Spanking and Mental Trauma

/ bs king / 4 Comments

The headline reads “Spanking Linked to Mental Illness“, and I was immediately intrigued.  Spanking, generally, is a very hard thing to study, as it is so often correlated with other things.  Physical punishment of children is often linked to frustrated and under resourced parents, cultural norms that can be positive or negative, and even immigration status.

Curious how the study authors controlled for such things, but assured by the article that they had, I flipped over to the study itself.  It didn’t take long for me to realize this was yet another example of bad journalism mucking about with a half decent study.

The article starts like this:

Although the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) strongly discourages spanking, at leasthalf of parents admit to physically punishing their children. Some research suggests that as many as 70-90 percent of mothers have resorted to spanking at one time or another. Anew study published in the journal Pediatrics may cause parents to think more carefully before laying a hand on their little ones.

However, the study states:

Physical punishment was assessed with the question, “As a child how often were you ever pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped or hit by your parents or any adult living in your house?” Respondents who reported an answer of“sometimes” or greater to this event were considered as having experienced harsh physical punishment. The term harsh physicalpunishment was used for this study because the measure includes acts of physical force beyond slapping, which some may consider more severe than “customary” physical punishment (ie, spanking).

 So the study specifically excluded “customary” physical punishment when it assessed the effects on future mental illness….which pretty much completely contradicts the headline.   I also doubt this is what 70-90% of mother’s are admitting to when they spank “at one time or another”.  

Irresponsible.

The SCOTUS and perception of statistics

/ bs king / 4 Comments

Finally got internet in the new house.  Can’t complain too much….the guy finished running the wire to our house even though a thunderstorm started.  Clearly that man was getting paid by the job, not the hour.

Anyway, had an interesting chat with my father (a lawyer) after our closing on Thursday about the Supreme Court ruling on health care.  He mentioned that a coworker was griping that the Supreme Court meant nothing any more because they only voted on party lines.  My father, being the good data accuracy man that he is, quickly dissented.

He looked it up, and asserted that nearly half of the decisions last year were unanimous.  For this year, 7-2 votes were the least common (8%), then 8-1 (11%), 6-3 (17%) and then 5-4 (20%).  So overall,  they agree nearly as much as they disagree, and they are only completely divided on about 1 in 5 cases.  Kennedy and Roberts voted with the majority over 90% of the time.  Ginsburg was the least likely to vote in the majority.  Lots of interesting stats to be run on this, another good breakdown of some of the data is here.

It seems the perception that every vote is political is heavily skewed by the very few court cases most of us hear about every year.  I would wager even highly political citizens probably couldn’t rattle off more than a handful.  When you break down the 5-4 decisions exclusively, about 2/3rds of them vote down ideological lines…..which totals to about 10 cases for 2011.

This kind of skewing of perception is common when a few high profile events dramatically overshadow regular operations.  Thanks Dad, for pointing that out.

Big day

/ bs king / 2 Comments

To be honest, my day was dominated by big news that had nothing to do with healthcare…..we closed on our house today (the one we were buying….we closed our sale yesterday).  

I was fairly glad, as I got sick of the coverage of the decision by noon.  
I thought the coverage itself had some interesting things to say about how we process data however.  When it comes to science, so often people are just skimming over things, trying to get out a good headline.  Watching the blogs and other websites today, I saw a different angle….people trying to dissect legal jargon quickly to get to the sound bite….which of course led to this:
It was almost nice watching this happen in a different field….though I felt incredibly bad for the pundits trying to put together commentary while still trying to read the decision.
Not much with statistics to comment on, though Nate Silver has some good preliminary stats on how this will go for the election.  

Conspiracy theories and replicatability

/ bs king / 1 Comment

I’m working on a theory around how many conspiracy theories a reasonable person is allowed to buy in to in their lifetime while still being completely normal.  My current thought is you’re allowed at least 3 during your teenage years, and then one every 5 – 10 years after.

When I say conspiracy theories, I will mention that I’m only including ones that do not actually change your daily life in a significant way.  

Conspiracy theories in general are a fantastic study of selective data interpretation.  All of them do it in different ways, but there are some general themes.  One of them was illustrated quite entertainingly by xkcd.com this morning:

To note: I never disbelieved the moon landing, but my (normally rational) little brother did for about 3 weeks one summer after watching a documentary on TV.  He’s now a high school science teacher, for what it’s worth.

Causes of death and perception skewing

/ bs king / 1 Comment

My first job out of college was working in one of the busiest Emergency Departments in the country.  I learned a lot of interesting things about human behavior there, and some random facts about the way the ED interacts with the government as far as reporting goes.  

One of the smaller parts of my job was making sure the proper reports got filed at the appropriate times, and this included death certificates.  Contrary to what you might think, not many people actually die in the Emergency Department.  Trauma victims almost always have enough time to get to the operating room before they die, and people with more chronic illnesses tend to die in the intensive care units.  Thus, when death certificates come up, most residents have no idea how to fill them out.  I don’t remember much about them, but I will always remember one thing: heart failure is NOT a valid cause of death in Massachusetts.  You can put unknown, or heart disease or many many other things, but you can’t put heart failure.  The reason?  Everyone dies of heart failure.  If your heart is still beating, you’re not getting a death certificate.  
I’m thinking of all this because of a very cool new interactive graph put out by the New England Journal of Medicine about causes of death over the years.  I can only post the static graph, but I suggest you check out the interactive one:
Another list here, comparing 1900 and 2010 directly:
It’s interesting to see causes that have dropped due to actual dips (tuberculosis) and those that are not there any more due to medical reclassification (senility).
It’s a good study in how medical reporting can change over time for various reasons, and why changes should always viewed from both a broad view as well as up close.

