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Welcome To Polk
Posted Feb 21, 2008 by Billy Townsend
Updated Feb 24, 2008 at 12:19 PM
I’d like to call your attention to a story that ran on the Tribune’s front page today. It recounts the awful six weeks that rocked Polk in December and January and discusses how those events played into longstanding stereotypes about the county.
It also compares the stereotypes with Polk’s modern reality.
In reporting the story, I spoke with USF mathematician Greg McColm about probability and if there’s any mathematical explanation for a string of bad luck like the one Polk endured. Unfortunately, due to space requirements, I had to cut that passage. But I think he made some interesting points.
So here’s an abridged version:
Other than two spasms of killing police attributed to Leon Davis, no incident had any direct relation to any other. They were spread over virtually every significant city or region of the county, stretching from Lakeland in the northwest to Lake Wales in the southeast. Other than Polk County geography, there was no obvious pattern to any of it.
And that’s to be expected, given the laws of probability, said Greg McColm, a professor of mathematics at the University of South Florida.
“It’s a common fallacy to think that when you have something random, it will look random,” said McColm. If a blind man throws 100 darts at a wall, he said, the darts will not be uniformly scattered on the wall. “There would be clusters and empty spaces,” McColm said.
But McColm also said Polk’s run of bad luck might be something more than periodic statistical wobble. Mathematical modeling of the behavior of complex systems is an increasingly hot area of study, he said. McColm said preliminary research does suggest there may be patterns and correlations at work within seemingly random human behavior.
One example is the role human agitation may play in behavior, McColm said, particularly “now that the media is an echo chamber.” The idea is that a person made anxious by awareness of traumatic events, even those unrelated to him, may behave with more volatility.
However, McColm emphasizes that mathematical models available to researchers aren’t nearly sophisticated enough to clearly map how such “cascades” of social failure work.
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