Buzzfeed or Research Study?

/ bs king / 1 Comment

The Telegraph has a report on a new study  that attempts to divide people in to 4 different types of drinkers, based on how alcohol affects them.  The four types are:

  1. Hemingway
  2. The Nutty Professor
  3. Mary Poppins
  4. Mr Hyde

My first thought was “this sounds like a Buzzfeed quiz”.  So I went looking, and found that yes, Buzzfeed has actually done this quiz.  Oddly, the Buzzfeed version has way more boring names for their classifications.  OTOH, they probably used more interesting gifs…though to be fair I haven’t seen the study questionnaire to verify.

When I went to actually read the study, I realized that they actually kicked it off by citing Buzzfeed-esque clickbait headlines.  So basically, a study inspired by Buzzfeed headlines ends up sounding like a Buzzfeed headline, and the research version was more creative than the Buzzfeed version. Whoa.

No One Asked Me: Moving Sucks

/ bs king / 2 Comments

“Why does moving suck?”

-two of my cousins, while cleaning out their childhood home in 90 degree heat

 

Ugh, moving. Yeah, that definitely sucks. Get back to packing.

 

You’re still here.

 

Okay, seriously. You need to pack.

 

Okay, fine. Twist my arm, I’ll distract you.

 

So the thing about moving, is that it sucks.  It’s bad for several notable reasons, on which I am more than happy to expound:

1. Time spent packing and moving is like some sort of horrible geometric progression that theoretically approaches finished but feels like it’s never going to get there.

So a pretty typical geometric progression looks like this:

16jul15pic1

The stuff of dreams or nightmares, depending on your perspective

Which could translate in to percent of move completed, like this:

16jul15pic2

Behold the angst of the x-axis

Now if you take that first series, there’s a somewhat fundamental mathematical rule that tells us this will eventually happen:

16jul15pic3

The “…” literally means “and we go on like this FOR EV ER.

Nice equation, but you know what it’s telling us about getting to that perfect ending?  YOU NEED AN INFINITE NUMBER OF TERMS BEFORE YOU GET THERE.  To me, this means that no matter how beautiful the picture in your head of how organized you’ll be or how nicely you’re going to leave everything looking, you’ll eventually have to start calling .9875 close enough and just start shoving things in trash bags and labeling them with Band-aids and sharpies.1  

2. Moving is all the household chores at one time.

Household chores are a pretty highly researched area, especially when it comes to how fairly we divide them up.  The lousy thing about moving is that it turns your life in to one big several day long whirl of all the household chores, and none of it feels fair.  You have to clean and organize and sort and probably do laundry.  Then you have to do it all over again when you get where you’re going. Ugh.

Household chores just don’t bring happiness.  Neither does moving, at least for women2.

3. Moving is probably just another term in a bigger equation of lousy things.

One of the interesting things about looking in to the research on moving is that the process itself is most commonly studied when it’s attached to other things like divorce, childhood, aging, etc.  For example, the Holmes and Rahe stress scale3
assigns a general sort of “stress number” to all sorts of different life events. The value assigned for “changing residence” is fairly small (20), but if you look at that list, it’s really uncommon to change residences without ticking at least a few of the other boxes. 

For example, the last time I moved, I was pregnant (40) and not unrelatedly, we got a new family member shortly thereafter (39).  We also took on a mortgage (31) and changed our living conditions (25).  The magic number for Holmes and Rahe (in terms of predicting stress related health events) is 150….and in 2 months our household racked up a 155.  That’s enough to put both my husband and I at an elevated risk for a serious health breakdown over the next two years.  Now let’s look at my last 3 moves:

16jul15pic4

I wanted to add “in law trouble” for 29 to that last one, but I actually really like my in laws and had fun living with them. Take that Holmes-Rahe!

So two out of the three of them actually got me above the 150 level in a very short period of time.  When you consider that the Holmes/Rahe scale is actually supposed to cover the last year of your life, you can see why a move can  impact your whole year pretty quickly.  Additionally, keep in mind that neither of my “bad” moves were really that uncommon.  Changes in family status (marriage, babies, divorce, etc) and just wanting or needing more space/better neighborhood/to own a home are far and away the most common types of moves.  In fact, if you look at the Census Bureau list of the most common reasons for moving, it reads like….well, like the Holmes and Rahe stress scale.  People move when things change and changes are stressful.  People then associate moving with stress, and we all come to the accurate conclusion that it sucks.

