Segundo

MAYBE CONTACT THE FIRM'S INSURANCE CARRIER - THEY MIGHT HAVE DATA ON SUCH THINGS OR SUGGEST A WAY TO THINK ABOUT IT.

There's a very strong likelihood that your partner is having a good laugh.

Thirdo.

First one with a thoroughly worked answer gets a job at McKinsey...

Poor bastard.

Tsk. Tsk. He should have taken statistics instead of basket-weaving in college.

you need two probabilities.. the odds of pipe incident in that network, period.... then the odds that YOUR buildign is one of the few affected in this way..

estimate number of buildings adjacent to steam pipes, assume 4 buildings seriously affected per pipe incident... your odds are 4 in number_adjacent_to pipes multiplied by probability of steam pipe event in the first place.. the latter number is the tricky part... but might be able to get such data from pipe operators themselves.. either way, it's a ridiculously low number, enough to qualify as force majeure in any dispute, no?

4:54 - what exactly is a "pipe operator"?

I've been told that con ed is giving like $550 to each person in the vicinity of the explosion who claims to have thrown out their clothing because of concerns about asbestos. Can anyone confirm?

Tell him that the answer is a function of the size of his asshole so he will need to come back to you with accurate measurements..

whoever owns/maintains/is legally responsible for the steam pipes... con ed in this case? pipeline operator if you prefer.. they should keep stats on incidents etc. though you could estimate the probability other ways..

7/30/07 6 hrs Research re preparing Partner X for cocktail party

7/31/07 5 hrs Research re preparing Partner X for cocktail party

8/1/07 3 hrs Research re preparing Partner X for cocktail party

What kind of d-bag signs off of an email with "Cheers"?

Ultimately what you need to know is the odds that the steam pipes closer to your building than to other building were burst. This is the only meaningful way to estimate the odds that your building would be the one (and only one) effected for an extended period of time.

So the information that you don't have, and that you need, is the failure rate for steam pipes. If there was some data on an average rate for an average age pipe that would be the answer to your question (given the above assumptions).

However, let's assume for a second that you actually want to use all that useless data you have about Manhattan. In that case the more general information that you need is the number of steam pipe explosions in the Manhattan system since it has been installed, data you might be able to get from City Hall, especially given the current climate I imagine they want this number out assuming that it is low...

You would then want to look at the density of steam pipes in the area of Manhattan where you are (which you have data from).

So you have a 2.675 sq mile area with a concentrate pipes and an average density of 69,000 buildings / 23 sq miles to give you a total of 8025 buildings in the steam pipe dense area.

Now, assuming the explosion will occur in the dense pipe area you would have a 1/8025 chance of being the one building out of luck (assuming only one building has this bad luck). However, we need to discount this by the chance that the explosion doesn't happen in the dense area and happens somewhere else. Lets say, for the sake of argument and looking at your picture that there is a 75% chance that the explosion occurs in your dense area.

Now your odds are only .75/8025, so long as there is an explosion, also known as 1/10700.

So now in the event of a steam pipe explosion the odds of your building be the one SOL is 1/10700. This might be the answer that the partner wants.

However, if he wants the odds that in any given period of time (say one year) the office will be shut down for a steam pipe explosion then you need to know the failure rate of pipes in the system generally. Say this is one failure every 20 years (this is the data I told you to look up earlier).

Then you simply adjust your ratio by multiplying by 1/20 so that you now know that the chance of your building being shut down in a year is 1/10700 * 1/20

Aka: 1 in 214,000 (odds of bldg being shut down in a year).

Reminds me of a summer associate hazing project to which I was assigned over a long holiday weekend. Fun times!

ps, where do I send my app to get into consulting and out of law? This was more fun than doc review.

I took the relevant information and did a few quick calculations. Here is your answer: In retrospect, the odds are 100%.

Short answer: There are three types of lies - Lies, damned lies, and statistics. The partner who assigned you this problem obviously majored in liberal arts in college, or else he would have realized that the question "What are the odds of our building being affected by a steampipe explosion?" can have no mathematically precise - or even remotely accurate or significant - answer.

Long answer: As in any statistics problem, you first need to figure out what the givens are. For example: the odds of your building being affected by a random steampipe explosion will be a lot less than the odds of your building being affected, given that a steampipe explosion has already happened.

In the prior case, you must first calculate the odds of a steampipe exploding, and then calcuate the odds of your building being affected by it.

Your best bet is to attack the problem piecemeal from the micro level, and provide several different "probabilities" (ie, probability of any steam pipe in NYC exploding (good luck calculating this, it will be impossible); probability of a pipe within 5 square blocks of your building being the one to explode, given that a steam pipe explosion is going to occur (this will be relatively simple to calculate based on the numbers you have), probability of your building being the only one affected, given that a steampipe explosion is going to occur in your vicinity and only 1 building will be affected (easy to calculate, but of no practical meaning)). probability that your building will be affected given only that an explosion is going to happen in your vicinity (more meaningful, but much harder to calculate)).

People who think like this make me shudder at the use of statistics.

3,000 buildings per square mile (give or take), 8,025 buildings or greater in midtown

75-90 miles pipe in 2.675 square miles = 28 – 34 miles of pipe per square mile in midtown, avg 31 miles pipe per square mile in midtown (163680 feet)

2.675 square miles = 27878400 square feet

Crater = 1225 square feet – 1600 square feet – avg 1406 if 37.5 ft square crater

< 0.00005 % chance of being within crater range if in midtown, assuming also freakishly within range of the 0.005871 foot of pipe that underlies each square foot of midtown, who knows what chance that would impact the building b.c each of the 8,000+ buildings in that area would have a different footprint

I have the distinction of being in the office building directly across from this dude's building. Truth be told, the buildings are still a complete mess and the crater in the middle of Lexington Avenue is ever present since Con Edison has admitted they haven't even reached the steampipe yet. In fact, they admitted they aren't sure where exactly it is...

Con Edison is going to kill us before Al-Qaeda does...

Is the last paragraph of this NY Times article an admission of illegal price fixing?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/nyregion/06pizza.html

Lat,

Please do a recruiting thread on the Midwest (Michigan, Illnois, Indiana, Ohio)

Thanks.

Since this guy appears to be British (re: "Cheers"), perhaps he should just go back to the partner's office and exclaim, "ARE WE HAVING A LAUGH!?"

Here's a lawyerly solution to this problem: demand the answer from your landlord (who own your firm's building). Get him to admit on the record that he doesn't know and has never entertained this notion. Affirmatively ask him to investigate, and if/when your building gets hit, sue him for negligence.

I don't know about steam pipes, but I know the following for oil/gas pipelines: The pipe owner/maintainer is probably required under some government regulation to keep records about pipeline "incidents." These are often expressed in terms of mile years (0.005 incidents per mile year would mean a one mile pipe would have 0.005 incidents a year, while a thousand mile pipe would have 5 incidents per year). You could use this number combined with the length of the pipe in your building area to come up with a rough number. Sometimes the data are broken down further by severity of incidents: spill, 0.1 per mile year, explosion 0.00001 per mile year, for example. The fire marshal for your area might also keep this info on file.

5:27 -- yes.

'Cheers' could also be Australian...

What's even better about this assignment? The fact the L2L would probably castrate himself for the chance to do this bitch-work.

Apparently the odds were 100%.

What do I get for winning?

5:27 (Pizza Boy): I agree with 5:35. Absolutely astonishing that this would go in print. Horizontal price fixing is per se illegal; no market power or relevant market required. Go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200. [though I doubt the DOJ will be too intereted in a neighborhood pizza cartel].

5:41

The government may not care to prosecute the pizza cartel, but would Papa John's have standing to sue for civil damages? Assuming the new franchise loses money, can they sue the cartel? And then presumably bring in the statement as evidence of the cartel's historical (and arguably current) practices?

Given:

Chances of explosion occurring in past two weeks: 100%

Number of explosions: 1

Number of explosions that affected your building: 1

Chances of explosion occurring the past two weeks affecting your building = 100%*(1/1) = 100%

Problem solved . . .

You guys are idiots. Make up a huge number, then put some bad, but impossibly complex looking math underneath it, and turn it in.

Partner gets to go off about "these are the statistics" to his golf buddies, and you're done. He won't fucking know, unless he hires an expert to verify your answer, which is what he should do in the first place if he REALLY needs to know at all (like for litigation purposes).

5:32 - But those numbers are completely inaccurate and misleading themselves. Statistics reflect reality; reality does not reflect statistics. The fact that in NYC pipes have historically failed at a rate of X incidents per Y miles per Z years doesn't tell you anything about the odds of *future* failure. Now, admittedly, the results of flipping a coin 1,000,000 times are probably a pretty accurate indicator of the future odds of a subsequent coin flip. But this only because no variables exist in the equation. Every coin flip is a perfect repeat of the same experiment. The odds are 1:2; we know this because there are only 2 possible outcomes.

With something as sporadic as pipe failure, you're looking at a plethora of external factors like: quality of pipe; stability and pressure of the surrounding soil; pressure of the gas or liquid flowing through the pipe; heat; humidity; etc.

By trying to pin a mathematical likelihood on something like this steam pipe explosion occurring at any point in New York City (much less trying to further calculate the odds of it leveling a specific building), would-be-statisticians are fallaciously imputing the empirical results of prior observation to future events. I might buy it if all steampipe in NYC were the same age and quality, and existed in identical surrounding conditions, and carried identical liquid or gas. But so much physical discrepancy exists that statistics based on empirical observation cannot come close to providing any meaningful information.

5:44: Papa John's has no standing. Typically, competitors have a higher burden to show that they are showing harm to competition, rather than harm to themselves. But there is no reason that the existence of the pizza cartel would be harmful to Papa John's. They don't have to participate (and indeed, haven't, since they aren't open yet), and are free to set their own prices. If anything, they will do better because if the pizza cartel has set an unreasonable price, Papa John's can sell their product for less.

