percent.

Stanford’s Department of Statistics, both renowned and near so many Internet and bioscience companies, is at the center of the boom. It received 800 résumés for next year’s 60 graduate positions, twice the number of applications it had three years ago. Graduates head to business school at a starting salary of $150,000 or more, or to Facebook for about $130,000.

As most actuaries would agree: There’s money in the numbers.

(Via Flowing Data.)

Accompanying the press release is this handy chart:

My money is on “As I stand here today.”

He comes off as a petulant, picky, obnoxious crybaby, and that’s when he’s not cussing out his employees. He treats his son lousy, and his daughters worse.

Yet I type this on a MacBook, and we have three other Apple products in our house, all masterpieces of design. (I pay a lot of attention to design. Like Jobs, my design sense was inspired by Braun housewares from the ’80s.)

This pattern – rotten person builds brilliant company – happens a lot in business bios. I don’t know if that’s a storytelling crutch biographers lean on or if it’s a requirement. The thinking: To get the job done right, the big boss has to step on a lot of toes. Jack Welch of GE was big on the ‘cruel to be kind’ philosophy.

More on unruly bosses here and here. Pretty tough world when Jerry Sandusky checks in at No. 18.

Do great bosses have to be jerks?

P.S.: A great story on market research near book’s end:

Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”

The lines on the chart represent the percentage of students passing an exam in a typical year, between 35% and 45%. But this year pass rates were all over the place. Only 11% passed the advanced reserving/ERM course. More than 70% passed the introductory reserving exam.

This led the Exam Committee to publish an open letter in which it concludes all of the exams above are “‘outliers’ relative to historical results.”

Of the major CAS exams, only Part 9 – advanced finance – had a typical sitting, with 37% passing.¹

It’s a tough topic, not least because the organization overhauled its syllabus and renumbered the exams.²

The old reserving exam seems to be split in half. One half was attached to the introductory pricing exam and called Exam 5. The other half was attached to an ERM module and called Exam 7.

Meanwhile, some students had passed the old ratemaking exam but not the old reserving exam (and vice-versa). So the CAS put together transition exams – 5A for those who hadn’t passed the old pricing exam and 5B for those who hadn’t passed the old reserving exam.

Each exam contained half of the full Exam 5. Exam 5A contained the ratemaking questions from the full Exam 5. Exam 5B had Exam 5′s reserving questions. The partial Exam 5′s were two hours each, half the time alloted for the full exam.

But look up at the chart. More than 60% passed each partial exam, but only 27% passed the full exam.

Students on the wrong end of the pass mark cried foul. Some apparently alleged the Exam Committee manipulated pass marks to restrict the number of new fellows.³

The Exam Committee fired back:

. . . [S]uch assertions, even if made only in jest, are not only unfounded, but also offensive, as they call into question the integrity and professionalism of the members of the committee, all of whom are credentialed members of the society . . .

The reaction seems a bit harsh, though I haven’t seen the original accusations. The exams are hard and the process opaque – even though there’s far more openness now than, say, a decade ago. Students get frustrated and vent.

Unfortunately, the umbrage the committee took had two downsides. First, it set off a new round of bitterness, with comments like this:

it was worse than i imagined. especially the high and mighty “how DARE you question the integrity of the exam committee!!?” attitude. like a politician. that’s all i have to say. i better be careful because from the note it sounds like there’ll be consequences for saying the wrong thing now.

Second, it took focus off an interesting set of data on the exams, which I’ll look at in a future post.

___________

¹ I know, I know. The CAS focuses less on the overall pass rate and more on the effective pass rate – the percentage of people who passed after you exclude people who scored so low they probably weren’t even trying. But the open letter focused on the distribution of scores across the board, so I’m following suit. Anyhow, spring results are here, and fall results are here.

² Most people think about CAS exams by their number – Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, etc. That makes it a bit confusing to compare exams across years, since the new Exam 8 is comparable to the old Exam 9, the new Exam 6 is comparable to the old Exam 7, and so on. That’s why I, for the most part, will shun the exam numbers in favor of labeling each exam by its subject matter, as I’ve done in the chart above.

³ Can’t find the right thread on Actuarial Outpost – maybe someone can post it in comments.

In case you slept through football season, State Farm turned the Green Bay QB’s signature TD move into a marketing campaign, the Discount Double-Check. In the ads, agents and customers do the TD move to show what a good job State Farm is doing.

Well, Green Bay lost yesterday, and the venom turns on the campaign, towit:

Mr. Discount Double-Check had his worst EPA game and his 2nd-worst WPA game of the year Sunday. He totaled 0.02 WPA and -0.4 EPA, averaging just 3.9 AYPA with 264 net passing yds and an interception.

Also saw a lineman break into the Discount Double-Check after he sacked Rodgers. Note the negative connotation to both actions. Heard similar snide comments on the NFL Network after the game.

(All those TLAs, by the way, are stat numbers from Advanced NFL Stats, sort of a footballers Sabermetrics, which is probably worth a look for number geeks.)