Put another way, it’s not so much that moving sucks, is just that it’s a seemingly endless series of chores and housework that is almost always associated with a level of stress that is so bad it can make you sick.

Glad I could clear that up.

 

1. This is definitely a thing I have done.↩
2. To be fair, most of the moves studied in that study were family moves, possibly initiated by the man changing jobs. This can skew things a bit. Whatever. I hate moving.↩
3. The Wikipedia page also has an example of a version for non-adults, defined as anyone who doesn’t feel like the first list understands their problems well enough.↩

R&C: Exercise and Parenting

/ bs king

This week’s paper is about exercise.  And parenting.  And exercising while parenting.  And controlling for self-reporting vs measured exercise….all topics that I personally find fascinating and close to home. The study is Associations between parenting partners’ objectively-assessed physical activity and Body Mass Index: A cross-sectional study which is a mouthful of a name, but is much simpler than it looks.  Essentially it’s comparing parenting partners (moms and dads who live together, but may or may not be married) and their activity levels.  This has been done before, but mostly using self reporting.  This study was attempting to see what physical activity rates were when people wore a monitor to track their activity levels.  This controls for the very real possibility that people may inflate their activity levels to match their spouse, or spouses may both inflate their activity levels, etc etc.  Here’s the study:

14jul15

 

Now this is some interesting data.  Controlling for multiple other factors, women’s activity levels do appear to be positively correlated with their coparent’s….but mostly on weekends.   The study authors suggest that much activity during the week is actually a product of commuting or other routines, and thus is less correlated to what your spouse dose.  Makes sense.

What makes less sense is trying to tie activity level directly to weight loss, which the authors do right in the introduction.  While exercise is good for all sorts of things, increasing it does not automatically result in weight loss.  Interestingly, even among study participants the more active gender (men) did not have a lower BMI than the less active gender (women).  Of course for this study, the data set did not include any information about the current health status of the participants, so we don’t know if some of them were active and trying to lose weight during the study, or any other confounding factors.  Either way, it does seem clear that you will likely pick up some of your partners health habits, so chose wisely.

No One Asked Me: Love at First Sight

/ bs king / 1 Comment

Would you believe in a love at first sight?  Yes I’m certain that it happens all the time.

-John Lennon and Paul McCartney (cowriters)

 

This week’s question comes from a little known group called “The Beatles”.  It’s from their song “With a Little Help From My Friends“1, and the sentiment was raised by my friend John when we were discussing relationships.  Now John’s a little bit of a hopeless romantic pragmatic idealist, so the idea of love at first sight kind of appeals to him.  But does it exist?  And more importantly, does it really happen all the time?  Let’s take a look!

Alright, let’s be honest here…the question of whether or not you can really fall in love at first sight is one typically addressed by philosophical debates, not statisticians. Literally everyone has an opinion on this, and often a strong one. It’s a question that inspires all sorts of crazy debates, tons of movies, countless songs, and a mildly disturbing yet rather watchable reality show.  I’m not a philosopher and I’m not getting in to all of that “what is love” junk2, but I can tell you in the dating market it’s kind of a guy thing.  In a user survey done by Match.com, they found that about 60% of men believed in it, and 40% said it had happened to them.  For women, those numbers were about 50% and 30%, respectively.  Those numbers would suggest that John and Paul were on to something, as it certainly seems to be a pretty common occurrence.  But is that the whole story?

What jumps out at me as a I pondered this question was a concept known as the toupee fallacy.  This seems to be one of those questions where the facts we’re not seeing might be as important as the ones we are seeing.  I’m concerned that there’s some silent evidence at play here, and we may be missing a few things.  Namely, we’re not seeing how often people think they’ve fallen in love at first sight, only to be quickly disappointed.  Whatever this feeling or moment we are talking about is only gets counted if it works.  Here, let me illustrate:

09jul15pic1

It all looks so easy, doesn’t it?

