If it makes you happy (it can’t be that bad)

/ bs king

I don’t have any citations to back me up, but I’m pretty sure it’s a proven fact that a belly laugh from a baby is the most amazing sound on earth.

Anyway, I saw a great headline today, a classic “there’s more to this story” moment:  “Sex and alcohol make you happier than kids and religion, study finds“.  While I’m sure the headline made many a college student raise their hands with a “damn the man!”, I was curious where this was all coming from.  What makes us happy is notoriously difficult (in part because the things that make us feel the best are paired with things that make us feel bad…..water tastes better if you’re thirsty, showers are amazing when you’re feeling gross, absence makes the heart grow fonder, etc)
This took quite a bit of searching around, as apparently this was not actually a published study, but rather a press release for a talk a postgrad is giving (or gave, Nov 14th) at the University of Cantebury.  It’s a pity because I think the demographics of the survey population might be relevant, but I’ll work with what I have.
The study itself seems pretty interesting.  While the headline is true, it really sells short what the authors were trying to do.  They were actually trying to capture how different actions effected people (in the moment) on four different levels….pleasure, meaning, engagement and happiness.   Sex was rated number one in all categories, but other ratings were more divided.  Alcohol/partying was highly rated for pleasure and happiness (2nd), but lower for meaning (10th).  The “kids” part was actually the activities of childcare and/or playing with kids….which I felt like covered a pretty broad range of interactions.  I mean, making my son laugh is the highlight of my day, but the time I spend changing diapers and calming fussiness?  Well, it’s hard to put that all in the same category.  In the same vein “religion” was actually “religious activity”…which is slightly different IMHO.  Anyway, childcare and religious activity both rated high on meaning and happiness, and lower on pleasure and engagement.  
Basically, the point of the study was not to measure pervasive life effects of individual actions, but rather to quiz people (via text message) at random points in time on what they were doing and how it made them feel. The upside of this is it doesn’t rely on people’s memories of what made them happy, which could be influenced by later context.  The downside of course is that it is an action devoid  of context.  Drinking alcohol could make someone happier at the moment, but the rating does not include any potential consequences that might come in later.   What was most interesting to me about this study was the things people do regularly that they seem to know won’t bring them happiness, meaning, pleasure or particularly engage them, most notably Facebook time.
In the end, the headline just neglected 3 out of 4 categories and reported the most sensational results.  That’s not surprising.  I actually ended up finding the study pretty interesting, and I’d like to see it published somewhere with more details.  

Update on the House races

/ bs king

Patrick from ballotlines has updated his predictions about who would have the House if some of the seats were decided by popular vote within the state.  This time he included the potential voters who didn’t vote because the races they had available were uncontested or otherwise not representative.

I always find it interesting to ponder the effects of changes like these on results.  Most of my job for the last few years centered on a project that tried to change behavior of employees by changing the system they were working in.  It’s a fascinating thought project.

I suspect that this fear of the unknown is why we stick with an election system most people barely understand.  My guess is both political parties 9or at least their consultants) prefer small tweaks to the existing rules than a major overhaul to the whole operation.

Friday Fun Links 11-16-12

/ bs king

Looking for a Bad Data Bad approved Christmas present for a little girl in your life?  Reader David tipped me off to Goldi Blox….a new startup that’s making toys to get girls interested in engineering early on in life.  She had me at “this is the toy I wish someone could have bought me when I was that age”.

Also, are you traveling for Thanksgiving?  If so, you should know that surviving a plane crash is not nearly as uncommon as you’ve been led to believe.

Once you get to Thanksgiving dinner (safely), here’s some fun tricks you could bust out with.  Science.

In the post election dissection, I’ve seen a lot of random correlations, but this one touched my heart.  Apparently coffee won Obama the election.  Of course by this logic, Texas is one of the next states that could go Dem….so take it with a grain of salt.  Or lump of sugar.  Either way, a cute reminder that correlation is not causation.

Speaking of elections, want to remember what the internet used to look like?  Dole/Kemp ’96 is still up (for educational purposes apparently).

This one’s a little different.  I was raised in a home/church community where one of the most enduring traditions of the holidays was a call for giving to those in need.  This year, I decided to give some money through donorschoose.org.  If you’ve never been there, it’s a site that lets teacher’s from around the country submit their “wish lists” for specific education projects they are working on, and donors can fund the project. I (naturally) went looking for stats projects and found a school in a high poverty area in North Carolina looking for some resources to make statistics more real for their students.  They only need a little over $200 more to fund the project, and I thought I’d just put it out there to anyone who might be interested in pitching in.  I have no connection to any of these people, just a random act of kindness thing.  The project can be found here.

Math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better

/ bs king / 7 Comments

The headline right there was my favorite quote of the whole election cycle.

