Mr. Backus (Photo: Facebook)

British math genius Peter Backus was pretty convinced he was going to be alone forever. He didn't presume this because of the number of cats he owned or because he seemed genuinely comfortable eating out at restaurants by himself. Instead, he wrote a paper (PDF) where he applied the Drake equation, a "probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy," to discern what exactly his chances of finding love were. Turns out, they weren't so hot.

Mr. Backus wanted a university-educated woman between the ages of 24 and 34 that he finds attractive; since he estimated "generously" that he only finds 1 in 20 London-based, educated and age-appropriate women attractive (picky, picky!), he ended up with a pretty low number. By his estimates, Mr. Backus guessed that there were only 10,510 women in all of London that fit his parameters. This gave him a 1 in 285,000 chance of finding love--"about 100 times better than finding an alien civilization we can communicate with," he wrote. Tough break, guy.

Mr. Backus had luck on his side, though. CNET reports that not only has he found a girlfriend, but they tied the knot this weekend, proving there's hope for super picky single math nerds yet! The two met at a dinner hosted by a mutual friend, though, so you might have to actually log off OKCupid and leave your apartment if you want to improve your odds. Good luck out there.

Absolutely related. (Image: Memory-Alpha.org)

The pissing match between Mathalicious founder Karim Kai Ani and Khan Academy founder Salman "Sal" Khan is heating up! Today Mr. Khan responded to Mr. Ani's recent Washington Post editorial which questioned the hype surrounding Khan Academy's mission to tutor math students with free online videos and also criticized Mr. Khan's teaching ability. Mr. Khan offered a new correction to Mr. Ani's correction of the definition of slope (so meta!) and may have outed his critic as low-down dirty profiteer in his email response to Valerie Strauss, the anchor for the Post's Answer Sheet education blog:

I also think you might misunderstand our "business model." Unlike Mathalicious which is for-profit (and if it does well, Karim will become very wealthy), Khan Academy is a 501c3 not-for-profit. I take a salary from it that is approved by the board, but I do not own it (no one does). It can never IPO or be sold. It is a public charity.

BOOM! We can only hope they will eventually take this offline and go old school with hand-to-hand slide rules and compasses.

Below, Mr. Khan's video illustrating the correct definition of slope. Intense stuff.

Don't get struck by lightning when hanging with Bill Gates. (Photo: jurvetson)

We're calling it: This Mystery Science Theater 3000 trolling  of Sal Khan’s Khan Academy videos, posted in June, was the beginning of an inevitable backlash against the breathless hype about Khan’s abilities as an instructor.

Today, in  "Khan Academy: The hype and the reality" in the Washington Post, math coach and Mathalicious founder Karim Kai Ani put some sting in the criticism with a much more direct, serious approach to criticizing the Bill Gates-backed "Messiah of Math":

... [The] truth is that there’s nothing revolutionary about Khan Academy at all. In fact, Khan’s style of instruction is identical to what students have seen for generations: a do this then do this approach to teaching that presents mathematics as a meaningless series of steps. Khan himself says that “math is not just random things to memorize and regurgitate,” yet that’s exactly how his videos present it.

Sal Khan has done something remarkable in creating such a vast and varied library, and he deserves to be recognized. His commitment to making the site free is a rare and selfless act, and he deserves to be praised. Sal Khan is a good guy with a good mission. What he’s not, though, is a good teacher.

Karim Ani's harshest criticism isn't directed at Khan as much as at journalists covering Khan Academy's popularity, who have "confused journalism with sycophantism," leading to a "suspension of common sense."

That Sal Khan chose to make his videos freely available and has done so much work to at least help students the world over isn't lost on his other critics. It seems clear that some--in spite of Khan's own contention educators are jealous--agree with Mr. Ani. Khan Academy isn't the problem, the hype surrounding it is. Robert Talbert, who teaches with the math instructors who made the MST3K-style video, wrote this about Khan in early July: "I’m not jealous of, or threatened by, Khan Academy in the slightest. But I’m not an uncritical fan, either, and we need to look at carefully at Khan Academy before we adopt it, whole-cloth, as the future of education."

