Reliable Source, indeed

/ bs king

On my commute in this morning, I was listening to an interview with Jason Collins, the NBA player who recently became the first active/pro/major sport athlete to come out as a homosexual.  He’s an interesting guy, and it’s an interesting story, but one I never thought of as potential blog fodder…until I saw this story about how Howard Kurtz had been let go from the Daily Beast for his inaccurate commentary on the story.

In a piece that was first edited, then retracted on the Daily Beast, Kurtz wrote a grumpy column accusing Collins of disingenuously failing to mention that he had been engaged to a woman he was in an 8 year relationship with.  The problem was that Collins actually had mentioned this, in both the article and in subsequent interviews. It was even on the first page of the article and everything (paragraph 8 if you’re curious).  
What makes this noteworthy (for me anyway) is that Kurtz is the host of a show on CNN called “Reliable Sources”, and is apparently the author of several books that criticize the media.  Seems like with a gig like that you’d double check things.
Anyway, I thought this was interesting because the Collins article is one of the most talked about and widely read articles in pop culture this week, and a fairly famous journalist completely mischaracterized it.  It served as a reminder to me about how little to trust we should put in journalists, and how you should always seek out primary sources.  I mean, if you can get a widely read human interest piece wrong, how can you trust that someone is going to take the time to sort through the technical science/math language of most research papers?

Wednesday Brain Teaser 5-1-13

/ bs king / 4 Comments
Did you know Lewis Carroll was a mathematician?  Here’s one of his favorite ones:
On return from the battlefield, the regiment is badly battle-scarred.  If 70% of the soldiers have lost an eye, 75% have lost an ear, 85% have lost a leg and 80% have lost an arm, what percentage at least must have lost all four?

How old is old?

/ bs king / 5 Comments

This is related to a post I want to put up later in the week, but also is just a topic I’m generally curious about.

As culture has shifted over the last 100 years or so, we have been increasingly upping the age at which people are considered “adult”.  When I was in therapy school, we learned that the stages of development that were written even 20 years ago were pretty much invalid now.  The two main stages that are developing are the time period post-retirement but prior to physical decline…the Baby Boomers have started redefining this from a blanket “retirement” to a time for second careers and such…and then the time after classic “young adulthood”.  This time period has been expanding because of later marriage/baby making.  Whereas my mother got married 2 years after college graduation and had babies 2 years after that, I got married 6 years after graduation and had babies 3 years after that.  Thus, my twenties were nearly entirely responsibility free and thus a distinctly different time of life than it was for my mother’s generation.  From what I can tell, my trajectory was not terribly deviant from the norm.
All that being said, it’s getting harder to pinpoint exactly when someone stops being “young”.  I’ve noticed a tendency for people to push the age where youth is an excuse for less than advisable behavior higher and higher.  I’m trying to suss out a consensus on this, so it’s time for a poll!  Or rather, polls!  There’s a few angles here:
http://www.twiigs.com/poll.js?pid=107618&color=

poll by twiigs.com
http://www.twiigs.com/poll.js?pid=107640&color=

poll by twiigs.com
http://www.twiigs.com/poll.js?pid=107641&color=

poll by twiigs.com

I’ll talk about the results later this week, and hopefully link them to another topic I’ve been pondering.

Friday Fun Links 4-26-13

/ bs king / 3 Comments

From Brett Keller’s blog…there’s apparently an ICD-9 code for “accident involving spacecraft”.  I’m pretty sure that’s proof that THE GOBMENT IS HIDING SOMETHIN!!!  It’s E845, if you’re curious.

Flowingdata links to a cool video that shows how much food you can buy for $5 (US) around the world.  Spoiler alert: the US winds up looking pretty reasonable.

Oh, here’s a fun one…30 things to tell a book snob.  I might be forwarding this directly to a few people I know.

Another good one…what happens when a UCLA prof lets all of his students cheat on their final?

Jobs for STEM grads, are there enough?

/ bs king / 1 Comment

On Tuesday I griped about a woman at a conference complaining that there were no jobs because she didn’t have one.  I was not so much annoyed with here assertion – that STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) jobs are not as plentiful as everyone would have you believe – but more with her complete conviction that data was irrelevant because it didn’t match her experience.  

