Political Arithmetic – Voter ID laws

/ bs king / 3 Comments

Update: Link fixed

Last week I put up a post slamming an infographic on fair market rent between states.  I was interested in the AVIs response, which end with “These are advocacy numbers.  Not the same as actual reality.”

Advocacy and other political skewings of data are one of those things that shouldn’t bother me, but do.  
I read headlines, knowing that I’m going to be driven nuts but the presumptions and projections, and yet I read things anyway.  It’s a bad habit.
All that being said, I truly enjoyed Nate Silver’s examination of the real effect voter ID laws might have on voter turnout in various states. 
He attempts to cut through all the partisan hoopla and to do a one person point-counterpoint.  An example:

But some implied that Democratic-leaning voting groups, especially African-Americans and Hispanics, were more likely to be affected. Others found that educational attainment was the key variable in predicting whom these laws might disenfranchise, with race being of secondary importance. If that’s true, some white voters without college degrees could also be affected, and they tend to vote Republican.

He also makes a fascinating point about the cult of statistical significance:

Statistical significance, however, is a funny concept. It has mostly to do with the volume of data that you have, and the sampling error that this introduces. Effects that may be of little practical significance can be statistically significant if you have tons and tons of data. Conversely, findings that have some substantive, real-world impact may not be deemed statistically significant, if the data is sparse or noisy.

On the whole, he concludes it will swing in the Republican direction for this election, but reminds everyone:

One last thing to consider: although I do think these laws will have some detrimental effect on Democratic turnout, it is unlikely to be as large as some Democrats fear or as some news media reports imply — and they can also serve as a rallying point for the party bases. So although the direct effects of these laws are likely negative for Democrats, it wouldn’t take that much in terms of increased base voter engagement — and increased voter conscientiousness about their registration status — to mitigate them. 

The whole article is long but a great read about how to assess policy changes if you’re trying to get to the truth, rather than just prove a political point.

Weekend moment of Zen 7-14-12

/ bs king

No comic, but a mildly humorous anecdote:

My wonderful husband and I took a child birth education class today.  The teacher was excellent, and spent a lot of time emphasizing that there were lots of different opinions about lots of things, but the focus should always be having a healthy baby/healthy mom.

She repeated this several times (clearly trying to avoid having any natural childbirth vs epidural debates) and then mentioned that you could read plenty of research about all sorts of different aspects of childbirth, but that it was really important to assess sample size, who did the study, etc etc.

I started to laugh a bit, and she looked at me and said “no really, you would not believe how many bad studies there are out there!”.

Needless to say, I enjoyed this teacher immensely.

My kind of class right there.

Moral obligations and Lazy Truth

/ bs king / 3 Comments
I was going to include this in a Friday link post, but I really felt it deserved it’s own spotlight.  

There’s a new gmail gadget called “Lazy Truth” that promises to send you a fact check email every time you receive a (forwarded) email it deems to be of dubious content.

I haven’t tried it, so I’m not sure what it’s set up to flag, or how accurate the “fact check” email is, but I was immediately intrigued.  I’ve actually been working on a much longer post that covers just this topic, so it’s something I’ve been giving a lot of thought.

I’ve been mulling over the rise of Facebook/email/Twitter lately, and wondering…..for those of us who value our integrity and our truthfulness, and do not believe ends justify means, what exactly are the moral implications of hitting forward or share on information that we could have easily proven to be false if we’d checked?

I was wondering if I was the only one worried about this, when I came across a blog post from Dr Michael Eades.  He’s a pro-low carb physician, who spends much of his time critiquing nutritional research.  In a post about the book “The China Study”, he describes finding what he consider a great critique of it on another person’s blog.  Then this:

…. I had fallen victim to the confirmation bias.  My bias was that Dr. Campbell was wrong, so I was more than happy to uncritically accept evidence confirming his error without lifting a finger to double check said evidence myself.  I knew that if a blogger somewhere had come out with a long post describing an analysis of the China study demonstrating the validity of all of Dr. Campbell’s notions of the superiority of the plant-based diet, I would’ve been all over it looking for analytical errors.  But since Ms. Minger’s work accorded with my own beliefs, my confirmation bias ensured that I accepted it at face value. 

Once the fact that I had succumbed to my confirmation bias settled in around me, I became suffused with angst.  I had tweeted and retweeted Ms. Minger’s analysis a number of times, giving the impression that I had at least minimally checked it out and had approved it.  I had emailed it to a number of people, many of whom, I’m sure, had forwarded it on.  I’m sure I played a fairly large role in the rapid dissemination of the anti Campbell/China study info.

