It occurred to me recently that it’s a bit odd that most of my “real world” exposure to research comes in the form of the variety of clinical trials that go on around me on a regular basis, and yet I rarely comment on clinical trials.

This is probably because most clinical trials are a little dense to get through, and the results tend to be less interesting to people (it turns out the reuptake limitations actually weren’t as dramatic as they made them out to be!) and there’s rarely much media involvement to mix things up.

Anyway, I heard a tidbit recently about when to be suspicious of results of clinical trials that I thought I’d pass along.

In any trial assessing a new treatment/drug/etc vs a placebo, you would expect to see more dropouts in the “treated” arm of the study.  This, of course, is because most drugs/treatments have very real side effects that will bother people and cause them to drop out.  Therefore, if you see a trial where the dropout rate is higher in the placebo arm, you should be suspicious.  Placebo studies should almost always be blinded for the patients (and ideally for the providers), but if significantly more of those in the placebo arm drop out, you know this has gone wrong.  Patients don’t keep showing up if they know they’re not actually getting treated with anything…and once we’ve established that the patients know which arm of the study they’re in, the results become much less reliable.

I thought that was an interesting tidbit to keep in mind.

Do you like Johnny Cash?  Do you like data visualizations? Ever wondered how far he travels in “I’ve been everywhere man?”

The answer is 181075 kilometers.

Thank you internet.

FYI, I’m done with 75% of my Christmas shopping.  Still have to get a tree though.

For those of you not done yet, I’ll help you out with what to give me.   Here’s a whole list!  

And for my little genius baby, I’m thinking this “Outlier” bodysuit would be perfect….or perhaps a stuffed normal distribution?

Alright, enough shopping.  Need some entertainment?  Try the “thanks textbooks” tumblr. Featuring the best of the worst problems/examples/etc in textbooks.  Highlights in the commentary include “I’m less concerned with the question, “What does the scale read?”  and more concerned with the question, “Why the hell are we lubricating a hamster?”  and “Who has a “favorite” orange?  How long have you had this orange that you’ve bonded with it so much?  Who has an equation to calculate the weight of an orange?Is it your favorite because it happens to weigh nine pounds!?”

I wanted to put up a brain teaser yesterday, but the little one got his first cold.  Baby coughs are sad.

Anyway, one of the more famous statistical brain teasers is the birthday problem.  There are a few variations, but essentially the question goes something like this:

You’re at a party with 23 guests, including you.  What are the chances that  two people there have the same birthday?

The trick of course is that no one has to have a specific birth date, so the answer is not 23/366, but instead around 50% (interestingly, if the party were 50 people, it goes up to 97%).    For a further explanation, see here.

What’s interesting about this problem is that you have to assume every birth date is equally likely…which of course isn’t true.  I’ve written before about uneven distribution of birthdays in the US, due in part to scheduled c-sections or induced labor.  Anyway, I saw an interesting heat map today of birthday distributions from the Daily Viz, which is what got me thinking about the brain teaser.

 To note, this chart was made from a list of ranked birthdates, which is here.

I was a little struck by this, because I was thinking about how terrible I am at estimating things like this on my own.  The most common birthday in my circle of friends/family is Halloween.  The first week in April has the birth dates of my mother, sister and husband.  Neither of those time frames are overly popular within the general population, although I’d guess the difference between “most popular” and “least popular” are relatively small.  It was a good reminder that those I spend the most time with are not terribly representative of the population in general, on average.

Ann Althouse linked to a local news story about a hospital in Minnesota that went 62 hours and 19 deliveries without delivering a baby girl*.

The AVI has a poll up on polling, in reference to my post about polls.

I’ve recently been considering going more in depth with my stats education (especially the data analytics software stuff), and am checking out a few grad programs in applied statistics.

Anyone have any good suggestions?

Online and/or located in New England preferred.

I saw an interesting link on Instapundit today, under the headline “men on strike”.

According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.

The article went on to elaborate that this was a huge societal change caused by feminist women being too angry and unmarriable for men to bother.

Really? Because feminism started in 1997?

Despite the hoards of internet commenters regaling everyone in the comments sections about how their own lives (and ex-wives), like, totes prove that women are awful (obvi), I felt a little dubious.  I was curious about  this survey…..if we were really reading this that women value marriage more than men now, was that not true in 1997?  I remember 1997, and I’m pretty sure the sexual revolution (cited in the article as part of the problem) was over by then.

Anyway, since most Pew Research studies are surveys of about 1000 people, I went searching for the sample size on this one.  I was curious what those 60 or so males were answering in 1997 that was so different.  Of course I had to search the Pew website for a while to find the survey (my suspicions grow when articles don’t provide a link) but I found it here.  

As I scrolled down, one graph caught my eye:

Wait a minute….that graph shows men and women being pretty equal on the topic of marriage.  What gives?

Here’s the graph the Fox News article was talking about:

See the difference?  It’s in the notes.

Men and women differ when the response is “one of the most important things” but not when you include the next answer down….”very important”.

So the big culture strike is men moving marriage from “one of the most important” things to a “very important” thing.  That’s not nearly as sensational as promised.

I’m actually curious what percentage of the respondents in this survey were married when they answered this.  For an unmarried person, this could be a bit of a “how often do you beat your wife?” question.  I mean, if you’re not sure if you want to get married would you answer not important?  Because then it sounds like you’re saying you’d be okay with an unsuccessful marriage.  I’m not sure what I would have answered prior to getting married myself….marriage always felt pretty optional to me.  Anyway, now that I am married, I would have definitely answered “one of the most important things”.  If this had been two different questions, I would feel better about extrapolating from the results.

I guess it’s a day late, but here are 4 ways to cook a turkey using NASA gear.

Speaking of crazy uses for things, did you know you can cook fish in your dishwasher?

Alright, that wasn’t math or science related, but this is.  Neil Degrasse Tyson is teaming up with the GZA from Wu-Tang clan to teach kids math, and man, it ain’t nothing to @#$*& with.

Getting ready for Christmas?  How about some Hubble Telescope Christmas cards?