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Post migraine post

/ bs king / 3 Comments

I had a nasty migraine last night that kept me up for most of the night, and I’m not sure I have a real post in me.

In lieu of that, I have a linguistic issue I’d like to get off my chest: Misnomer does not mean “error” or “misconception”…it refers to an error in naming.

I’m sure my very smart and wonderful readers know this, but 3 times in the past two weeks I’ve heard people make this error.  If you’re going to try to use big/unusual words, please use them accurately.  Oh, and that also goes for phrases in Latin.  Saying part of your argument in Latin doesn’t make you right.

Sunday Fun Links 6-8-12

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Good morning!  It’s hard to find fun links this week.  Why?  Because George @#&$@* Martin wrecked my life.  Game of Thrones may land me in therapy.  I knew about the red wedding, but really George Martin, really?  Your life goal is to make your readers scared to turn the page?  Well you’ve got me.  Fine.  You win.

Alright, here we go, the New Yorker has an interactive map of the rise of the microbrews.  Little known fact:  there was an award winning microbrew in Texas named after me.  True story.

This here is possibly the most joyous/beautiful practical joke/prank I’ve ever seen.  It made me smile.

These are some pretty cool illustrations about how chemistry works.

Looking for some more summer reading?  How about a book that will tell you “what would Jesus drink?“

Thursday Quickies: DNA and the legal system

/ bs king

In other DNA related news, Scalia’s dissenting opinion regarding DNA sampling in Maryland v King was my favorite thing I read this week.

There’s some interesting math behind the practice of using DNA matching as sole proof in criminal cases.  The stats are normally presented to the jury as though it was a one in five million chance the person is innocent…but if the size of DNA databases starts to grow, that could lead to several hits.  Additionally, the stats do not factor in the chance that the sample was contaminated, or the chance that your DNA ended up somewhere randomly rather than intentionally.

End message: it shouldn’t be treated as perfect.

Thursday Quickies: Can I be in a Geico commercial now?

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A few months ago now, I decided to get my DNA sequenced through 23 and me.  I got my health results back yesterday, and while I’m still waiting on the full ancestry results, I did get one interesting piece of information:  I share an uncommonly high amount of DNA with Neanderthal’s.

Apparently your average person of European decent get 2.7% of their DNA from cavemen, and I actually have 3.2%.  That puts me in the 99th percentile.  I’m happy to finally have an explanation for why I’m so short and brutish.  
More on their science here.

Dating and marriage in the age of the internet

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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

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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:

  1. Check that the source cited actually exists
  2. Check that the source cited backs up the part of the sentence that really needs backing up.
  3. Check that the source cited actually backs up the thing it’s being used to back up, and doesn’t just reference it obliquely.
  4. Check that the source cited states the point as strongly as the article authors state it.
  5. Check that the reference isn’t so old as to be outdated, replaced, or from a paper that has been unreplicatable.
  6. 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.

Friday Fun Links 5-31-13

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Well, we hit 94 degrees in Boston today, and I’m parked on the couch with some banana peanut butter frozen yogurt and a deep thankfulness that the weekend’s upon us.  Here’s some fun links to keep you amused:

First, Jezebel covers the best/most ridiculous acapella group names.  Aural Fixation from my alma mater made it, but I was a little surprised to see that the MIT Logarhythms  didn’t get a mention.

This link actually wasn’t that fun…it was annoying.  It’s allegedly a list of “disappointing facts for geeks“…but almost the entire lists consists of “movie x made more than movie y” with none of the numbers adjusted for inflation.  My favorite from the comments section “good news for geeks…we know bad math when we see it!”

This is very cool:  Pangea with modern political borders.  Apparently I would have been living right next to Morocco.

This is my new favorite website, btw…the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.  An excerpt:
sonder

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Alright, now some analytics you can really use…do you live in IHOP America or Waffle House America?

If that’s too lowbrow for you, how about this:  could you pass Eton’s admissions exam?

Thursday Quickies: Moms as breadwinners

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I’ve seen a few headlines in the past few days about the study that showed that moms are breadwinners in 4 out of 10 households.  It’s based on this Pew Research study, and I feel like there’s a few nuances not made clear in the headline:

  • The denominator was not women or couples, the denominator was “households with children under 18”.  Thus any women without children or whose children are over 18 were not counted.
  • 63% of the female breadwinner households were single mothers
  • Of the 37% who were not single mothers, the only requirement was that they out-earn their husband.  There is no mention of a minimum gap…so a wife who earns $1000/year more than her husband is counted the same way a wife earning $50,000/year more is counted.  
Also interesting:  married households with female breadwinners have an income of four times more than households with a single female at the head ($80,000/year vs $23,000/year).  Households with a male breadwinner have a median income of about $78,000/year.  This shows some interesting selection bias…my guess is that women who earn high salaries and out earn their husbands are less likely to quit/drop to part time when kids come on the scene.  Since part of the normal debate around working/not working post-baby is “does my salary cover daycare costs”, it would make sense that women who could answer a resounding “yes” would be more likely to stay on and keep the family income higher.

Thursday Quickies: Stats, law, college and sexual assault

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Eugene Volokh had up an interesting article that touch on the intersection of stats and law.  It was on the topic of campus tribunals that hear sexual assault cases, and I thought it showed a fundamental principle of stats fairly nicely: when in doubt, put it in words.   He does this with 3 legal standards for evidence: beyond a reasonable doubt (95% confidence), clear and convincing evidence (75% to 80% confidence) and a preponderance of evidence (51% or more confidence).  He then says to determine the standard we should convert this in to words:

  • Better that 19  students  guilty of sexual assault remain at the university, with no discipline imposed, than one innocent student be expelled or otherwise disciplined
  • Better that 4 students guilty of sexual assault remain at the university, with no discipline imposed, than one innocent student be expelled
  • These outcomes are about equally bad for both students and the university
There’s some other interesting legal discussion in his post, but I thought the conversion of legal standards and probabilities in to clear sentences was a particularly helpful way to frame the discussion.