So pretty much everyone we meet falls in one of those 4 boxes.  When we talk about love at first sight though, we often only talk about it in the context of those two red boxes, ie people who wind up together.  What we can’t forget about is that blue box there…those we meet, feel an instant attraction to that never pans out.  Here’s the same information put another way:

09jul15pic2

Possible Stalker/Type 1 error is my new band name.

Now what we’re generally going for in life is either the box in red or the box in black.  In stats terms the red ones are true positives (falling in love with someone who loves you) and the black are true negatives (not falling in love with someone who doesn’t love you).  The other two boxes are actually what we’d call Type 1 errors and Type 2 errors….ie, the chance that we make the wrong call initially.  If we presume the null hypothesis is that most people don’t love us3, we can call the box in blue, our type 1 error and the box in green our type 2 error.  In love, we almost always prefer Type 2 errors….in other words, we want to find out we loved someone when we didn’t realize it rather than fall in love with someone who doesn’t like us.

But what influences the number of people who fall in each box?  Well, for that we have to take a look at the words that make up both of our conditions.

 

Let’s start with “end up together”.

During the discussion that prompted this question, John and I were specifically chatting about people who end up married.  Now, in 2015, this may not be a great metric to go by.  Many people who are in love do not get married, date or cohabitate for much longer than past generations, or otherwise define their loving relationships differently.  The point is not to cover every possible scenario, but rather to remind people that the more narrowly you define “end up together” the less likely it is to happen from a strictly statistical point of view.  For example, in the numbers I gave in the beginning of the post, 40% of men said they had fallen in love at first sight…but these were men participating in a survey for singles on a dating website.  Of course some of those men could have been widows, but the rest of them either ended the relationship that started with love at first sight, or had it ended for them.  Does this count?  Some will say yes, others will say no.  Your standards will influence how many people are covered by that first row.

Now, “didn’t end up together” seems more straightforward, but it actually can also cover a range of scenarios.  I made a joke in my table about someone who falls in love with someone who doesn’t love them being a stalker, but that’s not the whole story.  Most of us have met someone who we thought was awesome….for 5 seconds until they opened their mouths.  Or until part way through the first date.  Or two weeks later when you saw their massive teddy bear collection.  You get the picture.  The point is, not ending up with someone can mean a whole lot of things from “they were taken” to “we decided we were better as friends”.  How broadly you define this will also determine how often people fall in this category.

Love At First Sight (LAFS)

Alright, lets move on to love at first sight.  How are we defining this and how often is it happening?  Well, this one can get interesting.  LAFS is one of those things people tend to define by saying things like “if you have to ask, it didn’t happen”.  You know it when you see it.  This makes it ripe for hijinks and chicanery, which I’ll get in to in a minute.  In it’s most basic sense though, everyone seems to agree it’s some sort of overwhelming feeling of attraction bordering on feeling magnetically pulled towards a person.  How broadly you define this, and how often you think this has happened to you already are going to effect the number of people in that box.

So now that we’ve got some definitions, let’s put some generally fictitious numbers in those boxes.  Let’s say you’ve met about 1000 people in the generally correct age/gender/orientation that you’re attracted to.  Here’s what happened with them.  You’ve dated about 20, and twice think you felt something that could have been LAFS.  One of those worked out, one didn’t.  Your percentages are here.  We get these numbers:

09jul15pic3

There’s a Taylor Swift song somewhere in here.

So unfortunately, the chances are kind of small.  You can run the numbers for your own life, but my guess is it will be pretty small there too.

But John and Paul promised me! You said they were on to something! 

Okay, you got me.  So what’s going on here?

Well, the answer is really that we don’t actually often think of this in the terms I put above.  We’re not evaluating our own lives and our own chances, we’re trying to go off of other people’s experiences.  We are not calculating overall probabilities like I did above, we’re doing conditional probabilities.  No one asks people what happened when they didn’t find love, we ask them what happens when they did find love.  In stats this is a huge difference.  We just went from a regular probability to a conditional probability.  Basically, it’s the difference between these two equations:

09jul15pic4

P here is “probability” and the rest is about how I’m totally not bitter.  