They can teach you how to get a date

OkCupid has earned a reputation for its fun and insightful use of data, playing with the mountains of statistics it has on the science of love. But today it met its match in the mathematics blog Isomorphismes.

The main thrust of the argument here is that the mandatory questions users need to answer when creating a profile and finding a match really skew the system. They are often rather sensitive questions, for example Isomorphismes' mandatories include: Do you think homosexuality is a sin, would you try to control your mate with suicide, would the world be a better place if people with low IQs were not allowed to reproduce (yikes!).

Users who answer these questions differently have no chance of being matched. But users who do answer these questions the same way are ranked as very compatible, despite the fact that on a granular level, they may be wrong for one another. This bothers Isomorphismes, who pointed out that, 'Someone doesn’t become a great potential match simply because they’re not a bigot, a cheat, a eugenicist, or a depressive manipulative."

It also makes it fairly easy to appeal to a broad swathe. "The worst side effect of the current scoring system, is that a spammer could easily answer only the questions with obvious answers (basic facts and display of non-bigotry) and get a decently high match percentage with a lot of people. At which point, the spammer uploads a picture of an attractive guy/girl, writes some generic profile text, and scams away," writes Isomorphismes.

It seems the post touched a nerve. OkCupid employee Riley Goodside responded that while he couldn't address the whole post, the point about spammers was essentially correct. "The algorithm as described in the FAQ does suffer from this problem. However, we have enhancements that address the issue very effectively. The FAQ is slightly out of date, and shouldn't be taken as a complete, exhaustive description of how we make matches."

And for those who learn how to game the system, romance may be in the cards. "That is exactly what I did which led to my meeting my (now long-term) girlfriend. I was receiving about 5 profile views/week with 500 questions answered. I scrapped them all, answered 20 or 30 questions with non-offensive answers, and skyrocketed to 60-100 profile views/week," wrote one commenter on Hacker News. Love or spam, it's all in the eye of the algorithm.

TAKING A CAT NAP ON MY $6.11 GAIN ON YOU BITCHES. WHAT

So: Yesterday we had a wonderful little contest in which we offered everyone a chance to guess the Groupon IPO pricing, and what it would close at today. Here are the results, in which you watch an entire team of bloggers lose to both the least (and most!) obvious people we would lose to. There's a cookie on the line, here.

For the record, Groupon's IPO priced last night at $20.00. Shares of GRPN closed today at $26.11.

Onward:

Foster: My insane pre-IPO pessimism—priced at $16.85, closing at $14.25—was strongly refuted. $3.15 off pricing, $11.86 off close. My guess was under by a total of $15.01. I am a big, stupid bear.

Adrianne: "Pricing at $18.00, closing at $40.00." Adrianne missed the IPO by going under $2.00, and was over by $13.89 on the close. She was off by a total of $15.89, but she's correct about people being "sheep." That part is true. She gets a cookie for that.

Ben: Our fearless leader had the Groupon shares pricing at $16, rocketing to $60, and closing at $30. He wasn't even close with the high, but lucky for him, that doesn't get scored. Our fearless leader's guess is off by $4 on the IPO, and $3.89 on the close. Total: $7.89. Impressive.

Nitasha: Nitasha also had a crazypants "it goes up to $50" guess like Ben, but her offering and close numbers were more modest: $15.50 on IPO, close at $20. She was off the IPO by $4.50, and the close by $6.11. Total: $10.61.

So, of all the Betabeat staffers, Ben got the closest. Interestingly enough, Ben's been out of the office all day, likely manipulating a market somewhere. We'll save him a cookie for Monday. But how did our contestants do?

We might have only had one commenter, but goddamn was he good, besting the entire Betabeat team. DennyCrane's guess: "Opens at $14.50, closes at $27.50." He was off on the IPO by $5.50, but off the close by only $1.39. Wow. Total: $6.89.