I got a special request from a coworker of my father’s who suggested to him that I should wade in to the murky water of the gerrymandering controversy.  There’s a lot of data being thrown around*, but here’s the gist:
Some Democrats are claiming that the Obama victory and the victory in the Senate have given the Dems a mandate….basically claiming that the country agrees with their policies and they should push forward with them no matter how much resistance from the other side.  Resistance is considered irrelevant, because the people didn’t vote their opposition in.  Some Republicans on the other hand point to their victory in the House to say that actually they have the mandate, or at the very least that Obama/Dems do not have any sort of consensus.  The Dems counterpoint is that the Republicans only kept the house because of clever gerrymandering (redistricting) they orchestrated in 2010.  Thus, the Democrat mandate is even stronger than it appears because the Republicans cheated to get theirs.  
So, was it all chicanery?  How do we assess election and gerrymandering data?
Well, the first step is to look at the popular vote.  I couldn’t find any updates, but as of Nov 9th, the Democrats got more votes for their house candidates than the Republicans did (by a very small margin).  
However, this may or may not mean much.  
State politics are a funny thing.  In many states, people run unopposed, or with only token opposition.   It’s hard to count popular vote when many races are foregone conclusions.  Additionally, on the state level I’d wager people are more likely to vote for incumbents, if only for the extra power they believe it gives them to have more senior congressional members representing them.  Adding to the difficulty of interpreting the numbers is California’s new system of doing run off races….so we can’t presume that all house seats were decided in Rep vs Dem contests.  
Alright, so where does that leave us?  
Ultimately, we have to cut through the mess and ask ourselves what a fairer system would be, and what the results would have been under said fairer system would have been.  This blog post over at ballotlines does that quite nicely.  The short version is this: even if the House seats were broken down based on popular vote by state, the Republicans would have kept the majority, though not by as wide a margin.  
Another interesting take is here at the Monkey Cage blog, which revisits the 2008 district map, and shows the Republicans still winning the house, though again by a smaller margin.
So Dad, you were right, gerrymandering likely does NOT explain the house win, though it does seem to explain the magnitude.  That’s just math you do as a Democrat to make yourself feel better**.  
*Along with data being thrown around, there’s also some FANTASTIC conspiracy theories.  The two best I’ve read in comments sections so far are:  (Republican) “Polls clearly show almost twice as many people self identify as conservative vs liberal.  For Obama to win raises some serious questions.  Given that Silicone Valley is in California, and Californians are liberal, I think we should check how the voting machines were programmed.  I believe Mitt Romney won 60% to 40% and the computer programmers changed millions of votes.” (Democrat) “I understand that Romney does better among married women than single women.  Does anyone else think that’s because so many conservative men are abusive and probably force their wives to vote Republican? At my polling place I saw people enter the voting booth together, my guess is it was men making sure their wives voted the way they wanted”.  Actually, that first one is mostly just kind of tinfoil hat paranoid, the second one I found pretty disgusting.  Believing that many conservative men are capable of domestic violence is a kind of chilling way to view the world.

**All of the analysis here of course sidesteps the issue of how voter turnout would change if a new system were implemented.  We live in a country where (at last count) 42% of eligible voters didn’t vote.  Since we can only guess at what those voters would have done, we can’t know for sure how any new or different system would effect any of this.

Wednesday Brain Teaser – Driving down the highway

/ bs king / 7 Comments

If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?

 Answer will be posted in the comment section sometime on Friday.

Why you can’t always rely on the experts….

/ bs king

In research criticism, it is not an uncommon event for someone to suggest that if something was really wrong with the research, the peer review process would have picked it up.

This is an understandable sentiment, but clearly not true.  Peer review is a good system of course, and peer reviewed papers are much more likely to be reliable than those not subject to it.  However, to imply that no one not on the review committee can or should point out errors in papers is silly.
I bring this up because there’s a great article at Retraction Watch right now about a guy who was doing a little reading in the journal “Water Research” when he came across a paper that addressed one of his pet interests.  He was excited when he started reading it to find the authors seemed to share many of his opinions, and thought it was cool that they even used a lot of the same wording he would have……and then he realized the paper was his PhD thesis, with at least half of it copied word for word and attributed to another author.
Oops.
The paper ultimately got retracted, and it looks like the journal handled it well. However, it’s a great example of how peer review is not a fool proof system.  
The world always needs people who keep their eyes peeled for error.  

Weekend moment of zen 11-10-12

/ bs king

My father in law is reading Nate Silver’s book.  He said he was getting bogged down in the description of Bayesian statistics.

I sent him this XKCD comics to help explain it to him:

I’m not sure it helped him, but it certainly made me giggle.

Electoral map fun

/ bs king / 1 Comment

I was psyched to see a friend post this link to electoral map fun on Facebook today.  Mark Newman, a professor at the University of Michigan has done a series on different representations of the electoral map.  You should look at the whole thing, but here’s a sample.

It’s always been interesting to me how misleading the regular red/blue electoral map is:

This always makes it look like the red should easily have outnumbered the blue.  The link shows different breakdowns to account for population by state:
He includes breakdowns by county, and some with shades of purple to represent splits.  Interesting stuff.

Signs signs everywhere signs

/ bs king

Well, it appears that either there was no systematic bias against Republicans in the polls, or Nov 6th just happened to be the wrong time of the month for the Republicans.

My mother was with me on election night, and she mentioned being quite surprised that New Hampshire wasn’t a closer race (52-46 for Obama), and even more surprised that Maggie Hassan beat Ovide Lamontagne by as wide a margin as she did (55-42).  Apparently the polls had showed a closer race, and many people she knew were convinced that bias meant the Republicans were actually leading.

I ended up driving back to New Hampshire with her, and I started to see where some of the problem had come up.  At least on the route I take, the roads were COVERED in Romney/Ryan and Lamontagne signs.  They outnumbered Obama/Biden and Hassan signs by quite a bit.

I was reflecting that I’ve heard that’s the point of signs….to give the impression that there is a majority for one candidate, and that you are going against all of your neighbors if you vote otherwise.  I wondered how many people saw those signs and had at least some of that influence there opinions of the polls.  There can’t be that many people voting for the other guy….I see hundreds of signs every morning that say otherwise.

This is yet another example of where proxy markers can fail.  Political signs along major routes reflect the dedication of a few, not necessarily the opinion of the many.