I am thinking of a number between 1 and 1300.  It meets 3 criteria:

1. It is a perfect cube.
2. It is less than 500.
3. It is a perfect square.

At least according to this chart of people’s most and least trusted TV news sources:

I’ve been meaning to post something on David Brooks (Brooks’s? Brooks’?) column from a few weeks ago on the “Philosophy of Data”.  A couple readers sent this to me (thanks all!) and I thought it was pretty interesting.  He questions how the rise of big data is going to change things, and raises a few pertinent questions:

Over the next year, I’m hoping to get a better grip on some of the questions raised by the data revolution: In what situations should we rely on intuitive pattern recognition and in which situations should we ignore intuition and follow the data? What kinds of events are predictable using statistical analysis and what sorts of events are not?

I think those questions are relevant, and I was thinking about them when this cartoon popped up in my newsfeed on Facebook a few days ago:

1. Figure out what problem you’re trying to solve
2. Get a large relevant data set
3. Analyze it until you get any numbers you can think of that might be helpful
4. Find several rational people who are deeply embedded in the problem area
5. Ask them what they think of the data, get the gut reaction
6. Explain to them where you got the data, see if their reaction is the same
7. Ask them if anyone they know would disagree with this data, and if so why
8. Ask them if this helps them know how to proceed
9. Ask them if there’s any other data that might be useful for this problem
10. Go find that, repeat 5-9.

So tonight’s the last night I’m at this conference (American Society for Bone Marrow Transplant if you’re curious), so I figured it would be an appropriate moment to share some interesting data issues that came up in the sessions I went to.

The most interesting one came from a group out of Johns Hopkins, in their talk about their combined inpatient/outpatient program.  About 20 years ago now, they started to transition their transplant patients from one long inpatient stay to a shorter stay with a sort of intensive outpatient clinic follow up.  This worked really well, cut costs, helped patients feel more autonomous, etc.  What was interesting is that as they followed up on patients and how they did, they found that patients treated under this model did better on every single quality of life metric* except one: feelings about appearance.

Since there is no reason to believe they actually looked any different, the only conclusion they could reach is that the more “normal” people the cancer patients saw, the more acutely aware they were of how they looked.  When they were in the hospital, they were surrounded by other patients, but on the outside they were exposed to more healthy people.

I thought that was an interesting example of how much quality of life measures can depend on what your environment is and who you’re being exposed to.  We like to act like hapiness or contentment were definitive values that are totally internally generated, but they’re not.  People compare themselves to others.  We just can’t help it.

*The hard health measures (recovery, blood counts, etc) were the same with either method.

Once upon a time my family went to a restaurant way up in Northern New Hampshire.  My brother decided to get the “spaghetti and meatball” dinner.  As he was looking at the menu before ordering, he remarked that it was interesting that they seemed to have forgotten the “s”.  The meal came.  There was no typo.  There was just one solitary small meatball atop an ocean of spaghetti.  The end.

It’s not a great story, but it’s the kind of thing that a 9 year old and a 7 year old found endlessly hilarious.

Of course that’s just me saying that I didn’t forget the “s” on link up in the title.  I’m having a hell of a time trying to cut and paste links with my iPad, and that all I have here.  Anyway, this is another Valentine’s Day one, but it was good enough to put the effort in.  Amazon.com did 50 Great American Love Stories…one for each state.

I knew that Massachusetts would be “Love Story” and it was.  Honestly I think they used “love stories” a little loosely, because I’ve read “The Virgin Suicides” and that was damn depressing (and don’t even get me started on Grapes of Wrath).  I haven’t read too many of these….Florida (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Georgia (Gone With the Wind),  Nebraska (My Antonia), Ohio (Beloved), Oklahoma (Grapes of Wrath), South Dakota (These Happy Golden Years), and Wisconsin (Blankets).

So that’s seven…and for someone as New England-centric as I am, they’re certainly all over the place. My favorite is certainly Their Eyes Were Watching God, and my least was Grapes of Wrath.  I wish I had known earlier you could skip every other chapter.  Sigh.

I was going to post this last night, but it turns out procuring a cocktail in Salt Lake City actually requires a bit more time and effort than one might suspect.  On the plus side, they have a lovely choir here.

Well, I made it to Salt Lake City in one piece.  I even got a chance to walk around for a bit, but I kept getting really confused about where I was going.  Then I realized that I am actually staying at the intersection of West South Temple and South West Temple.  Um, no wonder I kept going in circles.

Anyway, I didn’t have time to find a good number puzzle today, so you’re getting one I saw in the in flight magazine:

Three of these names have something in common:  Diana, Mary, Sophia and Carol

Which is the odd one out, and why?

Yesterday’s post got me thinking about crime, and I remember a stat I saw somewhere that I had never seen any details on…namely that women tend to get shorter jail sentences than men for the same types of crime.

