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.

Think I’ll have myself a beer

/ bs king / 5 Comments

Well, I made it through the first work “week”, though not without getting on the wrong commuter rail on the way home and winding up quite a few miles away from anywhere familiar.  Did I mention I then got threatened by a 14 year old who seemed to think I was mildly out of line for being at the train stop when she wanted to smoke pot there with her friends?  Because I did.  Sigh*.

Given all that, this chart from the Economist seemed appropriate.

I like this graphic because it juxtaposes two interesting things….average wages and the price of alcohol.  I had no idea the Brits and Aussie’s were paying so much for their booze, but it’s interesting to see how well the developed world still comes out in this.

I did have to wonder whether this was average beer prices or lowest cost beer, and for what region.  I actually am allergic to beer, so I’m not sure if that $1.80 for 500 mL (17 oz or so) is accurate or common.  Seemed a bit low to me, but it’s likely because it’s part of a retail price for a six pack, not the bar prices I’ve seen.

Regardless, I was glad to see that if I needed to do some drinking, I’m apparently in the right country for it.

*In case you’re curious how I fared in this encounter with the Roslindale hooligans, the answer is strangely.  I was pretty over the top upset about the train thing (it was unmarked with a broken PA system so I couldn’t even correct my mistake quickly as they weren’t announcing any stops).  In my tired still post-partum hormonal state, I really couldn’t handle this child attempting to impress her friends, and ended up rolling my eyes at her and walking off with a “Fine, whatever”.  I think she was genuinely surprised by that response, couldn’t think of a comeback and then I was gone.  It occurred to me later that I had quite possibly just out teenagered a teenager.  

Ultimately, my very sweet husband came and found me, which was quite nice of him.

Workin’ for the Man

/ bs king / 3 Comments

I’m headed back to work today.  It’s a bit early, but in exchange I get to work part time through Thanksgiving.

Given that, I thought this headline made for a good blog post today: “Is Opting Out the New American Dream for Working Women?“.  In a survey by ForbesWomen and TheBump.com, they found that:

84% of working women told ForbesWoman and TheBump that staying home to raise children is a financial luxury they aspire to.What’s more, more than one in three resent their partner for not earning enough to make that dream a reality.

Yikes.

Subsequently I saw several bloggers reference the fact that “84% of women want to be stay at home moms”, so I decided to do a little digging.  What did this survey really say?  Well, Forbes published more about the survey here.

Weirdly, in that recap, the only time the 84% number is mentioned is in reference to women believing staying at home is a financial luxury, leading me to be more than a little curious as to how they phrased the question.  Do 84% of women actively want to stay at home, or do 84% of women wish they had enough money that they got to make the choice?  This quote from the article lead me to believe perhaps we were really discussing something rather than prioritizing staying at home with the kids:

As one (working) mom of two told me, she may dream of leaving work to take care of her kids, but the (financial) reality of it is not so ideal. “Sure, if my husband made so much money that I could spend time with the kids, still afford great vacations and maybe the occasional baby sitter to take a class or go out with friends, I’d be the first to sign up,” she said. “So maybe while it’s a luxury I do think about, it’s not one I would want unless it was actually luxurious. I don’t want to be a stay at home mom who clips coupons or plans her weekly menu to make ends meet… If that’s the case, I’d gladly go on working to avoid that fate.”

So it sounds like at least some of the respondents were focused less on wanting to opt out of the workplace to raise their kids, and more on wanting to have enough money to keep their standard of living while not feeling pressured to work.  Two slightly but significantly different things IMHO.  I have rarely seen a stay at home mom who didn’t strive to make the household more financially efficient while at home, so this dream seemed a bit divorced from reality. This is backed up by the survey’s additional result that only half of working women think they’d be happier if they stayed home.  I’d also guess most of us would be happier if we had enough money to completely call the shots regarding where we worked.

