Who talks more…men or women?

/ bs king / 3 Comments

There is nothing I love more than a clever phrase to describe a phenomena that bothers me.  Last night I found such a phrase in a Jezebel article about gender differences in number of words spoken per day.

The phrase: public domain data.
This describes the phenomena of data that’s been so often cited that no one seems to think you need a reference for it anymore (think “you need 8 glasses of water per day”).  
In this particular article, she brings it up in the context of the assertion that women say more words per day than men do.  The most commonly cited data puts it at anywhere from double to quadruple the number…quite a difference by any stretch of the imagination.  The problem is the numbers are apparently quite fictional.
The Jezebel piece links to this piece on a blog from UPENN where someone actually tried to track down a study that ever established the numbers quoted.  They found that it apparently originated with James Dobson sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s, and that he did not seem to have a study to back him up (his actual quote was that “God gave women 50,000 words for the day, and men 25,000”).
From there it seems to have changed and distorted, but it does not seem anyone has actually sat down and counted the number of words men and women said.
If you think about it, this would be a really hard study to do.  I mean, I think most people would knee-jerk agree that women talk more than men, but we have to remember that we’re only thinking of social situations. Your choice of profession would HEAVILY skew how many words you were saying per day.  I mean, my brother the biology teacher is by far the quietest member of my immediate family when we get together.  However, I would hazard a guess that 5 days out of the week he likely says more words than I do.  I mean, he teaches.  He has to say words.  I spend at least half my day analyzing data.  No words needed.  I also have a longer commute (no talking needed) and unless I’m giving a presentation all of my meetings involve giving people equal time to talk.  But of course people who met us wouldn’t count his professional speaking. It would be clear to everyone that I talk more…unless you had a researcher study us on an average day.
Additionally, even if this stat had been true in 1993, how would we count it today?  In 1993, most social communication was verbal.  How would we count blogging, Twitter, Reddit or texting? It feels strange to count those as words, but also strange to not include them.  
I mean, the little lord’s been taking his morning nap for the past hour or so.  In that time I have commented on 4 blogs, written two emails, one Facebook message, and written this post.  For research purposes though, I haven’t said a word.  Interesting, isn’t it?

Friday Fun Links 2-22-13

/ bs king

Now that Valentine’s Day is over, I thought you might want to know how to break up with someone, data style.

An American accent quiz.  I just spent some time out west, is this why I apparently sound like I’m from there?
Fun fact: Britain has only failed to invade 22 in the world.  What did Guatemala do wrong?

Remember the Sims?  Here’s what happens when they go wrong.

This is a little surreal looking, but these fMRIs of fetal brains are really interesting.

Going out to Utah reminded me that my first science crush was paleontology.  Here’s a size comparison chart of people and dinosaurs.  Expect more dinosaur mentions in the weeks to come.

Who do you believe, me or your brain?

/ bs king / 3 Comments

A few years ago, right before the 2008 election, a friend of mine put the following up on Facebook:

This was accompanied by a blurb that we should all think about these wise words from a great man.  
Now I haven’t taken a history class since 1999, but something about the language struck me as funny.  I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t sound like Lincoln to me.  Thusly, I ran to the Google and took a look around.  I found the Snopes page and the Illinois Historical Society site…both confirmed my suspicions.  Lincoln never said that.  
Back then I was young and naive, so I blithely left a link for my friend letting him know the author was wrong, and that it was actually William Boetker who said it.  A few days later, I decided to check if anything else had happened with the post….and found that he had deleted me as a friend, deleted my comment, but left the post up.
It was baffling to me that someone could take that much offense not because I had disagreed with the content, but because I had pointed out a legitimate factual error in something he was citing.  It was my introduction to this sort of thing (which I think has become more common as the internet has grown) but it gets me every time.  Obviously I understand why people want their opinions to be right, but must everything that defends ones point be true?
I’ve had a few other incidents like this recently, and so I was really interested to hear about this  study done in partnership with Slate.com, where they presented people with photos of political events since 1999. The twist was the 5 of the possibilities (participants were given a random sampling of 4)  were doctored photos depicting events that never happened.  They were then asked if they either saw it or remembered it happening.  
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
Quite a few people “remembered” the false events (all of which could be viewed as negative against a particular politician).  While some merely checked the box, others had detailed memories they wrote down (ie “that was the day I lost all respect for Hilary Clinton”).  What really got me interested were two things:
First, Democrats were more likely to “remember” the false events that made Republicans look bad, and Republicans were more likely to “remember” moments that made Democrats look bad.  Additionally, regardless of party, the more strongly you said you remembered it, the more people couldn’t recognize events as false even when they were told there was a false one out of the ones they’d remembered.
Now there are some limitations to this study*, but I wonder if it’s not starting to touch on the same phenomena.  Once we start to believe a piece of information is true, are we more likely to keep believing it or to consider certain points of falseness less relevant?  If it aligns with our previously held beliefs, are we even more likely to do this?  
Why else would you hold on to a quote/fact/etc that had a demonstrably false portion?
*Only 5% of those survey were conservative, it was Slate readers polled, nothing stopped them from looking things up during the survey

Wednesday Brain Teaser 2-20-13

/ bs king / 5 Comments

I am thinking of a number between 1 and 1300.  It meets 3 criteria:

  1. It is a perfect cube.
  2. It is less than 500.
  3. It is a perfect square.
Just kidding, it only meets two of those.  To make up for lying though, I’ll tell you that it starts with 5, 7, or 9.

Include in your answer how much googling it took you.

Fox news: the channel you love to hate

/ bs king / 3 Comments

At least according to this chart of people’s most and least trusted TV news sources:

I’m deeply curious how many of the people who ranked anything as their “least trusted” actually arrived at that assessment after watching that particular channel.  This feels like a poll that’s a lot more about social signaling than about actual assessment of new sources.
Here’s the original poll.  