In the end, he went back and realized that the post was good, but his panic attack was intriguing to me.  How many of us have had this same panic?  How many of us should have?  How many lousy graphs rip through Facebook like wildfire because no one bothers to double check if they’re even valid?  Is the liar the person who created the graph, or do those who share it share some blame?

I don’t pretend I have an answer for this.  I feel most of the people interested enough to read this blog probably do not fall in the category of those who would easily share skewed information without thinking about it, but I am hoping for some thoughts/feedback from you all.

Are we so used to hearing politicians of all stripes seamlessly repeat bad data that we’ve come to view it as acceptable?  Is this just a fact of life?  Is it possible that we will be saved by widgets like the one above?   Does religion matter, or is this an overall moral issue? Does confrontation work with this sort of thing?  Or is this something I just have to learn to live with?

Soviet Propaganda, Infographic Style

/ bs king / 6 Comments

In “How to Lie With Statistics“, the author frequently comments about Soviet Propaganda and how bad it is. Being a member of a cynical generation, Huff’s annoyance at an oppressive regime using data skewing to seem better than it was seemed almost quaint….I mean of course they were.

Even given my cynicism and lack of Russian skills, I have to admit these infographics from the Duke U library are pretty interesting.

This one’s my favorite, because none of the bar heights make any sense:

Moral of the story?  Every time you share a bad infographic, the Communists win.

Good hospital/Bad hospital

/ bs king / 5 Comments

Several years ago, back when I was working in the Emergency Department, I had a rather fascinating encounter with a patient’s wife.  It was late in the evening on a Friday….a generally bad time to come in to the ER….and she had brought her husband in with a large cut on his arm.  He needed stitches for sure, but the place was hopping that night, and so she, her husband, and her two small children had been stuck in the waiting room for several hours.  After some time, she had come in asking me when someone was going to come get him.  At that point, I think they still had 4 or 5 people ahead of them, and I let her know.  

She (fairly understandably) flipped out.  
As I tried to calm her down, she started to lecture me about how long they had been waiting….and then proceeded to let me know that this wait had come after she had driven her husband over an hour and a half to get there.  “You are SUPPOSED to be the best hospital in the country” she raged.  “How can you be if you make patients wait so long????”.
Now I had the “why am I waiting so long” conversation with literally thousands of patients in my time in the ER, but something really struck me about this poor woman’s frustration.  She had brought her husband to a hospital that was supposed to be the best (this particular hospital bounces around the top 5 in the country pretty routinely), but not for what he needed done that night.  What he needed was a simple set of stitches, the likes of which nearly any doctor in the country could have done.  When I took a look at her address, I realized she had driven by at least five different hospitals with ERs to get to ours.  Most likely any one of them would have gotten her faster service with the same quality of care.  In fact, within the next few years, three of them would devise marketing strategies around publicizing that fact.  The problem is, this woman had confused “the best” with “good at everything”.  
When it comes to hospitals, that’s just not true.
Given my professional experience, I was unsurprised  to see Time reporting that not one of the 17 best hospitals (according to US News and World Report) made the consumer reports list of safest hospitals.  
There’s a couple reasons for this, some good and some bad:
  1. Best hospitals tend to be large teaching hospitals.  Large teaching hospitals have a lot of residents. Residents can be a little dicey.
  2. Best hospitals tend to see huge numbers of patients.  This can complicate things.
  3. Best hospitals tend to see cases other hospitals can’t help.  Almost all of your top hospitals will have higher mortality rates than smaller community hospitals.  Why?  Because unless you’re literally DOA, the first thing a small hospital will do with a really sick patient is to ship them off to a hospital with a good intensive care unit.  The top hospitals almost never transfer their patients.
  4. Best hospitals are ranked in large part on how they treat the toughest cases.  The more unique your condition, or the worse your risk factors, the more selective you need to be.  The more routine your complaint, the more a top hospital can actually work against you….you’re going to be one of many, and nothing makes you stand out.
  5. Large medical centers, specifically in urban settings, give away a lot of free care to a lot of high risk populations.  These patients are unlikely to do well in any setting, and can skew the data tremendously.  Location counts.
There’s constant strife over how to accurately rank hospitals, because professionals skew hospital rankings in the direction of valuing medical uniqueness.  Patients on the other hand, tend to value things like “comfort of chairs in the waiting room” nearly as high as they do “physician competence”.  Patient’s also claim to want things that they don’t really….for example nearly everyone says they value physician competence over bedside manner, yet patient’s routinely rate physicians with good bedside manner higher than those with good technical skill.  Patient’s receiving appropriate care also file plenty of complaints if it wasn’t the care they expected.  No hospital ranking is going to hit every part of the hospital equally regardless of who ranks it, and every department can have a bad day.   
I don’t have a lot of answers to these issues, but it’s important to keep them in mind when you hear ideas for improvement.  While the Time article got a bit too political for my taste, it is true that patients can only make informed decisions if the information they have is what they think it is.