That first equation gives us a .01% chance, and the second one gives us a 5% chance, using the numbers above.  That’s 500 times higher!

And this is assuming everyone’s being honest about who they’re putting in what box.  Spoiler alert: they’re not.

Most of this isn’t intentional though.  It’s just that as humans, we don’t tend to remember all the details of good events.  In fact, our memories of bad events are much stronger and typically more detailed.  So when two people fall in love and things work out, they will likely not really remember the moments of doubt or insecurity that may have actually been present in the beginning of their relationship.  They will retell the story more amusingly and more positively than the actual events may have warranted.  This is so prevalent in fact that it is actually considered a hallmark of a healthy relationship. We can infer then that by only talking to people in happy relationships, we may actually be overestimating how many people met and “just knew”4.  That’s why research on this is so sparse….the data confounds itself.

Ugh, well that’s not great news.

No, and it gets worse.  When John and Paul claimed that this happened all the time, they were likely right….but that won’t help you.  For example, let’s say that 1 out of 1000 people every year are likely to experience un-exaggerated, for real, LAFS with someone they stay with.  That’s about 25,000 people a year in the USA.   That’s 67 a day.  You will almost certainly know some of these people….but they may not ever be you.  Bummer.

Got any more good news?

Well yeah, actually, I do!  See, the thing is, LAFS may not even be the ideal here.  There’s actually some interesting evidence that people who date for longer stay married longer5.  Apparently it’s long engagements that threaten marital stability, not long dating periods.  So while those in the LAFS/stay together box may get a lot of attention, the ones in the no LAFS/stay together box may be quietly outdoing them. Also, when finding true love, most people really are more interested in the exponential distribution, not the Poisson distribution6. In other words, we’re not so concerned about the number of events, but rather how long we have to wait for it! Once you find the one, you probably won’t care so much how it happens, and evidence suggests that you and your beloved will keep altering your story bit by bit until it’s worthy of it’s own movie with the attractive Hollywood folks of your choice.  You’ll get there.  May your W = time to first event be short, and your moment generating function be beautiful.

 

 

1. Weird fact I learned about this song while researching this post: the first line was originally “what would you do if I sang out of tune, would you throw ripe tomatoes at me?” but Ringo made them change it when he realized their rabid fans might take it seriously. ↩
2. Baby don’t hurt me.↩
3. Okay, emo kid.↩
4. If you ever want to see this in action, find a friend who you knew pre and post divorce. If you know the story of how they met their ex, it’s really interesting to ask them again after their divorce. It is almost guaranteed the story will have changed, gotten briefer or otherwise be a bit altered. Do NOT point this out to them. Don’t ask me how I know this.↩
5. Some of this data is kinda old…marriage and dating practices have changed rapidly over the last few decades. Caveat emptor.↩
6. Our love is anything but a normal distribution!↩

Back Pain and Yoga

/ bs king / 2 Comments

So the irritation of the week is back pain.  I have a slight spinal deformity and gosh does that thing flair up sometimes.  I was looking around for some good papers to help address this issue, when I stumbled across this one that compared yoga, exercise, and a self care book.  It’s called Comparing Yoga, Exercise, and a Self-Care Book for Chronic Low Back Pain A Randomized, Controlled Trial  by Karen J. Sherman, PhD, MPH; Daniel C. Cherkin, PhD; Janet Erro, RN, MN, PNP; Diana L. Miglioretti, PhD; and Richard A. Deyo, MD, MPH.  Here’s the sketchnote:07jul15v2

Some thoughts:

  1. It’s pretty unsurprisingly both exercise and yoga outperformed the book.  Both were active interventions with some participation required.  Interventions like that tend to do better.
  2. The design of this study had a lot of attention to detail.  They were very careful to make the exercise as attractive as the yoga by having a physical therapist design a special program uniquely for the study.  They wanted to make sure that both the yoga and the exercise were novel enough that people would be interested equally in both.  I’ve seen other studies skip this step or have one clearly more interesting option, so I was happy to see they controlled for it.
  3. It’s interesting to think of the real world implications of point #2.  It is likely much easier to find a yoga class than it is to find a custom back pain exercise class.  OTOH, some people may like going to a physical therapist better than doing yoga, and that’s probably close to the same thing.

