Cool kids and linguistic pragmatism

/ bs king / 5 Comments

Yesterday a facebook friend of mine put up an angry post regarding misuse of the word “decimate”.  His chief complaint was that people used it as a synonym for destroy, when really it meant a reduction of 10% or so.  That cleared up the “deci” part of the word for me, but I was surprised that the proper definition was so narrow….so of course I went to dictionary.com to check his facts.

Turns out the “one in ten” definition is specifically marked as obsolete.  The current accepted definition is merely “to destroy a great number of”.  So basically it can’t be used to sub in for obliterate, but the 10% definition was only valid through the year 1600 or so.  Sigh.

I’m not a big fan of people who try to get too cute when picking on the language of others.  While I certainly am irritated by some of the more obvious errors in language (irregardless makes me cringe, and please don’t mix up “less” and “fewer” in my presence), I dislike when people go back several hundred verbal years and then attempt to claim that’s the “proper” way of doing things.  This annoys me enough that my brother bought me this book a few years ago, just to help me out.  I believe language will always be morphing to a certain extent, and while rules are good we just need to accept that all language is pretty much arbitrary.  Thus, I refer to myself as a linguistic pragmatist.  Adhere to the rules, but accept that sometimes society just moves on.

Why am I bringing this up?  Well, after going through that internal rant, I found it very interesting that this study is being reported with the headline “Popular kids who tortured you in high school are now rich“.

Basically, researchers assessed how popular kids were in high school, based on how many people gave you “friendship nominations” and found that those in the top 20% made 10% more money 40 years later than those in the bottom 20%.

Now I think this makes a certain amount of sense.  While the outcast nerd makes good story is appealing, it stands to reason that many of the least popular kids in high school might be unpopular because of real issues with social skills that hurt them later in life (to note, social skill impairment is a co-morbidity with all sorts of things that could make this worse….ADHD, depression, etc).  Conversely of course, those with more friends probably have skills that help them maintain networks later.  Basically, I think this study tells us that the number of friends you have in high school isn’t totally random.

My issues with the reporting/reading of this study is in the semantics.  I think there’s a disconnect between our common interpretation of “popular in high school” and the actual definition of “popular in high school”.  The researchers in this study weren’t assessing the kids other kids aspired to be, they were assessing the kids who actually had lots of friends and were well liked.  While the classic football player who beats up kids in the locker room may get referred to as a popular kid, it’s likely he would not have had many people naming him as a friend on a survey.  So basically, the study had a built in control for those kids who were temporarily at the top of the social ladder, but lacked actual getting along with people skills.  I had an incredibly small high school class (<30) and I could name several kids who fell in the "perceived popular" category but not the "actually popular" category.

All this to come back to my original point.  Words mean different things depending on context, and this should always be taken in to account when assessing research and reading subsequent report.  It’s not bad data, just a different set of definitions.

Bond by Numbers

/ bs king / 5 Comments

Little known fact:  I once spent a summer watching every James Bond movie ever made, in order.

Thus, I enjoyed this chart from the Economist about the differences between the Bonds.

By themselves they’re fairly fluff, watching them in order shows some interesting things about societal trends. Everything from the theme song, special effects and villians to the choice of Bond girl to the demeanor of Bond himself shows a lot about what the particular era valued.  I’m sure there’s been a PhD thesis written on this somewhere, it’s really quite fascinating.
Sean Connery was my favorite Bond, though I did like On Her Majesties Secret Service more than most.  Daniel Craig updated the series nicely for my generation, making it quite a bit darker than previous years.  

Elections and small sample sizes

/ bs king / 1 Comment

XKCD hits the nail on the head yet again with a great commentary on election year “no one has ever _____ and won the White House” musings.

These drive me nuts because obviously we have an incredibly small sample size.  Our country may have been around for quite some time now, but we’ve only had 44 presidents.  Think about how few people that really is.

Additionally, states change, demographics change, and the electoral college system is ridiculous.  This gives rise to all sorts of statistical “anomalies” that really are quite probable when you think of how few events we’re looking at.