Of course none of this addresses the totally skewed sample that comes from two websites joining up to do a survey like this.  Doubtless ForbesWomen/TheBump do not attract a random crowd.  Additionally, it should be concerning to our sense of family that 1/3 of women are resenting their husbands for not making more money….though to note the survey used the phrase “sometimes resent” while the article merely used “resent”.

A side note about this survey….one of the last questions was about how much women spent on themselves per month.  Most (63% of working moms, 78% of stay at home mom’s) said they spent less than $100 a month on themselves.  Every time I see a question like this, I always wonder where people count cable TV and haircuts.  When I was getting my degree, they mentioned that during premarital counseling you should always ask the woman how much she thought a reasonable haircut cost.  Apparently that one expenditure can cause a lot of fights.  I definitely know women who believe a basic haircut costs $80 or more.

All that being said, I’m going to miss my little monkey today, but I’m happy to have a job I love to go back to, I don’t resent my husband, and I think a reasonable haircut for a woman costs $40.

Rule 6D

/ bs king / 1 Comment

After yesterday’s post about “the way things were” I thought of one more subreason why this isn’t always a strong argument.

I’ve been reading the Game of Thrones series, as have many folks in my general set of friends.  For those of you who haven’t read the books, they’re set in a psuedo-middle ages fantasy realm (summer lasts for 9 years, dragons exist, etc).  Anyhow, twice in the past few months I’ve gotten in to a discussion about the books in a group and had someone mention “how awful things were back then”.  Each time of course, someone pointed out that these books are not historical fiction and not meant to be an accurate representation of any time period.  Of course the person making the mistake laughed.

These are not intentional gaffes, but strongly written fiction can convince us we learned something about a way of life that may or may not have existed.

It’s often mentioned in Christian circles that more of our visuals of hell come from Dante’s Inferno than from Biblical description.

The point is, when you have a strong picture in your mind about a time period, make sure it didn’t just come from a good book.

Rule #6

/ bs king / 3 Comments

Since posting my 5 rules for reading science papers online, I’ve been pondering if I missed anything.  Something  in Erin’s comment on the matter about “experts” tearing in to new mother’s because they didn’t feed their child organic yak’s milk from a glass bottle with a hemp nipple reminded me of a whole genre of ridiculousness I missed.

          6. Be very wary of those whose main argument is “we did this for thousands of years so it must be the best way of doing things”.   Now listen, I actually don’t mind this logic for lots of things.  I confess, I’m one of those people who likes more natural things in general (ESPECIALLY peanut butter.  I HATE peanut butter with anything other than peanuts and salt.)  So I get why the train of though appeals to people.  HOWEVER, in the absence of supporting evidence, it’s not a real argument most of the time.  There’s a couple of subreasons for this:
  • Most people saying this don’t actually know how many people did whatever they’re claiming or for how long.  They’re not anthropologists.  To say that all primitive people ate this or raised their children like that is probably a bit reductionist.  
  • The lifespan in “the good old days” was abysmal.  Yes, they might have fed their infants yak’s milk or eaten saber tooth tiger raw, but many of those children died before the age of 5.  It’s called “survivor bias”, and it means you have to be careful to remember that you only get to see how the people that lived through the whole thing turned out.  Some advances in technology are pretty categorically good, and if you’re going to try to live more “back to the earth” you should remember that you’re probably going to have to be a little selective about this if you want to live past 35 or so.
  • Lots of practices from ancient times are dismissed pretty out of hand these days, we’re selective about the ones we glorify.  I remember the first time I really read the Bible’s retelling of the Moses story and had to ask my mother what a “wet nurse” was.  I was horrified.  Most people today who go with “natural” practices would never consider handing their child off to a stranger to breastfeed, and yet other practices are held up as the ideal.  Our forefathers/foremothers got a lot of things wrong.  On second thought…..I feel the whole wet nurse comeback is due for a comeback….anyone want to try to write a book for rich parents about how this is what you’d do if you really loved your child?
I’m sure there’s more, but now I have a craving for yak’s milk.  I hope my local Whole Foods is open early.