One of my favorite weird genre of news story occurs when the journalist/editor/newsroom all forget how old they are in relation to the people they are writing about. This phenomena is what often gives rise to articles about millenials that don’t actually quote millenials,  or articles about millenial parents of small children that compare them to Boomer parents of teenage children. I also see this in the working world, where there are still seminars about “how to manage millenials”, even though the oldest millenials are nearing 40 (and age discrimination laws!) and new college grads are most likely “Gen Z”.

Anyway, given my love for this genre of story, I got a kick out of a Megan McArdle Tweet this week that pointed out a Mother Jones article that fell a bit in to this trap.

She was pointing to this article that explained how Juul (an ecigarette manufacturer) had been marketing to teens for several years. As proof, they cited this:

Now for many millenials, this makes perfect sense. How could you screen three teen movies like “Can’t Hardly Wait”, “SCREAM” and “Cruel Intentions” and say you were marketing to adults? Well, that depends on your perspective. Can’t Hardly Wait came out in 1998, SCREAM in 1996 and Cruel Intentions in 1999. Current 14-18 year olds were born between 2001 and 2005. Does a party featuring movies made 5 years before you were born sound like it is trying to attract current teens? Or is it more likely that it would draw those who were teens at the time they were released….i.e. those in their early 30s?

As a quick experiment, subtract  5 years from your current birth year, Google “movies from ______”, take out the actual classics/Oscar winners and see how many of those movies you would have gone to an event to see at age 16. I just did it for myself and I’d have gone to see Rocky (though that’s an actual classic) and that’s pretty much it. I enjoyed the Omen, but not until later in college, ditto for Murder by Death and Network. In thinking back to my teen years, I did attend an event where Jaws was screened at a pool party, but I suspect the appeal of Jaws is more widespread/durable than “Can’t Hardly Wait”.

To be clear, I have very little insight in to Juul’s marketing plan or anything about them other than what I’ve seen on the news. What I do know though is that some movies appeal to broad audiences, and some appeal to a very narrow band of people who saw them at the right age. Teen movies in particular do not tend to appeal endlessly to teens, but rather to continue to appeal to the cohort who originally saw them.

There is an odd phenomena with some movies where they do poorly in the box office then pick up steam on DVD or cable broadcasts. The movie Hocus Pocus  (1993)is a good example. It was a flop at the box office, but was rebroadcast on ABC Family and the Disney Channel and then landed on a kids “13 Nights of Halloween” special in the early 2000s. This has caused the very odd phenomena of kids who weren’t born when it was released remembering it as a movie of their childhood more than those in the “right” cohort would have.

So basically I think it can be a bit of a challenge to triangulate what pop culture appeals to what age groups, particularly once you are out of that age group. Not that I’m judging. I struggled enough to figure out what was cool with teens when I actually was one. I have no idea how I’d figure it out now.

There was an interesting article in the Washington Post this week, about a man with a truly bizarre disorder. Among many other terrible symptoms, he essentially never has to go to the bathroom while he’s standing up and going about his day and appears to be dehydrated no matter how much he drinks, but the minute he lays down at night he has to urinate copiously and shows signs of being overhydrated. He has so many bizarre symptoms that he ended up in something called the Undiagnosed Disease Program, a fascinating group run by the NIH that seeks to find diagnoses for people who have baffled other physicians. They conduct all sorts of testing and try to either find people a diagnosis or to add their information to a database in the hopes that eventually they’ll get some information that will help them figure this out. The overall goal is to both help people and add to our collective knowledge about the human body.

Outlier medical cases are truly fascinating to many people, myself included. The WaPo column is actually part of a series called “medical mysteries“. Oliver Sacks made a whole writing career out of writing books about them. These cases make it in to our textbooks in school, and they are the stories that stick in our minds. These aren’t even one in a million cases, they are often one in 10 or 100 million. The guy in the WaPo story might even be 1 in a billion or 10 billion.

I am also fascinated by these stories in part because last year I started in on a medical mystery of my own. It started innocuously enough: random bouts of nausea, random bouts of extreme fatigue, then noticeable increased sensitivity to smells, tastes and pain. I assumed I was pregnant. I wasn’t.