Nick Rizzo over at Reuters was off by $15.89. He was "confused" by Betabeat's extreme pessimism in our tres sophisticated estimations/forced G-chatted guesses on the way out the door last night. Dude, you're Felix Salmon's Blogging Capo and we spend our time in Startupland, not the public markets (as evidenced herein), and yet the very worst one of us tied with you. We suggest being wary of Felix's Friday StunGun; we wouldn't dare ever shame him like that for fear of reasonable consequences.

Bloggerthing Connor Simpson got in on the game late, but guessed: "Betting GRPN hits $40 by 1pm, $60 by mid afternoon and closes at $35." Groupon peaked at $31.14 and didn't close near it, or go near $40. Womp womp. You were $9.89 off the closing price, Connor, which is still sadly better than Adrianne and I. But since you didn't guess the IPO pricing, you don't get to play. Go to hell.

The best guess as of last night came from Zach Seward over at the Wall Street Journal: "Opening at $19, closing at $30." Zach was off by $1 for the IPO pricing, and—wait for it—$3.89 on the close, for a total of $4.89. And that makes him our winner. And of course the guy at the Wall Street Journal won.

What did we learn? Betabeat can't guess an IPO for shit, but at least we're better than the Reuters guy, but we could still creep up on our commenters and Tweeters. Meanwhile, Ben will not be voted off the island even though he probably did his best to manipulate today's markets. Finally, the Wall Street Journal has smart people working for them. Zach Seward, you earned yourself one Groupon Cookie, en route Monday. Well played. As for us, we'll be blogging the rest of the IPO next week.

Hopefully, I'll have stopped breathing into this paper bag by then. Thanks for playing! Cookies forthcoming (we're a blog of our word, Zach).

What happens when you combine tech investment fervor, hype-as-absurdist-performance-art and the kind of advanced mathematics required by birthday party magicians to "pick a number, any number at all"? You get a brief history of Groupon's valuations in the press. This is what a coupon company whose value increases by a factor of 48 in less than two years looks like in TechCrunch headlines (with exceptions for context).

"Groupon Valued At $250 million" - TechCrunch, December 17, 2009

"Groupon Raises Huge New Round at $1.2 Billion Valuation" - TechCrunch, April 13, 2010

"It's Official: Groupon Announces That $1.35 Billion Valuation Round" - TechCrunch, April 18, 2010

[Moment of Context #1: "Google's Groupon Offer: $5.3 Billion, With $700 Million Earnout" - All Things D, November 29, 2010]

"Groupon's Valuation Could Be As High As $7.8 Billion" - TechCrunch, December 28, 2010

"Groupon Closing $950 Million Round, Valued At $4.75 Billion" - TechCrunch, December 28, 2010

"Groupon Said To Be Valued At, Like, $15 Billion" - TechCrunch, January 13, 2011

"SharesPost Report: Groupon Is A Deal At $6 Billion" - TechCrunch, February 3, 2011

"Is Groupon Worth $25 Billion? Revenue Now 'Multiple Billions Of Dollars'" - TechCrunch, March 17, 2011

[Moment of Context #2: Groupon files their S-1, opening their finances to the world - June 2, 2011. Noted with a smiley face in chart above.]

"Groupon’s IPO Valuation Could End Up Being Less Than $6 Billion" - TechCrunch, October 3, 2011

[Moment of Context #3: "Groupon Seeks Valuation at Close to $12 Billion" - Dealbook, October 19, 2011]

To be fair, TechCrunch was far from the only offender on playing in Groupon's crazy sandbox o' numbers.

[Moment of Context #4, from March 17, 2011: "Groupon Valuation Soars as Possible I.P.O. Nears." The article noted that Groupon's then-possible I.P.O. could "value the company at close to $25 billion, according to a person close to the matter who was not authorized to speak because the talks were private." The article appeared in Dealbook.]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek