In my morning perusal of the internet, the Washington Post headline “the saddest graph you’ll see all day” caught my eye.  It turns out it was this infographic about rape*:

*Since when are you allowed to call an infographic a graph?

Back in August, right after I gave birth to the little lord, I did a post on why I thought a lot of research around  best practices for caring for infants was skewed.  At the time, I was pondering the difference the selection bias around mothers who had time and resources to engage in lots of skin to skin contact with their infant or to breastfeed for more than a few weeks vs those who did not(sparked in part by Mayor Bloomberg’s initiative to make formula harder to get in the hospital so women would be more likely to breastfeed).

Well, last week Time magazine did me one better.

In an excellent piece, Lisa Selin Davis points out that there is almost no research on whether there can be underlying medical conditions that affect a woman’s ability to breastfeed.  The justification for this is that women should be able to do it because “it’s a normal mammalian function”.

As the article points out, this is a positively stunning thing for a doctor to say.  The vast majority of non-injury related ailments we treat are things that aren’t working normally.

As I mentioned in my single moms post, sometimes we need more granular categories for the things we talk about broadly.  While breastfeeding is good for babies, do babies whose mothers are medically unable to feed them this way really have worse outcomes?  If this problem is so unacknowledged, has a study like that ever been done?

I liked the map I put up yesterday, but then I found this one (via chartporn) which is even more fun.  It’s from 1927 and it was a guide to where in California you should shoot your movie if you wanted it to look like other regions of the world.  I like that “Sherwood Forest, England” is it’s own category.

This map was produced by running all the various countries’ “History of _____” Wikipedia article through a word cloud, then writing out the most common word to fit into the country’s boundary. The result is thousands of years of human history oversimplified into 100-some words.

Reader’s guide here.

Apparently Pakistan (country) is actually India (word).

Now there’s a headline that’s too irresistible not to click….”It’s better to be raised by a single mom“.

I was looking forward to this article, as my master’s program specialized in marriage and family issues…so I was expecting some new and interesting study I could take a look at.

Spoiler alert: there is no study.  I’m going to talk about it anyway.

It turns out Slate.com is running a new series on single moms that they are soliciting essays for with this line:

Readers, we invite you to submit your testimonies on why being raised by a single mother, or being a single mother, has its benefits and might even be better than having both parents around.

This article is the first personal essay where the mother asserts that her kids are not doomed to failure like all the studies say, but rather they are doing better than their peers.  Her primary argument is actually not a ridiculous one: her kids went through difficult times with her and developed more resilience than they would have otherwise.  Almost anyone who went through a difficult time financially/emotionally/physically/all of the above when they were younger will say in adulthood it made them stronger….so I can see what she’s saying.

On the other hand, we all know the headline is enticing because you simply can’t draw any action from the conclusion without getting ridiculous.  No one would divorce their spouse they were otherwise happy with in order to give their kids “more grit” like the writer asserts hers have.  This is similar to people who escaped childhood poverty….it might have made them stronger, but none would purposefully go back in order to raise their kids in the same way.

But opinions on her article aside, from the data point of view, I am baffled that in 2013 we are still referencing data on “single moms” as though that group were even approaching homogeneous.  When I tracked back some of the links were they were explaining why they were doing this series, it appears it all started with the study from this summer that found the majority of women under 30 who give birth are unmarried.  This is an interesting stat, but it’s worth pointing out that unmarried does not necessarily mean solo, and “single” can reference either.

That being said, there are four categories of single mothers I can think of, all with different factors that affect outcomes:

1. Single mothers who are single because their spouse died.  Possible variables include at what point the child’s father died, how involved both families are, if there’s any trauma surrounding the circumstances of the death in particular.
2. Single mothers who were married, but got divorced. Possible variables include timing of divorce, level of the father’s involvement, and how acrimonious the divorce was, and how hostile the marriage was before the divorce.
3. Single mothers who were unmarried at the time they gave birth.  Possible variables include how long they knew the father beforehand, commitment level/father’s involvement and cohabitation status.
4. Single mothers who became mothers intentionally sans partner.  This is a small category, but possibly growing.  This is mostly 30s-ish women who choose to adopt or use a donor to achieve a pregnancy and child without any recognized father.

I realize that I don’t often talk about teachers or pre-college math and science education on this blog, but today I’m making an exception.  You see, today is my grandmother’s birthday, and it feels only fitting to reflect on one of the most wonderful educator’s I have ever known.

I was chatting with my grandmother this morning, and somehow we ended up talking about the traffic fatality study I posted about on Friday.  I mentioned to her that according to the article, traffic fatalities (for 2011) were as low as they were in 1949.  

A few year end roundups for all of y’all.  My big plans involve champagne and my pajamas, and a whole lot of gratitude for a wonderful year.

First, 5 retracted research studies.  #2 is weirdly hilarious. (h/t Maggie’s Farm)

Then, best data shares of 2012.  Way to represent Boston!

This list is a bit more modest….not “best of” rather “20 great” infographics.

And here are about 10 different “best science books” links, all in one place.

Unrelated to data, but good for a laugh:  Dave Berry’s year in review.

That’s all for 2012.

Don’t forget that 2013 is The Year of Statistics!

Happy New Year!

This always makes me smile.

In my last post, I took a look at the idea that gun fatalities were set to surpass traffic fatalities as a cause of death in the US.  In the comments, SJ pointed out that the word “surpass” was not appropriately use.  The primary driver of this convergence was really the decrease in traffic fatalities, so it would have been better phrased as “traffic fatalities set to drop below firearm deaths”.  The article I originally cited had this to say about the drop:

The national gun-death rate would not be approaching that of motor vehicles if it weren’t for the fact that the latter has dropped fairly drastically in the past half decade or so thanks to an increased effort to make the nation’s roads and vehicles safer. Gun-rights advocates will point to the relatively subtle rise of the gun-death’s purple line to argue that we don’t need to pass more gun restrictions. Gun-control advocates will point to the more severe drop of the yellow line to make the case for what might happen if we were to.

It got me curious though….was that drop really do to some new law or set of regulations?  I’ve been a licensed driver for over a decade now, and I couldn’t recall any specific big changes in the past few years that change how I drive. Let’s take a look at that chart again:

• Be cautious in assuming that a sudden, large drop in fatalities is in response to interventions related to vehicle design. It takes about 20 years to turn over the fleet. 

• Don’t expect most regulatory actions aimed at drivers to produce a sudden, huge drop in fatalities because such actions usually target only a portion of drivers (such as improvements in graduated driver licensing targeting young drivers only). 

• Realize that any sudden, large reduction in fatalities is likely only an unintended byproduct of factors that influence the entire transportation system, such as a rapid change in the economy. 

• Be aware that most rapid, underlying changes are transient, and therefore, their effects are mostly transient, too.