The sports world does this too, baseball probably more than the rest of them.  While watching the post season this year with my long suffering Oriole’s fan husband, we got quite a kick out of pointing out how specific some of the stats they brought up were.  “He’s 1 for 3 when facing Sabathia during the post season over the last 3 years”.  Four at bats over a whole career and we’re supposed to draw some sort of conclusion from this?  Sigh.

Anyway, here’s the comic.  Happy Thursday.

Lance Armstrong and False Positives

/ bs king / 4 Comments

Well the talk went well.

I’m waiting for the official rating (people fill out anonymous evals), but there seemed to be a lot of interest….and more importantly I got quite a few compliments on the unique approach.  Giving people something new in the “how to get along” genre was my goal, so I was pleased.

Between that and having 48 hours to pull together another abstract for submission to a transplant conference, posting got slow.

It was interesting though….the project I was writing the abstract was about a new test we introduced that saved patients over an hour of waiting time IF it came out above a certain level.  We had hours of discussion about where that should be, ultimately deciding that we had to minimize false positives (times when the test said they passed but a better test said they failed) at the cost of driving up false negatives (when the test said they failed, but they really hadn’t).  We have to perform the more accurate test regardless, so it was a choice between having a patient wait unnecessarily, or having them start an expensive uncomfortable procedure unnecessarily.  Ethically and reasonably, we decided most patients would rather find out they’d waited when they didn’t have to than that they’d gotten an entirely unnecessary procedure.

I bring all this up both to excuse my absence and to say I was fascinated by Kaiser Fung’s take on Lance Armstrong.  He goes in depth about anti-doping tests, hammering on the point that testing agencies will accept high false negatives to minimize false positives.  It would ruin their credibility to falsely accuse someone, so we have to presume many many dopers test clean at various points in time.  It follows then, that clean tests mean fairly little, while other evidence means quite a lot.

I thought that was an interesting point, one I had certainly not heard covered.

Also, as any Orioles fan (or someone who lives with one) would know, I have good reason to want Raul Ibanez tested right now.

More posts this week than last, I promise.

Weekend of Distraction

/ bs king / 4 Comments

Posting’s been a bit slow this week, as I’ve been ridiculously distracted by an upcoming conference this weekend.

On the plus side, if anyone cares to hear my thoughts on inter-professional differences in communication and conflict, I’ll be speaking on it Sunday morning at 8:30am at the AABB meeting at the Boston Convention Center.

Normally my public speaking style is fairly laid back and has some improvising….but as I haven’t been able to string too many coherent sentences together for the past few weeks post-baby, I’m a little nervous about this talk.  Thus blogging time has turned in to “practice your talk” time.  I’m hoping that winds up being a good trade.

Any prayers/good vibes/happy thoughts would be appreciated.

Also, you’d like my talk.  I use the sentence “so this is a little kumbaya, why should care in the real world?”.

I think that sentence should be used in all talks about how to get along in the workplace.

I also raise the idea that diversity of thought is an incredibly under recognized aspect of diversity, and that’s not a good thing.

I think that idea should come up in every talk where the word “diversity” is mentioned.

More beer and politics

/ bs king / 1 Comment

I have a love hate relationship with graphs like these (from the National Journal).

On the hate side – implications of correlation and causation, using random variables to grab headlines.

On the love side – oh!  colors!  bubbles!  Fun!!!!!

The data for this one actually looks pretty good….survey results for over 200,000 people….and the survey was done by a polling group and not, say a beer manufacturer.

A pretty good breakdown of some of the data is here.  They point out some funny things, like the proximity of Romney campaign headquarters to the Sam Adams brewery, and that the most likely Dems to turn out actually drink a Canadian beer (Molson).

Shiner Bock makes sense to me as I’ve only seen it sold in Texas and parts thereabout, and Corona always makes me think of the spring break crowd.

I’m a hard cider girl myself, though that’s due to an allergy.  I guess it is true that I skew Democrat, but mostly because in Massachusetts all your local races are pretty much uncontested Dems….so I probably have voted for vastly more Dems than Repubs in my life.