I followed up with my doctor who confirmed that my hormone and other blood levels were fine. She ran tests to see if I was being poisoned, if I had a weird vitamin deficiency or had ODed on something accidentally.  She referred me to a couple of other doctors. The bouts came and went, but they actually started to get very disconcerting. My increased sense of smell meant that my car would frequently smell strongly of gas…something most of us take to mean there’s a problem. I couldn’t wear certain clothes because it felt like the seems or zippers were cutting my skin, but my skin showed no signs of redness. I couldn’t drink my coffee some mornings because I was convinced it was scalding my mouth. When I ate food I was convinced I could still taste the wrapper. Sensory information is supposed to help us make our way through the world, and to have it suddenly shifting around on you is incredibly disorienting.

Over the course of 6 months I saw 7 different doctors, all of whom were baffled. Since I work at a hospital I informally talked to half a dozen other NPs/PAs/MDs, and none of them had any idea either. The nausea and fatigue could come with hundreds of disorders, but nervous system hypersensitivity is a much less common symptom.

In the course of all this, the Assistant Village Idiot made a comment about how I should remember that strange symptoms were more likely to be an uncommon presentation of a common thing than an uncommon thing. The most experienced doctors I saw also mentioned the limitations of diagnosis. We build diagnoses based on the most common presentations of things, but we often don’t know if there are other possible presentations. We give names to clusters of symptoms because we see them together often, but it’s possible the biological underpinnings of the disorder could end up different places we don’t see as often. One doctor mentioned that in 6 months or a year I might add more symptoms that made things much clearer.

After about 6 months I still had no answers, but got some relief when I discovered that a magnesium supplement I’d taken to help me sleep seemed to help my symptoms. My doctor told me I could increase the dose and take it daily, and over the course of 6 weeks it mostly worked. I had relief, even if I still had no answers.

That was in January, and for the last 8 months I’ve seen small flares of symptoms that magnesium seemed to help. Then, about a month ago a new symptom started that made the whole thing much clearer: I got a headache. A one sided, splitting “gotta go lay down in a dark room” headache. A week or two later I got another one, then I got another one. I had always gotten a handful of migraines a year, but with the sudden change in frequency I started to notice something. For two days before I would be extra sensitive to light, pain, and smell. Sound too. Then during the migraine I would be incredibly nauseous, then the day after I would be so fatigued I could barely get out of bed. I looked back at my journals of my mystery symptoms I’d started keeping last year and realized it fit the same pattern. The symptoms that seemed so mysterious were actually part of the very classic migraine prodome/aura/postdrome pattern. It was then that I learned about the existence of acephalgic or “silent” migraines…..migraines that occur with all of the symptoms except the classic headache. My doctor confirmed my suspicions. I had been having chronic migraines with the headache, that now had developed in to chronic migraines with the headache. Once the headache appeared, my case was textbook. I got prescriptions for Imitrex and Fioricet along with a prophylactic medication.

Now per the Wiki page (and everything else I’ve read), acephalgic migraines are uncommon. It’s not particularly normal to get them as badly as I did without regular migraines, though they admit the data may be flawed. Since most people wouldn’t identify those symptoms as migraines, they might have an underreporting problem. Regardless, the AVIs point stood: this was an uncommon presentation of a common thing, not an uncommon disorder.

I like this story both because I am relieved to have a diagnosis and because it is relieving to have a diagnosis and because it is an interesting example of the entire concept of base rate. Migraines are the third most common disease in the world, after tension-type headaches and dental caries (cavities). One out of every 7 people get them. If we assume that my symptoms are highly unusual for migraine sufferers….say 1% of cases….that still means about 15 out of 10,000 people will get them. For comparison, schizophrenia is 1.5 out of 10,000.  Epilepsy is 120 out of 10,000, or about 10% the rate of migraine sufferers. A small percentage of a big number is often still a big number. An uncommon presentation of a common disorder can often be more common than uncommon disorders.

See, everything’s a stats lesson if you look hard enough. While I’m relieved to have a diagnosis, the downside of this is that the more frequent headaches are impacting my ability to sit in front of a screen as often, which may impact blogging. While we figure out what works to reduce the frequency of these, I may end up doing some more archives posting, maybe a top 100 post countdown like the AVI has been doing. We’ll see. While my doctor is great, any good resources are appreciated!

There was an interesting graph in a recent New York Times article  that got Twitter all abuzz:

Visually, this graph is pretty fascinating, showing an increasingly motivated white Evangelical group, whose voter participation rates must put every other group to shame. I was so taken aback by this I actually did share it with a few people as part of a point about voter turnout.

After sharing though, I started to wonder how this turnout rate compared to other religious groups, so I went looking for the source data. A quick Google took me to this Pew Research page, which contained this table:

Two things surprised me about this:

1. Given the way the data is presented, it appears the Evangelical question was asked by itself as a binary yes/no, as opposed to being part of a list of other options.
2. The question was not simply “are you Evangelical” but “are you Evangelical/born again”.

Now from researching all sorts of various things for this blog, I happen to know that one of the most common ways of calculating how many white Evangelicals there are in the population is to ask people their denominational affiliation from a menu of choices, then classify those denominations in to Evangelical/Catholic/etc. That’s what PPRI (the group that got the 15% number) does.

For the voting block question however, they were only asked if they were a “White born-again or evangelical Christian?”

Now to get too far in to the theological nuances, but there are plenty of folks I know who would claim the “born again” label who don’t go to traditionally “Evangelical” churches.  In fact, according to Mark Silk over at Religion News (who noted this discrepancy at the time), he’s been involved with research that “found that 38.6 percent of mainline Protestants and 18.4 percent of Catholics identified as “born again or evangelical.” So yes, the numbers may be skewed. It’s also worth noting that Pew Research puts the number of Evangelical Protestants at 25%, in a grouping that categorizes historically black groups separately (and thus is presumably mostly white).

So is the Evangelical turnout better than other groups? Well, it might still be. However, it’s good to know that this graph isn’t strictly comparing apples to apples, but rather slightly different questions given to different groups for different purposes. As we know slight changes in questions can yield very different results, so it’s worth noting. Caveat emptor, caveats galore on this one.

I’m out of town this weekend indulging in a very non-stats related hobby: pro wrestling.

Those of you who follow such things will know that this is WrestleMania weekend and it’s in New Jersey/just outside of NYC this year, and just so happens to coincide with my husbands birthday. Convenient.

Given the throngs of wrestling fans converging on one spot, there were quite a few other shows put on by other groups looking to capitalize on the crowds. One such show was a New Japan pro wrestling/Ring of Honor joint venture held last night at Madison Square Garden.

We went to this one, and I was interested to note it had one of the more lopsided gender ratios of any event I’ve been to. I’ve mentioned previously that I have a habit of counting such things, and last night was no exception. Normally I like to estimate the ratio of mono-gender groups, but despite all my looking I never found a women only group at this event.

I ended up switching to the number of women I could see in each row – rows were about 15 to 20 seats each. Rows almost always had 2 to 3 women in them. I never found a row with 4 women. I’d estimate the ratio at 7 to 1 male to female.

Other notes:

• There were more women in the expensive seats than the cheap seats. I’d never explicitly noted uneven distribution of gender before, but I’ll watch for it from now on.
• The gender ratio changed as the place filled up. When we first got there it was probably closer to 10 to 1, but more women showed up the later it got.
• Men with long hair were a major confounder. When I count rows from far away I’m mostly looking at hair first, but I had to proceed slowly here.

Obviously those first two bullet points emphasize that this is a male dominated fandom, which I’m sure is not surprising to anyone. This was not a show aimed at the more popular or mainstream fan, but the “willing to tolerate half the show being announced in Japanese” type fan.

Tonight I expect the gender ratio to be more even, as WrestleMania has a broader spectrum of appeal and their women’s division is currently on FIRE. I’ll report back with my estimate tomorrow. Go Becky Lynch!

Update: The gender ratio at Wrestlemania ended up being about 4 or 5 to 1 male:female. Interestingly, the “extra” women were almost entirely younger girls, mostly there with their dad. One ahead of us walking in was even fully in costume (as Bailey), carrying a replica title belt and started trying to lead the “Woooooooooooo” cheer on the escalator. I think the strategy of pumping up their women’s division is paying off.

