Since my mother still doesn’t agree with any of my food desert postings, I thought of this comic.
Mom, I think we should consider that maybe obesity causes food deserts. Think about I’m pretty sure I heard about obesity before I heard the phrase food desert. I’m pretty sure that proves something.
Datasexual…apparently it’s a thing.
Sometimes I worry that’s what I might become…obsessed with my own personal data, quantifying myself until there’s nothing left that can’t be counted. I already have an embarrassing number of spreadsheets in google docs dedicated to tracking all sorts of things in my life….7 I’m currently updating regularly.
Normally, my love for efficiency saves me though. In healthcare, there’s a pretty unending stream of data, so we’ve had to learn how to sort through to what’s useful. If you don’t know how you’ll use it immediately, or at least have a very large hunch, we don’t collect it.
If efficiency doesn’t work as a motivator, I figure that’s a sign I need to get outside. Good thing I have a dog to remind me to do that.
In case you’re curious, on a sunny day like today, he’ll walk for an average of 24.6 minutes, with a standard deviation of 3.3, highly dependent on whether or not we see the UPS guy go by. He HATES the UPS guy.
Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.
John Naisbitt
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Arthur Conan Doyle
This week, Bad Data Bad is coming to live from downtown Chicago, just a few feet away from the Magnificent Mile!
I’m at the Science of Team Science conference, and so far it’s going pretty well. I got a chance to present and discuss some of my research with people last night, and it’s fun having people recognize more of the psych aspect of what I’ve been doing. Your normal bone marrow transplant crowd really doesn’t care about that part of anything, so it was nice to have people recognize the theories behind what I was doing. They’re posting the abstracts online at some point, I’ll link to them when I figure that out.
Anyway, on my flight out here the data geek in me realized that a Boston/Chicago comparison would be a great input for the Google Ngram Viewer. If you haven’t played with this yet, it’s fun. Basically it tracks how many times the words you put in were mentioned in books over the last 200 years. They uploaded a massive number of books to get the data, so the results are kind of fun. Here’s Boston vs. Chicago:
For reference, Chicago wasn’t founded until 1837. I tried running it starting at Boston’s founding in 1630, but that made a weird spike that made the rest of the graph look silly. My guess is that’s a function of fewer books from that era loaded in to the database, since the y-axis is percentage.
For more about the project behind google ngrams, here’s my good friend TED to explain:
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
The moment in my childhood when I realized data reliant on self reporting was probably suspect:
This will be completely lost on you if you’re not a Hunger Games fan, but the stats work/extrapolation is pretty damn impressive.
Professionally, I found this interesting….I can only get you the numbers, ma’am, I can’t make you use them wisely.
I haven’t talked much about small sample sizes, but this blog does.
These guys are my new heroes. They noticed a statistical error that kept popping up in neuro research, and then went back and figured out how often people were getting it wrong….half of the studies that could have got it wrong did. It’s a stat geeky read, but hears the story.
I’m headed to a conference in Chicago next week, and I don’t know that I’ll be back in time for this, but it looks awesome.
Most infographic’s are not terribly accurate or useful. However, it’s Easter, and this is pretty:
Two fun articles taking on bad data:
This one covers everything I will probably ever say in this blog, but with less pizzazz.
This one is trying to stop bad data before it starts. Don’t try to make things in to a scientific experiment if you have to fudge around things to do it. Just call it a model. I like that.
graph paper diaries 