The more interesting question is whether or not Papa John's could allege a "group boycott" (another section 1 violation) if the neighborhood is successful in avoiding the Papa John's, or if they might have had a Noerr-Pennington case if the "pizza cartel" succeeded in blocking the opening of the restaurant in the first place.

Sheesh. I need to get out more.

I wonder how large of a potential recovery there would be if someone brought a class action against the pizza cartel?

I think the funniest aspect of this has been overlooked. The listserve in question is a general listserve most commonly used for buying and selling dorm crap and the occasional flamewar, rather than highbrow actuarial contemplation.

The pizza case sounds like rule of reason to me. The mere fact that they get together and exchange information isn't enough to make out a per se horiztonal price fixing claim.

If they wanted to play hardball, however, I'd wager that Papa John's could get rid of them all fast with some messy group boycott litigation.

I hate people who sign their emails "cheers". So pretentious

don't forget people who sign "best" either. such a sentiment is about as empty as their vapid little souls.

50%
Either your building is affected or not.

I prefer to sign my E-mails with "With warmest personal regards," but as part of my automatic signature in an obviously different font than the message itself.

Haha. Irony.

I Can't Believe It's Really An ASSignment.

I don't know what's worse here: that this person actually thinks this is a real assignment, that this person actually wants other people to do his pretend work, or that some people on this board were more than happy to do his pretend work for him.

It's obviously a trick question. The post from Actual Math at 5:46pm is correct.

Partner: "What are the odds that our building would be one affected by the steam pipe blast?"

SA: "Good question. But since the steam pipe explosion has already happened, and because you posed your question in the present tense, the answer is 100%. Now, if you'd like to keep me busy for a few more minutes, feel free to rephrase your question."

Partner: "What were the odds...OH FORGET IT...I was just screwing with you."

6:22: you think too much like a defense lawyer. The actual text from the article says "when it comes time to raise prices, we get together". That certainly implies more to me than information sharing -- I don't see how it can reasonably be interpreted as anything other than an agreement.

The answer is 12.

Dear Helping Hand:

And maybe the partner wants the memo asa a part of some adverse negotiations with the carrier.

Very poor judgment to contact ANY third party without permission.

Helping Hand -

Caps lock key broken?

Dude, this is why some firms won't hire from Yale. An ounce of sense says "He's pulling my card," and "The probability is 100%."

I have some other questions for this summer, since he seems to be into this sort of thing. What is the probability of the North winning the Civil War? What is the probability of that partner graduating from law school and passing the bar? What is the probability of "gullible" being defined in the dictionary?

Think these are tough? I'm this summer's worst nightmare- I can do this all day. Just keep e-mailing your other really smart classmates about it and I'm sure you'll get to the right answer.

I must admit that I'm shocked at how many of you are so statistically ignorant that you believe that if something happened the probability that it would occur is 100%? The answer would only be 100% if the question was "what is the probability that (insert event) actually occurred?". If you are trying to assess the probability that an event would occur, the actual occurance of the event wouldn't enter into the calculus at all.

I don't expect a lawyer to be able to do the calculations or even understand all of factors, but you should at least understand the concept.

Just re-read my post . . . I shouldn't be blogging at 1:40 AM . . .

If I got this assignment, I would think the partners were trying to give me busy-work because I had previously turned in shoddy work.

Agree with 1:40. What was the probability that the coin I just flipped would be heads? Regardless of how it came out, the probability that it would be heads was 50%. Whether that probability was actualized or not is irrelevant.

To look at it another way, if you buy a ticket and win Wendesday's Powerball lottery ($141 Million!), the next day you would not tell reporters: "I'm not surprised at all because the probability that I would win was 100%!" Or at least, you wouldn't tell them that if you didn't want to appear retarded.

The head of the franchise gets it:
Singh: "“Yes, we share a wall, but we are not selling what Johnny sells"

Papa John's is the most disgusting pizza I have ever had the displeasure of trying to eat. It doesn't matter what it costs, I wouldn't buy it. Especially if there was an authentic Brooklyn place next door.

"Con Edison is going to kill us before Al-Qaeda does..."

At least Bin Laden won't be billing us monthly for the honor

"I have been asked to prepare a memo on the odds that our building would be one affected by the steam pipe blast."

That seems to mean the odds the building would be affected in the event of a steam pipe blast. It assumes the blast occurs, so any odds re the probability of a blast are irrelevant.

The answer is simply the portion of steam piping that would take out your building in an explosion - say 50 ft. or whatever the kill zone would be - divided by the 105 miles of total piping. Lol statistics, it is bloody algebra.

"I have been asked to prepare a memo on the odds that our building would be one affected by the steam pipe blast."

That seems to mean the odds the building would be affected in the event of a steam pipe blast. It assumes the blast occurs, so any odds re the probability of a blast are irrelevant.

The answer is simply the portion of steam piping that would take out your building in an explosion - say 50 ft. or whatever the kill zone would be - divided by the 105 miles of total piping. Lol statistics, it is bloody algebra.

Were you asked to calculate the odds for before or after the explosion?