Not a true brain teaser, but I figure people may be away for the looooong weekend.

Once upon a time, I took an International Public Health class.  As part of this class, the professor was teaching us about false positives and false negatives (false positives = test results that say you have something when you do not, false negatives = test results that say you don’t have something when you do), and he asked which one we’d prefer in an initial screening test for disease.  Most of the class said false positives…better to initially believe you have something and be told later you don’t, right?  He agreed that we were likely right…in the US at least.  However, he explained, in other countries this may not be the case.  In some areas, even an initial suggestion that you had something like HIV could lead to some major fallout…spouse leaving, getting let go from your job, etc…that may not be easy to correct even once the final results were in. The problem is not always what a patient will do with information, but rather what others might do with the information.

I thought of this today when I read this story about a new mom in Pennsylvania who got her 3 day old baby taken away because she had eaten a bagel before going in to labor.  Yeah, you read that right.  The bagel happened to contain poppy seeds, and it turns out this caused her to test positive for opiates, which caused the hospital to report her, which caused her to have her daughter ripped out of her hands right after she got home.  Now, this story didn’t make a tremendous amount of sense to me, so I read through the whole lawsuit (the hospital settled).  A few details that fill in some of the blanks:

• This hospital has mandatory drug testing for all moms in labor.  This is actually not standard practice…my hospital for example only did this if there was cause.  No behavior on the part of the mother triggered this.
• The cutoff used for the initial screening test is low…100 nanograms/uL.  In contrast the cutoff for say, Olympic athletes is 1000 nanograms/uL.  For federal drug testing, it’s 2000 nanograms/uL for codeine, and 4000 for morphine.  The mother’s levels were 300 nanograms/uL on the initial test, and 500 on the confirmatory test.  
• The doctor who saw the mom and baby thought they were fine, so didn’t even tell them about the test results.  She assumed they were a false negative.
• The hospital reported these positive tests to state, whose policy states that two positive drug tests are all that’s needed to take the child away.  They did no other investigation prior to removing the child.

Sorry for the impromptu hiatus.  I wish I had a good reason, but it’s really a few random personal issues combined with being totally obsessed with finishing the Games of Thrones books.  I decided I needed to put them down when I unironically called someone “craven”.

Anyway, I’ve had a story up in my browser for a bit now that I’ve been meaning to comment on.  It’s this Slate story about how “family-friendly” workplaces are discriminating against those who don’t have kids, by making those without kids cover for those with them.

*Bias alert*  I have a great deal of sympathy for the argument that kids should not be the only acceptable reason for people to leave the office early on a regular basis.  If people are able to leave to get to soccer games for their kids, it should be just as valid if it’s your own rec league soccer game.  Obviously people with kids will likely have more emergency calls, but I believe that too should apply to kids as well as parents needing a caretaker, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, pets etc.  If you’re a caretaker for someone, you have my support…as long as you’re getting your job done or taking available leave as allowed.  OTOH, there are some highly competitive or otherwise inflexible jobs that just don’t allow this sort of thing, and I know that sucks.  When I’ve worked in environments like that (example: where you had to work on major holidays) there were generally blanket rules for everyone to keep things fair (work 2 out of 3 of Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Years)   Either way, I’m not a fan of having two sets of rules based on personal life choices.  *End alert*

Given that I’m inherently sympathetic to the viewpoint expressed, I was interested to find that I got really annoyed at what I was perceiving as a bit of a bait and switch within the article…as exemplified by this quote:

When almost half of the people in the U.S. are single, why do companies continue to cater to their employees who are married with children?” 

This quote came from an author of a book about discrimination against single people.  What irks me is that she’s moving the goalposts around…are people being asked to do more work because they’re single or because they’re childless?  Yes, half of the population may be single, but as best I can tell nearly 80% of women have a biological child by age 44*.   That doesn’t count step kids or adoptions, by the way.

