Mystery collator moves from astrological auto accidents to MARS Search

Should you pay more for car insurance if you were born under the sign of Libra? Lee Romanov thinks so. Determining the "why" behind that assertion makes for an interesting story that took me from Stanford University to a cool new audio search startup that launched its first product today. Confused? This is bit of a shaggy dog story. But here goes...



Romanov, an author and owner of the Toronto-based insurance quotation service InsuranceHotline.com, recently gained headlines in Canadian newspapers - and some free publicity for her business and her new book - by announcing the release of a study concluding that a person's astrological sign determines how likely they are to get into an auto accident or receive a traffic ticket. Adding some credibility of the claim, the press release says the study was "collated by" a Stanford University professor. Based on that work, Romanov asserts that insurance companies should start using drivers' astrological signs as a factor in determining insurance rates.



By Romanov's reckoning, people born under the sign of Libra are the worst drivers and should be paying the highest auto insurance premiums. Leos are the best risk. While this sounds ridiculous, none of the news organizations that picked up the story seem to have questioned the validity of the study itself in their stories, although some did question the conclusions. I decided to dig a bit.



The "report," available at the InsuranceHotline.com Web site, is an entertaining advertisement for Romanov's book and makes for good party conversation. However, I could find little detail here on the the study, its methods or why it proves that people's astrological signs are a determining factor in predicting whether they will get traffic tickets or have accidents.



The data on which the study was based didn't come from the government or an insurance industry accident database. The source was "North American driving data, gathered by InsuranceHotline.com's online quoting service over the last 6 years," according to the press release. In other words, information provided by customers who used InsuranceHotline.com's service to get price quotations.



What was the Stanford University professor's role? The PR Newswire press release attributes some of the work to Stanford University professor Keyvan Mohajer. I found it interesting that professor Mohajer, who collated the study, did not comment on it in the press release. None of the news stories I came across had quoted professor Mojaher either, although some brought in insurance industry experts to dispute the conclusions.



Confused, I decided it was time to contact him. A check of the people directory on the Stanford Web site showed just one Keyvan Mohajer, who is listed as a graduate student in the electrical engineering program at the school. A call to Mohajer's phone at Stanford was answered by an unidentified man who said that Mohajer had indeed been a graduate student but had graduated one or two years ago. I finally tracked down Mohajer at audio search startup Melodis Corp., where he is now founder and CEO. I did reach him briefly and he promised to call back to comment. He did not call back. The reason, as I learned later, was probably that he was in the middle of a product launch.



A conversation with Romanov helped to clear things up. "I hired him. He’s worked on my database for a number of years. He pulled out the 100,000 drivers outside of the database and did the tabulations for me and sent me back the data and the weighting of the data," she says. Mohajer was apparently somewhat taken aback by the request, Romanov said, but went ahead and did the work. The query report involved calculating how many of the 100,000 people in her database had accidents or tickets in their history, grouping the results by the birth date ranges for each astrological sign and providing percentages. Using that data, Romanov then determined which group had the most and least accidents. The assertion was made based on the statistic that, among Insurance Hotline.com's customers, 15.8% who were Libras reported an accident versus 9% for those born under the sign of Leo. I'm no statistician, but as far as I can tell, the results don't prove any causation between a person's astrological sign and the propensity to get tickets or get into accidents.



So why was Mohajer listed as a professor in the study? After he graduated he taught for a while, Romanov says.



For Mohajer, the astrology project appears to have been nothing more than a college side job, a simple query for a client. As to why he hasn't returned my calls, that may have been due to the fact that he has been rather busy this week releasing a product. Mohajer's Melodis startup announced its first audio search product today: Multimodal Adaptive Recognition System (MARS) Search, a product that "allows users to search for music by singing, whistling or humming a few bars of a song to identify the track." In other words, hum a few bars and I'll find it. Cool. According to today's press release, the first commercial implementation is at midomi.com.



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