Ultimately, if it looks intriguing, that’s probably enough to help make a difference.

 

Rock, Paper, Crayon

/ bs king / 1 Comment

Recently in a conversation with a friend of mine, I mentioned a paper I had read that asserted that we are more attracted to potential partners who look like us1.  I couldn’t remember all of the details, so a googling I went.  Before I found the actual paper, I found an article about it that contained the following sentence:

For the study, photographs of real-life couples were also studied and analyzed by the researchers with at least one child, to determine if these actually influenced partner choices.

There’s a sentence that leaves you with an amusing mental image.  Did the researchers have to have at least one child?  Did a child help with the analysis? Who is this child and why are they involved so specifically?

When I found the paper, I confirmed that in fact it was the couples being analyzed who had at least one child….but I still like my mental image of a kid with a crayon, marking up all the photos with his observations on face structure.
1. Because it would annoy the crap out of me to read a reference like that with no link to the original paper, here you go.↩

No One Asked Me: Farting in Public

/ bs king

I’m a guy and I try my very best to not fart at all because if I did in around anyone, I’d be so humiliated I’d probably never come to school again or never go where I did again. Especially if someone was close and may have heard. Is it unhealthy to hold in farts? Do you guys think it feels good to fart? I’m sorry, I know it’s a disgusting question but I’m just curious on what you guys think of it.

-Anonymous Teen

Found at Yahoo Answers

Alright AT,  I’m gonna skip over some of the touchy feely does-farting-feel-good stuff here, and go straight for the crux of the matter: it’s not going to hurt your health to hold in farts, but it might give you a few cramps and be kind of uncomfortable.

I’m not letting you off that easily though, because I’m a little concerned about your anxiety level here. No one’s saying you have to be Peter Griffin, but  I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of someone being this concerned about farting in public1.  Would it make you feel better if we ran some numbers here?  That always calms me down.

The simplest way of drawing out your fears is through a Venn diagram, like this:

02Jul15blog

My circles aren’t great. I need a compass.

In other words, you’re not scared of farting, you’re not scare of being in public, you’re scared of farting AND being in public at the same time.

So the first thing we have to do is to assess the scope of the problem aka the size of the circles.  For the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to assume that other than the anxiety you’re  healthy.  If you read anything here that makes you think you are farting more often or with a worse smell than what’s normal, you may want to talk to your doctor.  Alright, let’s start with the farting.   Now the average person is going to fart about 10-20 times in a 24 hour period, with at least some of those coming at night.  In this study, the median number during waking hours was 8, so lets start with that.  This works out to about one fart for every two hours of wakefulness.  However, that same study told us that it’s very likely this isn’t spread out evenly.  You’re more likely to fart in the hour after you eat.  So what would happen if we drew out a little table of what a hypothetical day of farting might looking like?  Well, in stats we call this a probability density function or PDF, and we can draw it like this:

All the values should be multiplied by 8, if that's the average we're rolling with here.

All the values should be multiplied by 8 to get the total per hour, if that’s the average we’re rolling with here.

If you’d like some better data, you can track yourself for a few days and see if you have any unique patterns.  In a case study about a terribly unfortunate man who was farting 30-130 times a day, his journal looked like this2.  Now this may be segmented out a little too much to be useful, so lets collapse that down a bit:

02Jul15pic3

Red = Danger danger Will Robinson

So if you follow this schedule, we’re looking at 6 or 7 farts in public.

Now a few things jump out at me here.  The first is that spike in the morning could definitely be moved a bit if you ate breakfast earlier, causing that first wave to happen before you get to school.  Also, there’s some evidence we could mitigate that spike after lunch if you started trying to avoid having gas producing foods.  Another tip from that list is to avoid gum or soda all day, as those can both lead to farting3.  If you want to get even better, you could make sure you wander off by yourself for a bit right after dinner.

