Well, I missed towel day.
Here’s a infographic:
Friday Fun Links 5-24-13
Interesting stuff from Juice Analytics…30 days to better data storytelling.
Also, just in time for summer, a whole bunch of science reading. I just finished Space Chronicles and am starting My Beloved Brontosaurus.
Speaking of dinosaurs, here’s the list of best to worst.
On a fun note, here’s 20 biopic actors and the famous people they played. I always thought Charlize Theron deserved every bit of that Oscar she got for Monster.
In other news, here’s the top 10 species discovered in 2012. The Semachrysa jadeis my favorite story. It was found on Flickr.
It’s hard out there boys
Ann Althouse linked to an article about the struggle of working class male undergrads vs middle-class undergrads:
Combine the “chiselled out of rock” body of actor Ryan Reynolds, the intellectual prowess of writer Christopher Hitchens and the “funny, quirky” demeanour of film star Joseph Gordon-Levitt and you have the perfect role model for male middle-class undergraduates.
But while bourgeois students can “seamlessly integrate” many types of masculinity, a study at two universities concludes that their working-class peers find squaring the many demands placed on the modern man more challenging.
This looked like an interesting study, and I was all ready to read up on it…but it hasn’t been published yet. It’s a conference paper. That’s fine, but I was pretty interested that this article gave pretty much zero proof of the assertion that middle class males were seamlessly integrating different types of masculinity, or that working class ones were struggling. The only piece of data reported suggested that middle class men weree integrating anything was that they included “well groomed” and “metrosexual” as priorities in being good looking, whereas working class men did not.
Other than that, the article was mostly researcher’s continued assertion that this phenomena occurred…though I question her bias a bit as she stated that working class men’s way of thinking about intelligence “belies an assumption of entitlement to dominance….arguably a refashioning of traditional male hegemony”.
So how much of this is data and how much was spin? Who knows. Despite what the journalist is reporting, we might all just have to wait for the paper.
Wednesday Brain Teaser 5-22-13
Via Spikedmath.com
Anti-science is party neutral
I didn’t mention it in my post yesterday, but part of the impetus to my father sending me the link about the water fluoridation was an ongoing discussion we have about the reputation of Republicans as “anti-science”. I actually get asked about this a lot, and my standard answer tends to be something along the lines of “I think almost everyone is anti-science”.
If it’s a topic that interests you, I suggest you check out Harriet Hall’s latest post at Science Based Medicine about progressive mythology in science. Lots of “natural is always better” type fallacies.
Some people in the comments are noting that libertarians and lefties can frequently wind up on the same side of some of these issues (like with water fluoridation), but I think it’s slightly different for the libertarians. At least the ones that I know don’t so much think water fluoridation is bad, as that the government should be letting individuals choose. That’s annoying to public health people, but it’s a political opinion, not a scientific one.
You may noticed I’ve added my Twitter feed to the side bar. I’ve just started messing with it a bit, but I’m putting up some interesting links that I don’t get a chance to write about here, and it felt weird to keep things separate.
Complaints/comments/concerns welcome as always, and if you have Twitter, follow me!
Fluoride in the water (fire in the sky)
My Dad sent me an article today about Portland’s ongoing debate about putting fluoride in their water.
There’s a lot of interesting science around water fluoridation, but that’s not what caught my eye. What I noticed was this paragraph:
Almost every credible national, state, and local health and science organization—private and public—gives its blessing to optimal levels of water fluoridation: The American Medical Association, the American Dental Association, the Environmental Protection Agency, the World Health Organization, American Academy of Family Physicians, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which named the measure one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. They all agree that fluoridated water is perfectly safe and extremely effective at preventing tooth decay.
I was intrigued by that paragraph because the link they provide for the organizations that support water fluoridation has 11 pages of organization names and their statements supporting it.
While there’s many well known names on there, I was thinking about how hard it really is to know about lesser known organizations, and how easy it is to confuse various organization names.
Example: the American Medical Association is one of the biggest medical groups in the country. The Association of American Physicians is a group dedicated to furthering biomedical research. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is a group dedicated to “fighting socialized medicine and the government takeover of medicine”.
Now you might recognize the difference between the first one and the other two, but my guess is most people will not remember which one is which 20 minutes after you finish reading this blog post.
Now I’m certainly not saying that these 11 pages are crap…there’s some big names on that list. What I am saying is that random names of groups is something people must take some due diligence to investigate. I’m sure that the anti-fluoridation people could also come up with a long list of organizations that support them, even if it represented far fewer people. In this age of propaganda, we must remember that organization names alone may not be enough to convince people. Too much data causes overload, and we can’t blame people for this. Now go brush your teeth.
Weekend randomness
Every time I hear someone say they’re random, I think of 14 year old girls Myspace pages, and I remember why Facebook won.
I also think of computer programming classes, and how I always get way too interested in how different programming languages come up with their random numbers. Some use a digit somewhere in the computers time stamp. This website uses atmospheric noise. Now that’s random.
Want to see how good you are at being random?
Try these tests.
Friday Fun Links 5-17-13
Hey it’s Friday! And Arrested Development’s almost back! Here’s a graph of all the running jokes!
Speaking of which, want a text the second Netflix posts the next season? Instructions for text notification here.
Now seriously, Friday is tough. Here’s the 21 stages of Friday.
On a down note, the cicadas are coming. Here’s how far they’ve gotten.
Oh well, apparently they’re edible. Here’s how to cook them.
Does that gross you out? Fine. Here’s how much money it would take to build the Starship Enterprise.
Race and wealth, relative or absolute?
Recently, my brother was a contributor to an infographic his organization put together about race and the wealth gap. Despite knowing that I am inherently biased against infographics, he called me and asked my opinion on some criticism it had received. The whole thing’s fairly large, so I’m only posting the piece that caused the controversy:
The graph at the top had caused some commenters to question the use of “average” in lieu of median, and if it was skewing the results.
Luckily, since my brother has listened to me rant for years about people not sourcing their facts, he had mad sure this graphic included the source of the numbers…a report from the Urban Institute that can be found here.
I was interested to see that they not only acknowledge that they use average over median, but also give the median numbers to show that the trend is essentially the same. Here they are for 2010:
Average Median
White 632,000 124,000
Black 98,000 16,000
Hispanic 110,000 15,000
Using average numbers, the absolute gap between incomes is larger…however I was interested to see that using median the ratio of incomes would have looked larger (8 times lager vs 6 times larger). Honestly, there’s pluses and minuses to using either angle.
Absolute inequality generally favors the gap (higher value – lower value) as the important measure. This can make sense in some situations, but it tends to depend on where you start. The difference between a person who makes $20,000/year and someone who makes $90,000/year is very different from the difference between someone who makes $90,000/year and someone who makes $160,000/year.
Relative inequality looks more at the ratio between two numbers. It also really depends on where you start, and is skewed by small starting numbers. If I change the price of something from 50 cents to a dollar, it’s doubled, but you still can likely afford it. If I change it from $20 to $40, I’m going to lose some customers.
So given that, did they use the right one here? Well, I think it was probably a toss up choice. Picking average made the graph and some numbers below look larger, but they made the 2010 ratio numbers look smaller. If they had switched from average to median depending on what was more substantial, I would have taken issue, but as it is I don’t think there was anything deceptive going on. After all, had they used the median numbers, they would have also changed the axis and the difference would have looked just as dramatic.
There’s always the possibility that they could have put both to prove this point, but I’m pretty sure only someone like me would have enjoyed that.
graph paper diaries 