I took one class on assessment in my master’s, and it gave me a whole new respect for teachers (or anyone who routinely prepares questionnaires for people).

Figuring out how to assess whatever topic you’re assessing is really really hard.

That being said, I found this quiz particularly interesting.  It’s called “Do You Live In a Bubble?”, but it’s target is particularly the “new upper class” and how much they do or do not understand about the lives of most Americans.

What he chose to assess is fairly interesting….people you know, where you’ve lived, smoking and drinking patterns, jobs you’ve had, knowledge of popular media, etc.  Lots of interesting issues to be taken with those categories, especially for those who clearly didn’t get the score they were hoping for.  The comments are pretty amusing actually…I feel like one of the questions should have been “is it important to you that this quiz tell you that you are “of the people”?

The most interesting point here was actually the entire purpose of the quiz.  The author of the quiz answered a few follow up questions, but I thought this was the most telling one:

2. Do you feel that people scoring higher on the quiz are not culturally sequestered as well? 

Question from Reddit: HillbillyThinkTank[S]: “You’re right that everyone lives in a bubble of some kind; the tendency to cluster with similarly situated people is not a behavior limited to the “elite.” The way the quiz is structured, he is suggesting that a low-scoring person is culturally sequestered in a way that a high scoring person is not. I don’t think I agree with that.” 

Sure, they’re sequestered. We all live in bubbles of one kind or another. The problem is an asymmetry. As I put it in the book, it isn’t a problem if a truck driver doesn’t understand the priorities of a Yale law professor, or news anchor, or cabinet secretary. It’s a problem if the ignorance is the other way around, because the elites are busily affecting the lives of everyone else. When they haven’t the slightest idea what the rhythms and feel of life are like in mainstream America, they tend to make mistakes.

I thought this was an interesting case of trying measure a very abstract concept through concrete questioning.  He includes an explanation of each question and why it was included.

Agree or not with his questions, it certainly succeeds at being provocative.

Also, in case you’re curious, I scored a 56.

Via Brainpickings

The only part I disagree with is the A/C.  I kind of like that hum.

If you are a baseball fan who hasn’t yet read Mark Lisanti’s “Derek Jeter’s Diary” over at Grantland yet, go now.  Enjoy.

Though I don’t often do sports stats, “Jeter” has a few words about stats blogs:

I don’t read those blogs, they’re just negativity disguised as indisputable math…

That does about sum it up Derek.  I kind of want that stitched on a pillow.

He also has some words of wisdom on the limitations of statisticss:

The stats guys are always trying to tell you there’s no such thing as clutch, that there’s no special skill to it, it’s all probabilities and math. Look: I also know that math exists. I’ve taken math classes, I’ve seen numbers be added and subtracted in front of my very eyes. Those symbols on the back of baseball cards mean something real.  

But you can’t tell me that there’s not some magic ability some players have that makes them rise to the occasion when it counts most. I’ve seen Alex Rodriguez fail in huge situations too many times not to believe what I have is special. 

Have a good weekend everyone!

Last time I did a list of fun links, my most curmudgeonly reader informed me they weren’t fun enough.

Fine, I’ll try again.

I don’t even attempt to touch on economic stats on this blog.  Frankly, they make me dizzy.  However, I’m excited to see that George Mason’s Stats.org is launching an Econostats website soon.  Their regular site is pretty darn good for going behind the headlines, and I’m hoping this one will be too.  Here’s a post from the guys who will be running it.

If you’re looking for summer reading for your local math/logic puzzles nerd, this might be a good choice.  Even for those not on the job market it looks fairly interesting. (Fixed the link)

Nate Silver feels about acronyms what I feel about infographics.

I’ve been trying to improve my data visualization skills lately, and I’ve been noticing huge variances in examples on the web.  Thus I liked reading this proposal for creating three different categories: data visualization, data illustration, and data art.

Speaking of data art, I bought David McCandless’s book, which is very pretty, very fun, and answers the burning question “what can facebook teach us about peak break-up times?”

Facebook breakups not of interest to you?  Maybe you’re a tennis fan?  Watching the French Open?

But here’s my new superhero alter ego, just for laughs:

H/T to the Assistant Village Idiot, though I think he got it from his son Ben.

It reminded me of my favorite protest sign from the Rally to Restore Sanity:

Happy Tuesday!

Hans Rosling’s enthusiasm gets me every time.  Here, he takes on the ideas of unlimited population growth and religions influence on baby making:

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Apparently he has a one hour documentary on stats.  I’m adding watching it to my list of goals for the long weekend.

One of the more thought provoking moments of my high school career came from a youth pastor who decided to find an amusing way of calling out a bunch of church kids.  It seemed he had at some point grown weary of hearing too many good church going adolescents start sentences with “Well it says in the Bible….” when what they actually mean was “I heard in a sermon/my Dad says/my mom believes/I read this book once/I’m pretty sure this is true”.   Anyway,  he was a clever sort of youth pastor, and he realized that calling out and/or publicly shaming offenders would probably lead to lots of discord, hurt feelings, and possibly calls from parents, so he decided to take a different tack.

Starting with a few key young gentleman, he began to tell everyone that whenever they heard the phrase “It says in the Bible” they were all allowed (in fact encouraged) to all yell “BACK IT UP!!!!”  At this point whoever had made the claim had to stop and find a verse to back themselves up and read it to the group.  If they couldn’t find a verse quickly, the conversation continued, and they were condemned to sitting rifling through the concordance until they either admitted they couldn’t find it, or they stayed quiet for the rest of the conversation.

I bring this up because I WANT THIS TO BE A THING.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could do this with research?  I bet the story I mentioned in my post this morning wouldn’t have happened if every time we heard/read someone saying “Research shows” we could all scream “BACK IT UP!!!” and then silence them until they found the proper citation (and no, Wikipedia and Malcolm Gladwell would not count as actual citations).

For the printed word on the internet, we need some sort of meme for this that people could leave in comments sections of articles with vague “research” claims…perhaps a gif of some sort (where are the 4channers when I need them???).  I took a poke around the internets and this is the best I could find was this lady:

GIFSoup

I think this could work.  There has to be an unemployed journalist or two out there who could help me spread this around.

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: