Rich Mom Poor Mom

/ bs king / 3 Comments

I have a sleeping baby in my lap, so you’ll forgive me if I have a one track mind.

Yesterday we met with a nurse who let us know that in Sweden, they have now set minimums for skin to skin contact between mom and babies during hospital stays.  If you don’t do the minimum, you pay the hospital bill.  This morning, in my first perusal around the internet in a few days, I see that Mayor Bloomberg is trying to find ways of encouraging new mother’s to breastfeed.

A note on research regarding babies and various practices in infancy:  Babies are a lot of work.  I realize I’m preaching to the choir on this, as many of my readers have successfully raised quite a few children, but it’s true.  Many of the practices that show lots of benefits for babies (skin to skin contact, breastfeeding, etc) take even more time than the alternatives.  While I believe these things are good for babies on their own, all data collected on these practices will be complicated by the fact that parents who engage in them tend to have more time, resources, and support than those who don’t.  Pushing these practices on those who are already particularly stressed may not have as profound an outcome as it did in the study, as the groups went from self selecting to random.

Something to think about for the policy makers.

Sorry, I’ve been reading over a lot of hospital literature and getting mildly annoyed.  I think that means the pain medication has worn off.  Nurse!

New data point

/ bs king / 8 Comments

Today I would like to announce the start of a new study, with n=1.  Results will trickle in sporadically from here on in.

His name is Finn.

This morning I spent a few minutes explaining to him about correlation and causation, and his uncle took confirmation bias.  I think he understood.

They say the best data can be explained in pictures, so I’ll leave you with this:

Good data, good.  Please excuse some sporadic posting for a bit!

International data – beware the self reporting

/ bs king / 2 Comments

Maybe it’s just because the Olympics are on, but I’ve run in to a few interesting international statistics lately that gave me pause.

The first was regarding infant mortality.  After Aaron Sorkin’s new show The Newsroom incorrectly reported that the US was 178th in infant mortality (really, you think there are 177 countries you’d rather give birth in?), I went looking for the infant mortality listings across the world.  The US does not typically do very well in terms of other industrialized countries.  
There are a few interesting reasons for that….we have a much larger population than most of the countries that beat us, and it’s spread out over a much larger area.  Our care across areas/populations tends to be more uneven, states vary wildly on issues like access, health insurance, prenatal care, etc. Our records however, tend to be meticulous….there is very little doubt that we capture nearly all infant mortality that actually occurs.  This combination can put the US at a huge disadvantage in these statistics (10-30% according to the best published studies).
This raises the point of why Cuba tends to beat us.  Now, realistically speaking, if you or someone you love had to give birth, would you seriously pick Cuba over the US?  Would anybody?  And yet they look safer given the data….which is all self reported.  I have no problems believing that Singapore outranks us, but I’m skeptical of any country that might have an agenda.  Worldwide, there is actually very little consensus on what is a “live birth”, and the US tends to use the “any sign of life” definition.  
On the other end of the spectrum, I saw this piece recently on gun control.  I’ve covered misleading gun stats before (suicides are often combined with homicides to get “death by gun violence” numbers).  One of the interesting facts the article above points out is that internationally, gun deaths are only counted when it’s civilian on civilian violence.  This is certainly fine in the US…I would think we wouldn’t want to count every time the police had to open fire, but in countries with, um, more questionable police tactics, this could cause some skewing (Syria was cited as one such example).  
Data is hard enough to pin down when you know the sources have no vested interest in misleading you….international rankings will never be free from such bias.

Too hot to hire?

/ bs king / 3 Comments

….or why psych undergrads would make lousy hiring managers.

I saw this study pop up on Instapundit, and while the number of “that happens to me all the time” jokes are infinite, I’m pretty sad this study got mentioned at all.  Here’s the Router’s recap:

Attractive women faced discrimination when they applied for jobs where appearance was not seen as important. These positions included job titles like manager of research and development, director of finance, mechanical engineer and construction supervisor.

Oh the sad sad existence of beautiful women.  To work so hard on your career and then get denied a job because you’re too attractive.  Now, out of curiosity, exactly how many women got rejected from these jobs for this study?

None.

This study didn’t study women or men actually applying for jobs.  They studied what happens when you give a bunch of psych undergrads a huge stack of pictures, a list of job titles and say “sort these pictures in to groups of who you think would be most qualified for a job based solely on the pictures“.  Seriously, that’s what they did.  Read the full study here.

It turns out that when you ask 65 undergrads (mostly women) to rank a whole bunch (204) of photos of people using no criteria other than what they look like, people might judge other people based on what they look like.  There was some lovely statistical analysis in here, but at no point did they attempt to prove that asking a 20 year old (who presumably had no first hand knowledge about any of the fields other than psych) to sort a picture reflected at all what goes on in hiring offices.

In fact, this is what the “practical implications” section of the paper said:

Although the findings reported here demonstrate the “what is beautiful is good” and “beauty is beastly” effects, it is important to address the likelihood of such stereotypes influencing actual employment decisions. For example, in situations where there is a high cost of making a mistake, as would be the case for a hiring decision, one would expect the decision maker to rely more on individuating information, rather than on stereotypes about physical appearance. However, it is important to note that the bias for the physically attractive, unlike other stereotypes, seems to impact impression formation in a broader range of circumstances. Recent meta-analyses suggest that the what is beautiful is good effect is pervasive, even when the perceiver has additional information about the target   (Hosoda et al., 2003; Langlois et al., 2000). Attractiveness may influence decision  making at a subconscious level, where exposure to an attractive individual elicits positive feelings in the decision maker, causing him or her to judge the target more favorably (Eagly et al., 1991). Moreover, in situations where a decision maker is under a high cognitive load or under time pressure, he or she may be more likely to rely on stereotypes (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Pendry & Macrae, 1994).

So there is some proof that people favor attractive people no matter what, but no similar proof that they might discriminate against an attractive person if they had real world information.  Which leads me to get a little weirded out by quotes like this from the researcher (in interviews, not the article):

“In every other kind of job, attractive women were preferred,” said Johnson, who chided those who let stereotypes affect hiring decisions. 

Putting aside the fact that equality in this case appears to mean that everyone should prefer attractive people….what hiring managers was she chiding?  The ones she never studied?  Since the largest bias against attractive women was found when the mostly female undergrads were asked about who was qualified for male dominated fields….does that say more about what men think about women in non traditional fields, or what women think about women in non traditional fields?

While I’m sure that physical appearance does make a difference in hiring practices, I would have loved to see a little more time dedicated mimicking the real world before announcing that women were facing discrimination in certain professions.  To allow these results to be propagated as proof of what goes on at legitimate companies is a bit of a stretch, and points the finger at people who never even got asked what they would do.  

Friday Fun Links

/ bs king / 3 Comments

This is one of the coolest uses of graphic/animated data I’ve seen….it compares past Olympians to each other to show what the events would have looked like if the gold medalists from different years had competed against each other.  Swimming seems to have gained the most over the years, while the long jump seems more impervious to time.

This infographic looks innocuous, until you look at the upper right hand corner.  Cats have 72 hour days? (h/t junkcharts)

This is a useful page if you ever wanted to know what superhero your font of choice would be.  The only downside….no comic sans (asshole).

XKCD.com added a new page where he answers hypothetical questions with physics.  This weeks is “what would a mole of moles look like?”  Haven’t we all wondered that at some point?

Tracking the wild bad data

/ bs king / 5 Comments

As someone who spent 3 years studying family dynamics in grad school, I was pretty interested in the NYT piece that ran last week on class divides in single vs married households.  The article generated a lot of buzz, and if you haven’t read it, I would recommend it.