19 women don’t like sports

/ bs king / 3 Comments

Normally this is the sort of thing Joseph’s blog specializes in, but I couldn’t let this one slide.

I’ve spent all of last week and this week listening to construction workers traipsing around my basement, working diligently to finish it so we can finally have the sports room my husband’s impressive memorabilia collection deserves.  Thus, it distressed me a bit to see the headline that married women only watch sports for the sake of their husbands.  Is my interest in the sports room one big lie? Has my Red Sox fandom all been a fraud?  Should I toss out all my vintage basketball cards from the 80s?  And football…..okay, I actually didn’t like it all that much until I got married.  I’ll give you that one.  Two out of three ain’t bad.

Anyway, I pretty amused when Jezebel and other’s quickly pointed out that the sample size for this study was 19.     19 women, all from around the University of Tennessee.  In case you’re curious, The Bleacher Report ranked Knoxville the 44th best sports town in the USA.  Maybe my perception is skewed because Boston’s #2, but I’m not sure that’s an overly representative sample from an overly representative town.

Get some good Southie girls together and ask them what they think, I bet you’ll get a wicked different picture.

Fair Market Rent and Another Dubious Infographic

/ bs king / 5 Comments

I’ve seen this infographic a few places now, and it has been causing me some furrowed brow time:

Supposedly, this is a graphic showing how many hours you would have to work per week at a minimum wage job in order to afford a two bedroom apartment in each of the given states.  This version appears to be a year or so out of date, but here’s the original report.
I had all sorts of questions about this when I saw it, so of course I went digging.  
To clarify the parameters, affordable is defined to mean 30% of income, and this chart assumes only one income earner per apartment.  Availability of low income housing or other programs is not taken in to account, which is probably where I find this chart most misleading.  Massachusetts has a fairly extensive Section 8 housing program, and from my understanding New York and California do as well.  I couldn’t find a ranking for the state distribution of aid levels, but I’d wager the less affordable the state, the more they give out in assistance.
As for the fair market value rents….I couldn’t find where they got their figure from.  Rents in Massachusetts vary wildly between the 3 largest city areas.  Boston rents run high….mostly because students rent most of the apartments near the colleges.  Springfield and Worcester however are much cheaper.  The MA website for Section 8 housing cites the difference between Boston and Worcester as almost $450 a month.  It appears the number used above is an average of several areas.  
If you dig further in the report however, it becomes even more interesting.  Apparently New England is the only section of the country that doesn’t report whole counties when reporting fair market rates for renters, New England only reports rates for metro areas and surrounding communities.  Is the northeast really that much pricier than the rest of the country, or does their reporting just make them look that way?
While I ultimately appreciate the issue at hand with this chart, I think it would be nice to see a more comprehensive chart including states efforts to address the high housing cost.  On the chart above, NH appears slightly more affordable, but if you google “section 8 housing nh” you will find a lot of people telling you to save yourself the trouble and move to Massachusetts.  Bigger cities tend to mean higher rents AND more social programs.  Throwing them all in to one big average is not the best way of representing information in a usable fashion.

Humor, Gender, and YouTube Research

/ bs king / 2 Comments

While peer reviewed research is the gold standard for results, sometimes more informal research can be pretty darn interesting.  I got sent an interesting informal study this week that I thought was quite fascinating despite (or perhaps because?) it lacked typical rigor.

This study was based on humor and gender.  Now, as a matter of course most gender research annoys me.  Gender is the biggest subgroup you can have (3.5 billion of each, give or take) and any conclusions you draw must be taken with the knowledge that much of the data will vary wildly.  This is fine if your goal is something like, oh advertising that will appeal to a larger number of women or men in specific.  However, if your goal is to address something to a specific man or woman (like say therapy) gender generalizations can only give hints of paths to follow, and will rarely tell the story for one person.  One of the bigger challenges couples therapists face is actually convincing clients that it doesn’t matter what most men do, it matters what your spouse does, and vice versa.

Quick example: Back in the day when it used to be a novel idea that a woman would be Secretary of State, I remember having someone tell me that women would be bad at international diplomacy because your average woman was more emotional than your average man.  I had never thought about it before, but I remember retorting that I sincerely hoped that we never had an average woman in a position that high, as I was sure we had probably had never had an average man.  On average, nobody should be Secretary of State.