Data, elections, and how to check your facts

/ bs king / 2 Comments

I’ve been meaning to post something on David Brooks (Brooks’s? Brooks’?) column from a few weeks ago on the “Philosophy of Data”.  A couple readers sent this to me (thanks all!) and I thought it was pretty interesting.  He questions how the rise of big data is going to change things, and raises a few pertinent questions:

Over the next year, I’m hoping to get a better grip on some of the questions raised by the data revolution: In what situations should we rely on intuitive pattern recognition and in which situations should we ignore intuition and follow the data? What kinds of events are predictable using statistical analysis and what sorts of events are not?

I think those questions are relevant, and I was thinking about them when this cartoon popped up in my newsfeed on Facebook a few days ago:

In the post election fallout, a lot of the geek blogs I read questioned deeply Romney’s data collection.  Several supposed insiders claimed that while there were many in his campaign charged with data collection, he lacked people who were performing what is scientifically known as “the sniff test”.
Now I have no idea if the stuff about the Romney campaign is true (though I did know some folks on the Obama team and their data gathering was quite stunning to the point of mildly creepy), but I think that raising questions about data vs gut reactions are going to be big battles in areas like politics.  I mean, anyone who’s seen or read Moneyball knows that it took a while to get this in to baseball, and baseball’s got far fewer moving targets than politics.
What I think is interesting though is that integrating large data sets in to a highly charged and changing environment actually isn’t that hard, and I’m not sure why intuition and data get set up as opposing forces.  They actually work quite well together if you let them.  Here’s the basic steps:
  1. Figure out what problem you’re trying to solve
  2. Get a large relevant data set
  3. Analyze it until you get any numbers you can think of that might be helpful
  4. Find several rational people who are deeply embedded in the problem area
  5. Ask them what they think of the data, get the gut reaction
  6. Explain to them where you got the data, see if their reaction is the same
  7. Ask them if anyone they know would disagree with this data, and if so why
  8. Ask them if this helps them know how to proceed
  9. Ask them if there’s any other data that might be useful for this problem
  10. Go find that, repeat 5-9.
Data is helpful, but easily manipulated.  We need a combination of data and good gut reactions to figure out where to go in high stakes environments.  People directly involved in a situation are always going to be both the best and worst judge of the situation….and that’s okay.  Data geeks should set themselves somewhere in the middle, and always be questioning.  Data doesn’t make you an expert, but it can give you standing to challenge the experts. 
There’s no magic bullet here.  There’s only another very useful tool in (what should already be) a well stocked tool box.  

Interesting conference data of the week

/ bs king / 3 Comments

So tonight’s the last night I’m at this conference (American Society for Bone Marrow Transplant if you’re curious), so I figured it would be an appropriate moment to share some interesting data issues that came up in the sessions I went to.

The most interesting one came from a group out of Johns Hopkins, in their talk about their combined inpatient/outpatient program.  About 20 years ago now, they started to transition their transplant patients from one long inpatient stay to a shorter stay with a sort of intensive outpatient clinic follow up.  This worked really well, cut costs, helped patients feel more autonomous, etc.  What was interesting is that as they followed up on patients and how they did, they found that patients treated under this model did better on every single quality of life metric* except one: feelings about appearance.

Since there is no reason to believe they actually looked any different, the only conclusion they could reach is that the more “normal” people the cancer patients saw, the more acutely aware they were of how they looked.  When they were in the hospital, they were surrounded by other patients, but on the outside they were exposed to more healthy people.

I thought that was an interesting example of how much quality of life measures can depend on what your environment is and who you’re being exposed to.  We like to act like hapiness or contentment were definitive values that are totally internally generated, but they’re not.  People compare themselves to others.  We just can’t help it.

*The hard health measures (recovery, blood counts, etc) were the same with either method.

Friday Fun Link 2-15-13

/ bs king / 3 Comments

Once upon a time my family went to a restaurant way up in Northern New Hampshire.  My brother decided to get the “spaghetti and meatball” dinner.  As he was looking at the menu before ordering, he remarked that it was interesting that they seemed to have forgotten the “s”.  The meal came.  There was no typo.  There was just one solitary small meatball atop an ocean of spaghetti.  The end.

It’s not a great story, but it’s the kind of thing that a 9 year old and a 7 year old found endlessly hilarious.

Of course that’s just me saying that I didn’t forget the “s” on link up in the title.  I’m having a hell of a time trying to cut and paste links with my iPad, and that all I have here.  Anyway, this is another Valentine’s Day one, but it was good enough to put the effort in.  Amazon.com did 50 Great American Love Stories…one for each state.

I knew that Massachusetts would be “Love Story” and it was.  Honestly I think they used “love stories” a little loosely, because I’ve read “The Virgin Suicides” and that was damn depressing (and don’t even get me started on Grapes of Wrath).  I haven’t read too many of these….Florida (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Georgia (Gone With the Wind),  Nebraska (My Antonia), Ohio (Beloved), Oklahoma (Grapes of Wrath), South Dakota (These Happy Golden Years), and Wisconsin (Blankets).

So that’s seven…and for someone as New England-centric as I am, they’re certainly all over the place. My favorite is certainly Their Eyes Were Watching God, and my least was Grapes of Wrath.  I wish I had known earlier you could skip every other chapter.  Sigh.

Valentine’s Day

/ bs king / 2 Comments

I was going to post this last night, but it turns out procuring a cocktail in Salt Lake City actually requires a bit more time and effort than one might suspect.  On the plus side, they have a lovely choir here.

Anyway, here’s a link to quite the smattering of geek themed Valentine’s Day cards.  These really run the gamut from comp sci to genetics….but I think #3 might be my favorite.  What’s yours?