Today’s addition to the GPD Lexicon is made in honor of my Dad.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that after years of keeping up this blog, people now have a tendency to seek me out when they have heard a particularly irritating statistic or reference during the week. This week it was my Dad, who heard a rather famous columnist (Liz Bruenig) mention on a podcast that “even conservative New Hampshire is considering getting rid of the death penalty”. He wasn’t irritated at the assertion that NH is looking to get rid of the death penalty (they are), but rather the assertion that NH was representative of a “conservative state”.

You see while NH certainly has a strong Republican presence, it is most famous for being a swing state and has actually gone for Democrats in every presidential election since 1992, except for the year 2000. Currently their Congressional delegation is 4 Democrats. Their state legislature is Democrat controlled. Slightly more people (3%) identify as Democrat or lean that way than Republican. The Governor is a Republican, and it is definitely the most conservative state in New England, but calling it a conservative state on a national level is pretty untrue. Gallup puts it at “average” at best.

What struck me as interesting about this is that New Hampshire actually did used to be more conservative. From 1948 to 1988, a Democrat only won the Presidential election there once. From 1900 to 2000, the Governor was Republican for 84 out years out of the century. In other words, it wasn’t a swing state until around 1992 (per Wiki).

It’s interesting then that Liz Bruenig, born in 1990, would consider NH a conservative state. NH has not been “conservative” in nearly her entire life, so what gives? Why do things like this get repeated and repeated even after they’ve changed? I’ve decided we need a word for this, so my new term is Broken Record Statistics:

Broken Record Statistic: A statistic or characterization that was once true, but is continuously repeated even after the numbers behind it have moved on.

In the course of looking this up btw, I found another possible broken record statistic. If you ask anyone from New Hampshire about the blue shift in the state, they will almost all say it’s because people from Massachusetts are moving up and turning the state more blue. However, the Wiki page I quoted above had this to say “A 2006 University of New Hampshire survey found that New Hampshire residents who had moved to the state from Massachusetts were mostly Republican. The influx of new Republican voters from Massachusetts has resulted in Republican strongholds in the Boston exurban border towns of Hillsborough and Rockingham counties, while other areas have become increasingly Democratic. The study indicated that immigrants from states other than Massachusetts tended to lean Democrat.” The source linked was a Union Leader article (“Hey, don’t blame it on Massachusetts!”) name but no link. Googling showed me nothing. However, the town by town maps do indicate that NH is mostly Republican at the border.

Does anyone know where these numbers are coming from or the UNH study referenced?

A couple of years ago now, there was a lot of hubbub around a paper about mortality rates among white Americans. This paper purported to show that mortality for middle aged white people in the US were not decreasing (like other countries/races/ethnicities) were, but was actually increasing.

Andrew Gelman and others challenged this idea, and noted that some of the increase in mortality was actually a cohort effect. In other words, mortality was up, but so was the average age of a “45-54 year old”. After adjusting for this, their work suggested that actually it was white middle aged women in the south who were seeing an increase in mortality:

In this article for Slate, they published the state by state data to make this even clearer:

In other words, there are trends happening, but they’re complicated and not easy to generalize.

One of the big questions that came up when this work was originally discussed was how much “despair deaths” like the opioid overdoses or suicide rates were driving this change.

In 2017, a paper was published that showed that this was likely only partially true. Suicide and alcohol related deaths had remained relatively stable for white people, but drug deaths had risen:

Now, there appears to be a new paper coming out  that shows there may be elevated mortality in even earlier age groups. It appears only the abstract is up at the moment, but the initial reporting shows that there may be some increase in Gen X (current 38-45 year olds) and some Gen Y (27-37 year olds). They have reportedly found elevated mortality patterns among white men and women in that age group, being partially driven by drug overdoses and alcohol poisonings.

From the abstract, the generations with elevated mortality were:

• • Non-Hispanic Blacks and Hispanics: Baby Boomers
  • Non-Hispanic White females: late-Gen Xers and early-Gen Yers
  • Non-Hispanic White males: Baby Boomers, late-Gen Xers, and early-Gen Yers.

Partial drivers for each group:

• Baby Boomers: drug poisoning, suicide, external causes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and HIV/AIDS for all race and gender groups affected.
• Late-Gen Xers and early-Gen Yers: are at least partially driven by mortality related to drug poisonings and alcohol-related diseases for non-Hispanic Whites.