Making those changes, we can shift the brackets in a bit, and we may be down to dealing with only 4 or 5, most right after lunch. Nice!  Now you’re dealing with a lot less stress, and you have some idea about when you might need to run to the bathroom or use one of these tricks to hide the sound or these pads to hide the smell.

Good luck.

 

1. Not gonna name names or anything, but there’s a few people in my life I might like you to talk to when we’re done here.↩
2. Spoiler alert: don’t go to his house around 8am.↩
3. The fact that you might be able to control this a bit is good news for you, but it’s why I couldn’t assume independence and thus use a Poisson distribution which sucks because I LOVE POISSON DISTRIBUTIONS.↩

 

R&C: A Tale of Two Bowel Preps

/ bs king / 2 Comments

So last week I had the distinct, uh, pleasure of having my first colonoscopy.  To answer your questions:

  1. Yes, I’m too young for that
  2. I had to get one because of family risk factors, that I’m irrationally annoyed about.
  3. Yes, talking about it could be considered TMI

With that out of the way, I’m at least going to talk about #3 there.  Colonoscopies are weird and uncomfortable to talk about yes, but colorectal cancer is the 2nd deadliest cancer (behind only lung cancer) in the US, and it just doesn’t have to be like that.  It’s pretty treatable if caught early, and removing polyps can prevent it all together.  Despite this, many people still skip or delay their colonoscopies because they’re embarrassed.  More info here.  By talking about it, I’m hoping to do my small part in normalizing the experience.  If we all talk/laugh/whatever about it, maybe more people will go.

Anyway, if you go to get a colonoscopy, nearly everyone will tell you the preparation is the worst part.  You have to do a clear liquids diet for a day, and drink whole bunch of stuff to clean you out.  The subject of my paper this week is what that drink actually is, and what the alternatives are.

When I told people I was going, a lot of people warned me about the drink.  When I got my instructions, I was interested to see that there was not special drink.  I was told to by an over the counter bottle of MiraLax and some Gatorade, mix them together, and to drink that.  Several people were rather surprised that this was an option, so I decided to look in to it.  I found this paper: Randomised clinical trial: MiraLAX vs. Golytely – a controlled study of efficacy and patient tolerability in bowel preparation for colonoscopy by B. K. Enestvedt,M. B. Fennerty and G. M. Eisen.  Success!  This paper covered exactly what the two drinks were, and why you might pick one over the other.

Interesting side note:  The third drink mentioned (currently advised against by the FDA) causes a severe reaction in some people.  My boss was apparently one of those people, and her first colonoscopy was the closest she ever felt to death.  That was a really fun story to hear 3 days before going for mine.

Anyway, here’s the paper30Jun15

Interesting huh?  Before I found this paper, I had actually asked the nurses at my center why they used the Gatorade mix instead of the Golytely.  They told me that at least at their center, they had been struggling with patient complaints about the Golytely and lower compliance, and effect not really seen in this study. That matched my anecdotal experience of friends and family wondering why they hadn’t been told their was an alternative. My center also uses a slightly different prep scheme than was used in this study, which the study author suggest could make it more effective (for this study the Golytely prep and the Miralax prep were identical in terms of timing).

Regardless, my prep appeared to have worked, so that’s nice.  I’ll be back in 3 years or so, she said ruefully.

No One Asked Me: Yesterday’s Weather

/ bs king

“I always dress for yesterday’s weather.”
-my brother

Okay so that’s not really a question.  In my defense though, my brother’s got a philosophy degree, which means most of what he says is an attempt to provoke a reaction, make a grand statement about life, explain his more questionable dating choices, or to get more attention, though not necessarily in that order.  Anyway, he posed this statement to me recently, then arched his eyebrow.  It’s possible I was supposed to take that as an opportunity to extrapolate some deeper meaning about his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, but instead I got curious.  If you really did always dress for yesterday’s weather, how often would this be okay?