Now there may be some data somewhere that shows married people with no kids get asked to do less than single people with no kids, but if it exists it was not included in the article.  At least anecdotally though, I think single people with kids actually tend to get more sympathy than married people with kids when it comes to time off.  That’s absolutely fine with me…not having a back up must suck…but at least some of the single people she cited above will be singles with children getting more breaks than singles without children.

I guess it’s just strange to me that we can all suffer through endless headlines about how many children are being born to unwed mothers and then turn around and imply that single = childless.  Additionally, the number of people checking “single” who are living with someone has been growing as well.  As family structures change, binary categories are less and less meaningful.  I don’t doubt that some workplaces could get better at this, but we have to accurately identify the problem before we can agree on solutions.

I’ve written about false literary attributions before, but I found this one particularly amusing.  Apparently a librarian in England figured out that a poem (written in the 1980s) was being falsely attributed to William Blake (a poet from the 1800s).  Worse yet, this poem was actually being taught in multiple classrooms as an example of his work.

It’s one thing when students don’t check their sources, but teachers?  Come on guys.

I think my one last week was too hard.  I’ll provide the answer as soon as I can find it…I’m trying to remember which book I got it out of.

Anyway, here’s an easier one:

A car travels at a speed of 50 mph over a certain distance, and then goes 30 mph over the same distance on the way back.  What’s the average speed for the trip?

In honor of my little sister taking her nursing boards today, I thought I’d do a post about a pet peeve of mine: hand washing.  Well not hand washing exactly, but rather those who get worked up in to a foamy lather* when others don’t do it.  Let me explain

I’m a fairly avid reader of advice columns, and there is a genre of letter that pops up every few months that goes something like this “Dear _____,  my coworker doesn’t wash their hands and it makes me wretch and think they’re a disgusting human being.  How do I confront them?”

Now these people are never hospital/patient care type employees, they tend to be just regular office workers.  What gets me so annoyed is that I have worked in patient care, and when I got my nurses aide license I even had to wash my hands in front of a state inspector.  Washing your hands is not easy and almost everyone does it wrong.  That’s what annoys me about these letters.  Unless they’re very meticulous, these people are likely not even being very effective themselves…and even if they are doing it effectively, nearly everyone else they work with is doing it wrong. Also, as someone who carries hand sanitizer around just to avoid having to insufficiently wash my hand in a public restroom, I get annoyed at people who think water = clean.

I thought about this today because I heard about a large scale study that vindicated my feelings:  95% of people do not wash their hands properly.  Properly means with soap, lathering for at least 20 seconds.  If you want to be good enough to get your nurses aide license, you also better use a paper towel to shut the faucet off, and angle your hands downward when you rinse to make sure you’re not spreading germs up your wrists.  People are so bad at this that many hospitals now recommend that hand washing only be used to remove stuff that may have gotten on your hands, and that hand sanitizer is what should be use to disinfect.

I like studies like this because they are very useful for reminding people that our self-assessment does not always match reality.  My guess is that a very high percentage of people believe they are washing their hands correctly.  It’s like how everyone believes they’re an above average driver.

Anyway, best of luck to my favorite little sister, may you be several deviations from the norm (in the passing direction of course).

*See what I did there?

Happy Father’s Day to all those in the relevant group!

I saw my father yesterday, and we, like much of the country, spent some time talking about the NSA leaks and Snowden.   My father asked how I felt about it, and I answered in a way only a daughter who’s been debating her father for decades could answer:  You already know how I feel about it Dad, we debated this years ago when Bush was President.  He was testing me. Nothing makes my Dad happier than knowing he raised kids who keep their opinions consistent regardless of who’s in power.

At that point my Dad mentioned that he had seen a survey that showed that Democrats and Republicans have switched places when it comes to supporting programs like this.  Under Bush, Republicans supported NSA surveillance programs, now the don’t.  Vice versa for the Democrats.  

I didn’t have a chance until today to look up the survey my Dad was talking about, and I found a good breakdown at reason.com here.