And finally, one nerve-wracking sentence:

Differential patterns of drug poisoning-related mortality play an important role in the racial/ethnic disparities in these mortality patterns.

It remains to be seen if this paper will have some of the cohort effect problems that have plagued other analyses, but the drug poisoning death issue seems to be a common feature. It remains to be seen what the long term outcomes of this will be, but here’s an interesting visualization from Senator Mike Lee’s website:

Not a pretty picture.

Welp, we have another election day coming up. I’ll admit I’ve been a little further removed from this election cycle than most people, for two reasons:

1. We are undergoing a massive inspection at work tomorrow (gulp) and have been swamped preparing for it. Any thoughts or prayers for this welcome.
2. I live in a state where most of the races are pretty lopsided.

For point #2, we have Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren currently up by 22 points, and Republican Governor Charlie Baker currently up by almost 40 points. My rep for the House of Representatives is running unopposed. The most interesting race in our state was actually two Democrats with major streets/bridges named after their families duking it out, but that got settled during the primaries. I’ll vote anyway because I actually have strong feelings about some of our ballot questions, but most of our races are the very definition of “my vote doesn’t make a difference”.

However, I still think there are interesting reasons to vote even if your own personal vote counts minimally. In an age of increasing market segmentation and use of voter files, the demographics that show they consistently vote will always be more catered to by politicians. I mentioned this a while ago in my post about college educated white women. As a group they are only 10% of the voting public, but they are one of the demographics most likely to actually vote, and thus they get more attention than others.

This shows up in some interesting ways. For example, according to Pew Research, during the election Gen Xers and younger will be the majority of eligible voters, yet will not make up the majority of actual voters:

There are race based differences as well. Black voters and white voters vote at similar rates, but Hispanic and Asian voters vote less often.  Additionally, those with more education and those who are richer tend to vote more often.  While that last link mentions that it’s not clear that extra voters would change election results, I still think it’s likely that if some groups with low turnout turned in to groups with high turnout, we may see some changes in messaging.

While this may be mixed for some people who don’t tend to vote with their demographic,  it does seem like getting on the electoral radar is probably a good thing.

So go vote Tuesday!

I was away for most of this week so I’m just getting to this now, but Brian Wansink has announced he’s retiring at the end of this academic year after a series of investigations in to his work.  I’ve blogged about the Wansink saga previously (also here and here and here) , and have even had to update old posts to remove research of his that I referenced.

Christopher B passed along a good summary article from the AP , which I was pleased to see included a note that they had frequently used him as a source for stories. The New York Times followed suit, and this article mentions that he was cited as a source in at least 60 articles since 1993.

While the initial coverage was mostly shock, I’ve been pleased to see how many subsequent articles point to the many bigger problems in science (and science reporting) that led to Wansink’s rise.

The New York Times article I just cited delves in to the statistical games that the field of nutrition often plays to get significant results, and how the press generally reports them uncritically. For those of you who have been following this story, you’ll remember that this whole drama was kicked off by a blog post Wansink wrote where he praised a grad student for finding publishable results in a data set he admitted looked like it had yielded nothing. While this wouldn’t be a problem if he had admitted that’s what he was doing, his papers never corrected for multiple comparisons or clarified that they were running hundreds of different comparisons to try to find something significant.

The Atlantic put up a good piece about the “scientist as celebrity” angle, discussing how we should think about scientists who get a lot of attention for their work. The “buzz cycle”, where we push findings we like and scientists respond by trying to generate findings that will be likable. This is a good point, as many people who don’t know Wansink’s name know of his findings (health halos, use small plates, we eat more from bottomless soup bowls, etc).

This Washington Post op-ed has an interesting discussion of science education, and wonders if we did more to educate kids about scientific mistakes and fraud if we’d be more skeptical about scientific findings in general. It’s an interesting thought…we do hear science mostly presented as an unbroken march towards truth, not always hearing how many side roads there are along the way.

Overall it’s a fascinating and sad story, made slightly worse by the fact that it appears to have come to a head at the same time that Wansink’s mother died and his father broke his hip. While this is a good reminder to limit any gratuitous potshots against him as a person, it still raises many interesting discussion points about how we got here. Any other articles, feel free to pass them along!