I still think she was being ridiculous in her phrasing, but I saw an article today that reminded me that she may not have been ridiculous in her claim.  Apparently a report was just released stating that our country is producing more than enough STEM graduates, and in fact many of these graduates are not finding jobs.  This is in response to the lobbying around making more H1-B visas available to bring more foreign workers to fill jobs caused by a lack of qualified domestic workers.  Critics argue that there is no lack, but that H1-B visa holders are paid less, so companies want more of them.
Now I’m not sure what to make of all this.  I work in healthcare, which is excluded from pure STEM by most definitions, even though I love me some stats.  Regardless, I don’t really know much about employment in IT, etc to know if this is true or not.
I was however, quite fascinated to look at the report that was put out and note a few things:
  • They cite a statistic that only one out of every two grads with a STEM degree is hired in to a STEM job…but I’ve blogged before about how “STEM” is really narrow.  My brother has a biology degree, but as a biology teacher, he’s considered “education” not STEM.  I have an engineering degree, but because I’m in healthcare, I’m not STEM.  
  • It’s really hard to capture people’s situation in narrow categories.  At one point they mention that 53% of IT grads (who don’t work in IT) found better opportunities elsewhere.  Does this mean they only found lousy IT jobs, or that they got a really great offer outside IT?
  • One big argument is that wages have stagnated, so there can’t be a shortage…but I would like to see what that looks like compared to other industries.  The dotcom bubble bursting might be playing games with the data
On the other side though, I get somewhat skeptical of companies saying “there’s no one for these jobs!”  I’d like a better definition there…do you mean actually no one qualified?  Or no one qualified at the price you’re willing to pay for them?  I’ve worked in more than one workplace where I’ve seen managers get frustrated when they’re told they can’t get everything they want for the salary they’re offering (and potentially then post the job anyway).  Many employers these days seem to be suffering from the same issues as those doing online dating have…when someone gives you thousands of options, why shouldn’t you hold out for absolutely perfect?  That thought actually came up at the talk that I started this post with, and the recruiter said she’d actually had to sit down with execs and tell them they were being too picky…that 90% right for the job was good enough (and she was a recruiter who worked strictly with scientists).  
Anyway, economic data like this always makes me a little crazy.  Too many things going in too many directions.  Like herding cats. 
Sigh.  Stay sane out there.

Wednesday Brain Teaser 4-24-13

/ bs king / 5 Comments

Alright, so you have a scale that looks like this:

You want to use this scale to measure the weight of various widgets you have that could weigh as little as 1oz, or as much as 1000 ozs. Now you want to purchase a set of weights so that you can get the weight on any of these to the closest oz.  You don’t have much money, so you want to buy the fewest number of weights possible…but you have to be able to measure all the individual weights that might fall in the 1-1000 range.
How many weights do you need, and what units should they be?

Who needs facts when I got my gut?

/ bs king / 2 Comments

When I get in to arguments with people about data, most of the conversation is pretty predictable.  Sometimes people counter with contradictory data, claim my data is biased, is from a bad source, is outdated, irrelevant, or otherwise not worthy of consideration.  I can accept this.

The one thing that really baffles me is when people just say “No, that’s not true”, and when pressed for why explain that their personal feelings lead them to believe that what I said can’t be true. 
I was thinking of this today during a talk at a conference I was attending.  The speaker was giving an interesting talk about the phenomena of having many STEM jobs open during a time when there was high unemployment, and why there was a “talent gap”.  She finished her talk, and a woman raised her hand and said “You say there are jobs, but there aren’t.  I know because I’m unemployed, and so are two of my friends.”  
The speaker (who works for a recruiter, btw) sort stammered with a bit of confusion, and repeated the numbers she had shown originally that showed there were jobs out there in these fields (at least in this city), and the length of time many of them had been unfilled.  The woman repeated “Yes, I see that, but I don’t have a job, so it’s not true.”  The speaker did pretty well from there, putting a few more things out there until it became entirely clear the woman believed that all economic activity rested on whether she personally had a job or not.
Now of course we all have cognitive biases.  That’s why we have science and data…because humanity has realized our eyes deceive us at times.  What baffles me is when people are willing to pipe up in public and say directly “no, I will only believe what I see”.  
Perhaps I should appreciate that it’s not subtle and insidious ignorance, but it still gets me every time.