It turns out this is one of those interesting stats questions that you can sort of come up with an answer for, but you have to make all sorts of assumptions to get there.   I did some poking around, and here are the parameters I figured I’d have to work with:

  1. You are perfectly rational.  Now this may not be a great assumption1, but it’s one we have to go with if we hope to get anywhere.  The problem with this is that people, especially those of us in northern climates, tend to start rebelling against winter every year. It’s a pretty well documented phenomena that some time around March/April people in northern climates just say “screw it” to the coat/gloves/scarf thing.  I don’t totally know how to take this in to account, but it’s something to keep in mind.
  2. You are like me.  It appears at least some types of cold/heat perception are pretty heritable, so when in doubt I assumed you’d act exactly like I do.  Hey, it worked in middle school.
  3. You modify clothes approximately every ten degrees (Fahrenheit).  This one was actually remarkably hard to find data about.  The problem is that apparently our bodies make lousy thermometers, and we have a remarkable spread of preferences.  The most consistent breakdowns I could find were actually on running or other outdoor sport sites, and they seem to support my “ever 10 degrees” hypothesis.  Apparently that’s where you can measure an impact on performance.
  4. You live in Boston. Yeah, you don’t.  Never have actually.  But I do, and the data’s actually stored for a while.
  5. Being stuck in the rain without an umbrella will bug you, but having an umbrella you don’t need won’t.  Umbrellas are like towels.  Always good to carry one.
  6. You don’t use an umbrella or other rain gear if it’s snowing.  Because snow’s not mean like that and you already have a jacket on and you’d look silly, that’s why.

 

Alright, with those out of the way, lets talk data.  I found a handy site called Weather Underground that actually keeps detailed archives of the weather.  From there I pulled all the data for Boston from Jan 1st, 2010 to June 22nd, 20152.  After that I measured a few things:

  1. How often the daily high temperature changed from one day to the next by more than 10 degrees in either direction
  2. How often the average daily temperature changed from one day to the next by more than 10 degrees in either direction
  3. How often a clear day was followed by a rainy day.

Basically if any of those three changes occurred, I assumed that you ended up dressed incorrectly.  It’s not perfect…the rain could have happened overnight for example, but it’ll get us in the ballpark.  I knocked off a few values because of fluctuations that fell in to either of the extremes (ie under 25 degrees or over 80 degrees).  Essentially if the day before was 85 and the next day was 96, I assumed you still dressed the same way.   At that point we normally resort to things like swimming or staying inside as opposed to clothing changes.  I did not account for changes in the daily low, as those usually happen at night, and the average picks up those changes. Based on all of this you ended up about 65.5% accurate.  Not bad!

Okay, so what went wrong on the other days?  Well, of the days you got wrong, here’s what tripped you up:

Temperature Changed: 49%

It Rained: 38%3

It Rained AND the Temperature Changed: 13%

Cool!   Now what if we wanted to know your luckiest month?  Well I have that too!

Month % of days you are properly dressed
August 75%
February 71%
July 70%
September 70%
October 68%
January 66%
November 66%
December 65%
June 63%
April 60%
May 60%
March 59%

So you’re actually headed in to a pretty good stretch here!  July’s almost here and August is really your month. At the very least you have some time to kill before March.  Use it wisely, and feel free to put this data on your LinkedIn/Facebook/Match.com profile.  It’s sure to impress.

You’re welcome.

 

1. At least that’s what mom said when I mentioned it to her.↩
2. Hey, happy birthday!↩
3. Interestingly, that means if you took my advice and always carried an umbrella, your accuracy would go up to almost 78%.  Things to consider. ↩

R&C: Drinking and Work

/ bs king

It’s been a lovely couple of weeks (months….almost a year really) at work, and I’ve been starting to ponder the effect of your job on your drinking.  Or the effect of drinking on your job.  Sometimes both at the same time.  I digress.

This week, I picked a paper called Job Strain and Alcohol Intake, A Collaborative Meta-Analysis which looked at the literature to see if high stress jobs were associated with higher drinking.

23Jun15blog

 

One of the most interesting parts of this paper was how they defined a “stressful job”….basically it was demanding jobs where you had very little control over your work.  By this metric, my job is not actually that stressful.  I’m not sure control inoculates you against stress the way they think it does, but I suppose it’s better than the alternatives.