There are actually 3 different polls cited:  one from 2002, one from 2006, and one from just recently.  The numbers do, in fact, flip (and 2006 is more dramatic than either of the other two years).  Eugene Volokh however, does an interesting take on the numbers, and points out a different spin:

If the 38% of Republicans who said no still say no today, and the 45% who say yes new said yes in 2002, that amounts to 83% (out of the average of 93.5% responding) whose answers were the same. Likewise, if the 41% of Democrats who said yes still say yes today, and the 43% who say no now said no in 2002, that amounts to 84% (out of the average of 94% responding) whose answers were the same. (I oversimplify here by assuming that the same people were surveyed today as before, despite the changing composition of the public overtime; but if you relax that assumption, then the consistency rate might be even higher.)

Those numbers actually sound pretty reasonable to me.  One also has to wonder how many of those 16/17% would actually admit they legitimately changed their minds.  11 years is a long time.  Even if you took the more dramatic 2006 numbers, about 75% of each party maintained their beliefs.

Now obviously it was not very likely that the same exact people were polled, so we don’t actually have evidence that any individual changed their mind.  The one thing to keep in mind when you see polls like this talking about Democrat vs Republican attitudes is that the type of person who identifies themselves with either party is changing.  Here are the breakdowns of Dem vs Rep vs Independent for the 3 years listed:

              Dem      Rep      Ind
2002      31         30         30
2006      33         28         30
2012      32         24         38

  Even if these survey had polled the exact same group of people and they all had answered identically, the numbers would have changed based on changing political affiliation (or lack thereof).  Things to ponder.

If you’re finding my weekly brain teaser too low stakes, try this one, win a million bucks!

There are 11 ways of expressing the number 100 as a number and fraction using the nine digits once each.
Example:

91+ (5823/647) = 100

The challenge is to find some of the other 10 ways.

Hint: In 9 of them, that first number is above 80.  In one of them, it’s less than 10.

I’ve mentioned before on this blog that I get annoyed when people link A to B and B to C and then proceed to assume that the relationship between A and C is just the average/sum/etc of the first two.  In pure mathematics, the technical term for this is transitivity and it tends to be pretty valid.

I learned recently that there is actually a term for this when applied to epidemiology research: teleoanalysis.  Developed in the realm of public health, it’s defined as

the synthesis of different categories of evidence to obtain a quantitative general summary of (a) the relation between a cause of a disease and the risk of the disease and (b) the extent to which the disease can be prevented. 

It has also been criticized, in large part because it was invented to help support pre-existing assumptions.  Both papers I linked to reference the “does cutting back on saturated fat actually prevent heart disease” controversy as an example.

I was thinking of this recently when reader Dubbahdee sent me this article about bicycle helmet laws.  The issue follows the same formula as above:

A. Bicycle helmets protect cyclists
B. Mandatory helmet laws increase the number of cyclists who wear helmets

Therefore:

C. Bicycle helmet laws save lives

What’s interesting is it appears this is not the case.  The paper’s authors suggest that increased helmet laws decrease bike ridership, and apparently having lots of bicyclists in an area makes it safer for cyclists in general.  Also, helmet laws seem to potentially inoculate lawmakers against making any bigger changes…the sort that actually help cyclist safety (infrastructure building, etc).

I thought this was interesting because it’s absolutely proven that you as an individual should wear a helmet, but the conclusions drawn from that weren’t valid.  Someone out there guaranteed that these helmet laws would save x number of lives, and they were wrong.

I had a nasty migraine last night that kept me up for most of the night, and I’m not sure I have a real post in me.

In lieu of that, I have a linguistic issue I’d like to get off my chest: Misnomer does not mean “error” or “misconception”…it refers to an error in naming.

I’m sure my very smart and wonderful readers know this, but 3 times in the past two weeks I’ve heard people make this error.  If you’re going to try to use big/unusual words, please use them accurately.  Oh, and that also goes for phrases in Latin.  Saying part of your argument in Latin doesn’t make you right.