And this little elite stayed home….

/ bs king

I’m catching up on my reading after a week of under-connectivity, and I was interested to see this piece linked to from the AVI’s site.  It’s about a recently published paper comparing the rates of “opting out” of the workforce for mothers who graduated from elite vs non elite institutions.  Apparently the better the school you went to, the more likely you are to stay home with your kids.

I had a couple of things to point out about the original article about the paper, but first I’d like to point out something that reminds me why you always need to dive in to the original data tables (if provided).  
First, here’s how the article from Charles Murray characterizes one of the papers stats:

But as soon as Hersh separates out women with children from those without, it becomes obvious that women from tier 1 schools are significantly more likely to be home with the kids than the others — 68% of mothers from the tier 1 schools were employed, compared to 76% of those from the other schools.

Sounds straightforward right?  8% more women from elite schools are home when their kids are young as opposed to everyone else.  Well, lets see what the actual paper said:

The employment rate for married mothers with children who are graduates of the most selective colleges is 68 percent, in contrast to an employment rate of 76 percent of those who are graduates of less selective colleges.

Pretty much the same thing right?  I mean, if you were to just read that second statement, you’d think the first one paraphrased it pretty well.  But when I looked at the data tables, that’s not what it said.  The 68%-76% jump is not between elite schools and everyone else, but between elite schools and tier 4 schools.  Here are the numbers (page 50 of the pdf from the link above):

                        Tier 1            Tier 2            Tier 3               Tier 4
Children           67.7               71.9              71.6                 76.3
No Children     87.9               90.9              89.6                 89.8

I tried to parse through the methodology for assigning tiers, but honestly I got confused.  It seems to be a mash up between Carnegie ratings and Barron’s.  In other words, the categories may not necessarily mean what you think they mean.  It seems private research I and II universities were considered tier 1, private liberal arts colleges are tier 2, public research universities are tier 3, and all others are tier 4.  This would put my alma mater as tier 1, and I would hardly consider it “elite”.

Anyway, there’s some good commentary going on about this article, but I thought the exact definitions being used were interesting.  I think it is interesting to see how people behave when they have money vs when they don’t.  Also, I thought it was equally interesting that much of the difference came from women who had earned degrees in law or MBAs.  These women quite their jobs at much higher rates than those with MDs or teachers.  It struck me as interesting because people do not generally love business or law the way people love medicine or teaching.  It seems to me that this data suggests that when women have their druthers, they keep jobs they love, and ditch jobs that are more status driven.

Moral of the story: find a job you love, and always read the data tables.                            

You can say this about life…it goes on

/ bs king / 1 Comment

Well, it’s been quite the week here at Bad Data Bad.

I appreciate all the kind words (both here and on Facebook and IRL) in response to my last post.  As some of you know, I ended up modifying that post and delivering it as the family eulogy at his funeral.  The fire chief also delivered a eulogy, and I think my uncle would be happy to know that the last line of both of our speeches ended with a hope that the farming equipment in heaven was more reliable than what he had here on earth.  He really did hate that baler.
We heard about the Boston Marathon bombings in our brief break between the fireman’s wake and the regular wake.  It was difficult for me because the marathon is one of the biggest fundraisers of the year for my workplace, so I knew dozens of runners and volunteers, not to mention possible members of the crowd. 
I returned to work on Thursday.  The bombings still hadn’t registered, but reality hit when I got off the train and ran right in to a group of MPs.  My bus took me within viewing distance of one of the blast sites, and by lunchtime, the Obama’s were at my workplace, visiting victims*.  
I worked from home on Friday, safe in the suburbs.  My hospital was on lock down, so they encouraged all who could stay home to do so.  I was happy to oblige. 
All in all, not one of my better weeks.  However, I’m safe, my family’s safe, and life is going on.  I think I have enough mental energy back to resume blogging this week (provided the world holds off on any more disasters), but I wanted to make sure you all had the update.
Thank you again for your kindness, and for reminding me how much good still exists in the world.
*the hospital I work at is oncology only, but located in the middle of two hospitals they were visiting, so they walked through our halls to get between the two.