People seemed to either love or hate this article, and it’s stirred up a whole lot of discussion online.  One of the more interesting points that got brought up though, was a discussion about why the focus was on single moms as opposed to deadbeat dads.

This led to some quoting of an interesting statistic regarding custodial parents and child support.  When I first read this statistic, it was from Amanda Marcotte over at Slate who put it this way:

…. in a substantial number of cases, the men just quit their families. That’s why only 41 percent of custodial parents receive child support.

Now, I’ve perused internet comment boards enough to know that there are a LOT of men out there griping about how much they pay in child support.  I was a little shocked to read that apparently 59% don’t give anything.  I clicked on the closest link she had provided…..which took me over to the NYT Economix blog and an item by Nancy Folbre. There was the stat again, except with a few more qualifiers:

In 2009, the latest year for which data are available, only about 41 percent of custodial parents (predominantly women) received the child support they were owed. Some biological dads were deadbeats. 

So that frames it a little differently.  It’s still a little unclear from that statement, but it started to occur to me that this probably meant only 41% were up to date on their support payments…not that only 41% of non-custodial parents were paying.

I clicked on the link provided by Folbre, and got to the Census Bureau website, which put it all this way:

 In 2009, 41.2 percent of custodial parents received the full amount of child support owed them, down from 46.8 percent in 2007, according to a report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. The proportion of these parents who were owed child support payments and who received any amount at all — either full or partial — declined from 76.3 percent to 70.8 percent over the period.

Now that’s still a lot of deadbeats, but it is a slightly different picture from the one we originally started with.  When I clicked on the link from the Census Bureau snapshot to the report it originally came from, I noticed something else interesting….only about half of all custodial parents have court ordered support, and the non-payment stats above appear to reflect only what is happening in the court ordered cases.  The non court ordered cases are certainly hazy….30% of custodial parents said they never went to court because they knew the other person couldn’t pay….but it is interesting that the quoted stats only apply to half of the custodial parent cases.

Overall, I must say I kind of enjoyed attempting tracking the evolution of a stat (in reverse).  It’s not often you get to actually see how things evolve from the primary source to several steps out….and it was an interesting mental exercise.  Thanks for taking the journey with me.

Review and redraft – research in government

/ bs king / 1 Comment

A few months ago, my father let me know that New Hampshire had passed a law that required the various government agencies to update their rules/statutes every few years (5 years? 7 years? Dad, help me out here).  I’m not entirely sure what the scope of this law was, but my Dad mentioned that it was actually quite helpful for his work at the DMV.  It had surprised him how many of their rules did not actually reflect the changing times, and how helpful it was to update them.  One of the biggest rules they had found to update was that in certain situations, they were still only allowed to accept doctor’s notes from M.D.s….so anyone who used a nurse practitioner for primary care couldn’t get an acceptable note….despite NPs being perfectly qualified to comment on the situations they were assessing.  It wasn’t that the note needed to be from an MD, it was just that when the rule was written, very few people had anything other than a primary care MD.  I found the entire idea pretty good and proactive.

I was thinking about that after my post yesterday on South Dakota’s law regarding abortion risk disclosure.  I was wondering how many, if any, states require that laws based primarily on current scientific research  review those laws in any given time period.

Does anyone know if any states require this?  Or is this solely up to those who oppose certain laws to challenge things later?  

Correlation and Causation – Abortion and Suicide meet the 8th circuit

/ bs king / 1 Comment

Perhaps it’s lawyer’s daughter in me, but I think watching courts rule on presentation of data is totally fascinating to me.

Today, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals had to make just such a call.

The case was Planned Parenthood v Mike Rounds and was a challenge to a 2005 law that required doctors to inform patients seeking abortions that there was “an increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide”.  This was part of the informed consent process under the “all known medical risks” section.

Planned Parenthood challenged on the grounds that this was being presented as a causal link, and was therefore was a violation of the doctor’s freedom of speech.