I thought about some of this when the AVI forwarded me this Steve Sailer post about men being funnier than women.  Humor is another tricky subject to study, and you put it together with gender and you can get bogged down for forever in questions and caveats.  Humor is in large part a cultural construct (watch the British, German, and French versions of The Office and you’ll see what I mean), and even within humor there are always questions about who is “truly” funny.  Commercially successful comedians?  Indie comics?  Their TV shows and movies or their stand-up days?  Or are we just talking about cocktail party chatter and our friends?  Also, the kind of humor you like has a lot to do with who you think is funny…puns?  Situational comedy, pranks, physical comedy, LOL cats?  My personal favorite comedy brand is the Comedy Central Roasts and South Park.  However you answer these questions though, I think it’s important to note that your average person is not terribly funny to anyone outside their own circle.


Quick example:  This is only funny for those who both appreciate farming humor and know who LMFAO is.  Since I listen to the radio and grew up on a farm, it made me laugh pretty hard:




That being said, I thought the research Kyria Abrahams did was truly enlightening.  She went through and found 10 unknown but rising comedians, and wrote down all the topics they made jokes about.  Then she postulated that the list of mens topics was more varied and more interesting to a broader audience than the women’s list.  Take a look and see if you agree:

Female Comics

Apartment is annoying
Bathroom attendants
Being a female comedian (x2)
Cosmo Magazine
Dating is awkward (x2)
Diamonds
Did poorly in school
Doesn’t want kids because she’s “selfish”
Gay marriage
Gynecologists/pap smears
Hangovers
Hates New York
Her body (x2)
Her mom (x2)
Her vagina
How guys hit on her
It’s hard being a woman, putting on makeup, and wearing heels and stuff
Jizz
Just got engaged
Just went through a breakup
Masturbation
Roommate is annoying
Sex and condoms
She’s flat-chested
She’s fat
She’s too pretty to do standup (x2)
What she’s wearing
What/who she looks like (x2)
Yoga
Male comics:
Alaska
Being thanked on an elevator
Clichés people use
Free AIDS clinics
God won’t help you bowl/God doesn’t exist
Having sex with animals
His name
Holding the phone between your ear and shoulder
How to treat AIDS
If the Jews killed Jesus
Jail shows
Mayan 2012 prediction
People asking him where he’s from
Pickle juice
The “ethnic needs” section of the supermarket
The age of sliced bread
The Cyclone at Coney Island
The Roman Empire
The storylines behind rollercoasters
Vegan soul food
What/who he looks like (x2)
White chocolate is racist

So yes….the men’s topics are more unexpected, fresher, and more likely to be funny than the women’s.  Now whether that’s because women are getting pigeonholed or what, I can’t say, but I had to appreciate this addition to the conversation.  While I have seen plenty of discussion regarding men and women and who is funnier, I had never seen someone actually try to tease out what comedians were talking about when we assessed their humor.  It’s an important variable, and her data suggests a big discrepancy.  If women changed this would it close the gap?  Who knows, but it’s an interesting thought.  To act like the gender/humor question only has one moving variable (the listener’s sexism) is to reduce two extremely complex topics down to nothing.  Mentioning other variables is not sexist (as Kyria was accused of in her comments section) it’s just good research.

The moral of the story?  Keep average people off my TV, when I want comedy, I want exceptional.

Friday Fun Links 7-6-12

/ bs king / 1 Comment

Between the heat and being 8 months pregnant, running to catch the bus is pretty much more than I can handle these days.  Still, it’s nice to know my age doesn’t preclude me from competing in the Olympics.  

Apparently I’m on the wrong end of the bell shaped curve if I want to win a medal though….

If sports aren’t your thing, how about a summer romance?  What, you’re trapped in the friend zone?  Here’s the stats on whether you should try to get out or not.

No summer vacation?  Stuck at work?  Use data?  Here’s Juice Analytics new chart chooser (2.0) to help figure out how best to present your data.  Haven’t tried it yet, but it looks awesome.

I’ve written before about retractions and their impact on public trust…but this was pretty stunning.  Yoshitaka Fujii, a Japanese anesthesiologist, has been found to have faked data in 172 published studies, dating back to 1993.  That’s a record.

My bff from college is from West Virginia, and always told me that coal is a big deal there.  Turns out she wasn’t exaggerating….apparently it matters more than political party in how people vote.

James over at I don’t know but…. had a good post about the inaccuracies in the reporting about the Higgs boson.  Went more in depth than I could have, for sure.

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