I’d like to see a bit of a note on how the size of the circle relates to absolute number of people (is that Lone Star drinker in the corner just one guy or 10?) but overall, this is fun.  It will definitely compliment the debate drinking game well.  Stay thirsty my friends.

Weekend moment of Zen 9-30-12

/ bs king / 2 Comments

I spent a whole summer making my way through Ulysses, and still had to read the Cliff’s notes to figure out what the heck was going on….but the idea of turning books in to pie charts makes me pretty happy:

Housekeeping

/ bs king

Well, it’s a gloomy weekend here, but luckily I have a good book to curl up with, thanks to my fabulous younger brother.  I’ve mentioned Nate Silver’s 538 blog as one of my favorites for breaking down election/political statistics, and it turns out he has a new book out.  Before I could figure out if I wanted to buy it or not, it showed up at my door, courtesy of Amazon.com and my brother Tim.  Review to follow I’m sure.

Next, I set up a new email address for this blog, in case any of my wonderful readers should stumble across any studies you think would work well on this site.  My time has been a bit crunched post-baby, so I’d appreciate any interesting articles to spur more posting.  If you see one, feel free to send it to baddatabad at gmail dot com (or hit the email me button on my profile).

That’s it for now, have a lovely weekend!

Pacifiers and baby boys

/ bs king / 5 Comments

I’m a bit behind on this one, but this study was too interesting to pass up.

Apparently, research suggests that pacifier use by boys limits their social development.

So we’ll start with the bias alert.  I have a baby boy, and he does use a pacifier to help him go to sleep.  I didn’t have any particular feelings about this, I just gave it a whirl and liked the way it helped him calm down when he was tired.  Give it 5 minutes, and he tends to spit it out and go to sleep.  That seemed rational to me, I actually was unaware there was much controversy about this until I got reading this article (reiterating Dubbahdee’s point that I should never read parenting advice on the internet….oops).

Obviously, I don’t yet know what his social development is going to turn out like (though at the moment he’s astoundingly unsympathetic to my lack of sleep), but I generally hope it’s okay.   End bias alert.

It took me a while to find the actual paper (why oh why do so many news sources not link to the actual paper????), but after scanning the whole thing I had a couple thoughts.

The headlines about this paper were stupid, of course.  The author actually had a pretty good theory based on actual science (babies learn emotions in part through mimicry, she wondered if a pacifier would make this harder for babies because their facial muscles were occupied), and of course it got over reported. Most headlines just mentioned “pacifier use” in general, but she clarifies pretty quickly that they only studied pacifier use during baby wake time….specifically excluding the type of pacifier use I described above (as a sleep aid).  This makes sense (the woman does have 3 boys herself after all) because you don’t have to spend very long around babies before you realize they’re probably not learning much when they’re trying to fall asleep.  They’re mostly just crying.

Anyway, the set up for the study was pretty good.  They assessed both 6 and 7 year olds and their emotional reactions vs pacifier use, and then later college students who were questioned about their history of pacifier usage to tie it to adult development.

For that second, I was curious about the length of pacifier use we were talking about, as this was based on the recollection of college students and their parents, and I was wondering how accurate that would be.  This graph sums it up nicely:

I’m not familiar with the emotional intelligence scale they’re using, so I’ll take their word for it that 4.7 to 4.4 is statistically significant….but wow, daytime use of a pacifier until 5 years of age?  That does seem like it should cause some concern.  Also, it seems as those the recollection bias here would be clustered at either end.  Parents would remember more accurately either remarkably short or remarkably long pacifier use…but that’s just a guess.

Overall, I thought it was annoying that “daytime use of pacifiers until kindergarten” got labeled as just “pacifier use”, but I thought the research was certainly intriguing.  I especially liked that they tested both younger children and adults to help prove their theory, as emotional development is most definitely a complex process that takes decades to work through.

What I actually liked about this study the most was Ann Althouse’s take on it.  She wondered if this meant you could stop overly emotional women from being overly emotional by giving them Botox so they couldn’t mimic those around them.  I’d say it’s worth a shot.