I took a look around and found that the definitive study on this seems to be this one by David Mustard.  He analyzed over 77,000 convictions and sentences for 41 different types of crime, to see if he could come up with how much race, gender, education and socioeconomic status effected sentences.

It appears that the difference in length of sentences between genders is 5.5 months, when comparing similar crimes overall.  This is an issue because the guidelines specifically prohibit discrimination based on gender.  I got curious though….if the only criteria was “similar crime”, could we be losing some detail here?  Interestingly enough Mustard actually did delve in to some additional detail that made a difference.  Apparently sentencing guidelines are set by the USSC guidelines, which require that criminal history and the particular offense be taken in to account, and ban certain characteristics from being taken in to account (gender included).  Everything else that goes in to a crime is fair game, and if a judge overrides the standards, he has to provide a reason why he felt these standards shouldn’t apply (an appellate court must agree).  If you exclude those cases where the judge believed there was an extra level of egregiousness, the sentencing difference drops to 1.8 months.  

I thought that was interesting….are judges more likely to see things men did as particularly awful, or are men more likely to add an extra layer of awful to some crimes?

I started wondering what would happen if you got several people to weigh in on particular offenses with gender removed (okay, this wouldn’t work for most rape cases….but everything else would likely be fair game).  This could be an interesting comparison study to see where the  differences were coming from.

Also, I can’t dig up the study at the moment, but there is some evidence that suggests the more emotional the accused seems to be about what they’ve done, the lighter the sentence.*  It strikes me that since women generally cry more easily/frequently than men, this might play a part.  Another interesting “is this discrimination against a gender or against a characteristic that is linked to gender” question.   I’d love to see a study that took in to account who cried at their sentencing.

As for me, I’m headed to Salt Lake City in the morning.  I’ll try not to get arrested.

*This is why people with Aspberger’s tend to get stiffer sentences.

Edit before I hit post:  I wrote this whole post and then decided to google a few more things to make sure I had everything straight….only to come across this article that clarifies that Dr Roth was misquote by the Daily Mail in the article I start with.  I’m still posting this though because I think that the criticisms I make below are a good framework for assessing any study that looks at the biology of criminals, and because assessing it like this had already led me to believe something was amiss (see my footnote I wrote before I found the clarification).  What can I say, when in doubt, blame the journalist.

I saw an interesting link over at Maggie’s Farm the other day about  a German scientist who claims to have found a “dark patch” in the brains of people who have committed violent crimes.

In the article, the scientist, Gerhard Roth is quoted as saying this:

When you look at the brain scans of hardened criminals, there are almost always severe shortcomings in the lower forehead part of the brain…. 

…But when I will look at young people, and I see there are developmental disorders in the lower forehead brain, I can say that there is a felon in the making with 66 per cent probability. 

What interested me as I read this was that his credentials and studies were being touted only as they related to his work with the criminal population*.  This can seem insignificant, I mean, if we want to predict criminal behavior, go take a look at the criminals right?

I’m not so sure.  It depends what he means by “66% probability”.  At first glance, I’d assume he means that have the “dark patch” in question will go on to become felons.  But that sort of assertion would mean he’d have to start with a young, non-incarcerated population, identify those with this particular brain abnormality, and then see how many of them became felons.  The study the article describes does nothing of the sort.  It’s one thing to say that criminals have a different brain from non criminals, but to say something’s predictive you have to actually, you know, see if it can predict things.  It’s possible he meant that 66% of felons have this patch and something got lost in translation?

Prison populations are really interesting to study, because they’re literally captive audiences.  However, finding commonalities between criminals are fairly useless unless you have a sense of how prevalent the same thing is in the general population.  If we know this, we can know exactly what we’d do with those 33% up there who are okay and got swept up in the mess.

Some of this is covered at length in Barbara Oakley’s Evil Genes.  There are a lot of issues with trying to predict violent behavior, and while I certainly think that linking genes or brain damage to evil is quite reasonable, we always will have to carefully weigh pros and cons of doing so proactively.  Even if you disregard ethical concerns, violent criminals always need to be compared to something to make sure you’re not just picking up on a characteristic lots of people happen to have.

*Other weirdness in the article: Roth’s not actually a neurologist, he’s a neurobiologist, I’m pretty sure the “scans” Roth’s referring to and that are pictured are not X-rays, you don’t measure brain waves with either of those, and there’s no such thing as a “central lobe”.  None of this seems to be Roth’s fault, but this reporter could use a little work.

I was actually looking for something totally serious on Youtube when I found this video, a statistical tribute to Far East Movement’s epic “Like a G6”:

I then went looking for the original so you’d have some context, if desired, but instead found a little somethin somethin for my religious readers….”Like Jesus”:

Now if those two didn’t wear you out, here’s the original:

And since we’ve come this far together, here’s a poll so you can rate the experience:

That was fun, thanks for coming by!