It’s a hot topic, but I tried to get around the controversy to the nuts and bolts of the decision. I was interested how the courts evaluated what research should be included and how.

Apparently the standard is as follows:

…while the State cannot compel an individual simply to speak the State’s ideological message, it can use its regulatory authority to require  a  physician to provide  truthful,  non-misleading  information relevant to a patient’s decision to have an abortion, even if that information might also encourage the patient to choose childbirth over abortion.”  Rounds, 530 F.3d at 734-35; accord Tex. Med. Providers Performing Abortion Servs. v. Lakey, 667 F.3d 570, 576-77 (5th Cir. 2012).  

So in order to be illegal, disclosures must be proven to be ““either  untruthful, misleading or not relevant to the patient’s decision to have an abortion.”


It was the misleading part that the challenge focused on.  The APA has apparently endorsed the idea that any link between abortion and suicide is NOT causal.  The theory is that those with pre-existing mental health conditions are both more likely to have unplanned pregnancies and to later commit suicide. It was interesting to read the huge debate over whether the phrase “increased risk” implied causation (the court ruled causation was not implicit in this statement).


Ultimately, it was decided that this statement would be allowed as part of informed consent.  The conclusion was an interesting study in what the courts will and will not vouch for:

We acknowledge that these studies, like the studies relied upon by the State and Intervenors, have strengths as well as weaknesses. Like all studies on the topic, they must make use of imperfect data that typically was collected for entirely different purposes, and they must attempt to glean some insight through the application of sophisticated statistical techniques and informed assumptions. While the studies all agree that the relative risk of suicide is higher among women who abort compared to women who give birth or do not become pregnant, they diverge as to the extent to which other underlying factors account for that link.  We express no opinion as to whether some of the studies are more reliable than others; instead, we hold only that the state legislature, rather than a federal court, is in the best position to weigh the divergent results and come to a conclusion about the best way to protect its populace.  So long as the means chosen by the state does not impose an unconstitutional burden on women seeking abortions or their physicians, we have no basis to interfere.

I did find it mildly worrisome that the presumption is that the state legislators are the ones evaluating the research.  On the other hand, it makes sense to put the onus there rather than the courts. It’s good to know what the legal standards are though….it’s not always about the science.

Political ages…mean vs median?

/ bs king

I just found out The Economist has a daily chart feature!

Today’s graph about age of population vs age of cabinet ministers is pretty fascinating:

It did leave me with a few questions though…..who did they count as cabinet ministers?  I don’t know enough about the governments in these countries to know what that equates to.  Also, why average vs median?  
I initially thought this chart might have been representing Congress, not the Cabinet.  I took a look at my old friend the Congressional Research Service Report and discovered that at the beginning of the 112th Congress in 2011, the average age was  57.7 years, which would make this chart about right.  I had to dig a bit further to get the ages of the Cabinet, but it turns out their average age is 59.75.  I was surprised the data points would be so close together actually….especially since that 57.7 was for Jan 2011, so it’s actually 59.2 or so now.  
In case you’re curious, 7 members of the cabinet are under 60.  The youngest is Shaun Donovan (46), Department of Housing and Urban Development.  The oldest is Leon Panetta (74), Department of Defense. Panetta is actually the only member over 70.  Half of them are in their 60s, 5 in the 50s, and 2 in their 40s.  
I felt a little ashamed I only could have given name/position to 5 of them before looking them all up.  That’s not great, especially when you realize I’m counting Biden.  Still, I comforted myself with the fact that I bet that beats a very large percentage of Americans.  
A quick look for other data suggests that median age of populations is the more commonly reported value.  The median age of the cabinet was actually 61, in case you’re curious.

Weekend Moment of Zen 7-22-12

/ bs king / 2 Comments

This is a useful flowchart/infographic from Lapham’s Quarterly for those who routinely get accused of witchcraft:

Hopefully your weekend went well enough that you didn’t need this.  Otherwise I’d feel bad I didn’t post it earlier.