There is one four-digit whole number n, such that the last four digits of n^2 are in fact the original number n. What is n?
Month: June 2013
Dating and marriage in the age of the internet
In light of rule #6 from my post on Sunday, I thought I’d take a crack at this article I got sent by my wonderful (and single!) brother. The headline reads “marriage from online meetings is more stable, satisfying“. In case you’re curious, the study was sponsored by…wait for it…an internet dating site.
This doesn’t actually make the finding illegitimate however, though it does indicate we should use some scrutiny.
First, as I’m sure many of my older readers have already wondered, this study only focused on people who have been married at most since 2005. Given some lead time for publication and all, that means that they were studying the incidence of divorce in marriages in the first 7 years or so. Now this isn’t totally crazy…about half of all divorces occur in the first ten years of marriage (This is what I learned in school, but now I can’t find a good source for this, but this article seems to back me up), so this study does likely tell us something. It’s interesting though that the abstract uses the word “slightly” to describe the lower divorce rate/marital satisfaction. It turns out that’s pretty true, as the divorce rate for those meeting online is about 6%, and for those not meeting online it’s 7.7%. This difference was smaller when they controlled for other factors, but was still statistically significant (they don’t list it).
Now I don’t think this is totally crazy. It’s a small difference, but I would imagine that much of that could be attributed to people who went online looking for love/relationships vs people in the offline world who just fell in to relationships with people they encountered. Actively desiring marriage would, I presume have a protective effect on said marriage once it occurs.
Overall though, it is interesting to ponder where this might go. Are the divorce rates going to be higher once we get more than 7 years out? Are there other changes coming due to online meetings that we haven’t noticed yet? Additionally, there’s evidence that the divorce rate is not continuing to climb because many who would have gotten divorced are simply not getting married. As those folks continue to opt out, how will things change? I will be anxiously awaiting the eHarmony followup.
Tales of the footnotes
I’ve written before about my 5 reasons you should check citations, and it occurred to me recently that I need to add a 6th. Here’s my updated list, changes in bold:
- Check that the source cited actually exists
- Check that the source cited backs up the part of the sentence that really needs backing up.
- Check that the source cited actually backs up the thing it’s being used to back up, and doesn’t just reference it obliquely.
- Check that the source cited states the point as strongly as the article authors state it.
- Check that the reference isn’t so old as to be outdated, replaced, or from a paper that has been unreplicatable.
- Check that the reference was from an actual journal and/or otherwise reflects real scientific inquiry
I add this one on because the word “study” and “survey” get tossed around rather loosely at times. Two examples that made me think of this:
First, from England:
Mr Gove said: “Survey after survey has revealed disturbing historical ignorance, with one teenager in five believing Winston Churchill was a fictional character while 58 per cent think Sherlock Holmes was real.”
Those surveys, the Department has now revealed in response to an FOI request, included research conducted by Premier Inn, the budget hotel chain, UKTV Gold and “an article by London Mums Magazine”. None are known for their work in this field.
Mr Gove is apparently the British equivalent of the Secretary of Education.
Second was from a website with a rather interesting name (Manboobz). The owner was apparently reading a book in which he saw the claim that schoolgirls hit schoolboys 20 times more often than schoolboys hit schoolgirls. Upon investigating that citation, he discovered that it was not actually a formal study, but a class project a friend of his had assigned her students at his request.
These may both be small things, and the points they make may or may not be valid…but when in doubt it’s always worth checking the source of the source. The answers could be surprising.
graph paper diaries 