Arizona Immigration and fake statistics

/ bs king / 11 Comments

In case you haven’t heard, the Supreme Court ruled on Arizona’s immigration law today.

I was not surprised to see this show up on some of the feminist blogs I read, as they generally have a pro-immigration slant, but I was more than a little surprised to see that Amanda Marcotte considers this a women’s issue.

In a blog post for the XX blog on Slate.com, she argues that the laws surrounding checking IDs will likely result in racial profiling (certainly) and probably target the young (highly likely) but that this will also target women more than men (wait, huh?).

Her reasoning:

…..women, especially in poor or rural communities, are also much more likely to be out and about without legal identification than men, especially if they don’t drive or drive often. Women that are poor or undereducated are much more likely to be stay-at-home mothers with few resources, which makes it very easy to let concerns about up-to-date licenses or ID slip, especially if you don’t drive a car much because someone else in the household is using it for work. If your daily life is dedicated to running errands for your family, you may not have much cause to worry about keeping all your papers in order generally, until it’s too late and you’re finding yourself in jail for not being able to prove citizenship on the spot.

A few comments:

  1. I have searched for 20 minutes for any study or proof that women leave the house without their ID more often than men.  I can’t find it.  Maybe the idea is that women walk around more than men?
  2. Women that are poor and undereducated are not more likely to be stay at home mothers.  56% of SAHM have at least some college education or more.
  3. I can’t find any hard data on which gender lets their license expire more often, but I also can’t find proof that it’s women.
I hate statistics based on bad data, but I really hate statistics just pulled from thin air.  Some assertions are self evident for sure….I don’t know that many people would argue that a group of teenage boys out on a corner is more likely to be stopped by the police than a group of 70 year old men….but the paragraph above states quite definitively several things that don’t seem at all definitive.  I could be wrong, but there weren’t any sources attached to check with.  When you factor in the idea that men are probably more likely to be stopped than women, it’s hard to figure out where this particular point is coming from.
If you disagree with Arizona’s law, that’s fine….but don’t make up statistics about it’s impact on women to justify that.  If it’s wrong, it’s wrong because it impacts people in general, not women in particular.

Life goes on, and so does life expectancy

/ bs king / 3 Comments

Life expectancy is a funny thing.  It’s a pretty often quoted statistic that not many people realize is just that – a statistic.  It’s also fairly misunderstood, in that many people presume it’s static.

Truthfully, your life expectancy changes over the course of your life based on how long you’ve already lived. Most people accept this as making sense once it’s pointed out, but it’s not often the first thought people have when they here it (and journalist’s are ABYSMAL at clarifying the “at birth” part of most life expectancy estimates).  Anyway, this week chartporn.org posted this chart, which I think illustrates the changes nicely.  I didn’t check all the other data they put on there (though I was surprised to see how low the median age for first divorces is), but I thought the overall affect was quite informative.

In particular, I like the beginning of the chart, where it shows that if you make it beyond your first year, you actually get a bump up pretty quickly.  Infant mortality is not often thought of as affecting overall life expectancy in developed countries, but it does.

Friday Fun Links 6-22-12

/ bs king / 1 Comment

Why ignorance shouldn’t be a dirty word.

I think this article’s premise should be someone’s doctoral thesis.
I’ve never used Pinterest, but this version of it seems to have potential.

Work got you down?  Don’t try robbing banks.  It’s not as lucrative as it would seem.

Since that’s out, perhaps you should go on a road trip.  Weather.com has a trip planner that will show you weather for your route.

This may not be as interesting to you as it is to me at the moment, but Chris Mulligan put up this very cool graph of birth trends by day of the year:

It looks like the data used is from 1969 to 1988….I would have loved to see this graph for 100 years ago, before there were any c-sections or inducements to contend with.  I had a Coptic Egyptian roommate at one point, and she told me that when she was little, they couldn’t divide up kids by birth date when they went to sort people out.  Apparently Coptic’s are prohibited from having sex for almost 170 days out of the year, and so the babies are all born very clustered together (9 months after the end of Lent for example).  I’d imagine the data would be nearly impossible to get a hold of, but I’d love to see some cultural variations on this to see how things correlated with social norms.

More thoughts on the soda ban

/ bs king / 1 Comment

Yesterday I found out the soda ban is potentially hitting a bit closer to home.

For those of you not familiar with Cambridge, MA, it’s affectionately known as “The People’s Republic” (and even has a communist bar of the same name).  Thus the proposed ban was pretty unsurprising.

Coincidentally, Ben Goldacre put up a new post yesterday publicizing a paper he coauthored to try to push governments in the UK to actually conduct trials of their policies before implementing them.

Best quote:

We also show that policy people need to have a little humility, and accept that they don’t necessarily know if their great new idea really will achieve its stated objectives. We do this using examples of policies which should have been great in principle, but turned out to be actively harmful when they were finally tested.

Contrast this to the Mayor of Cambridge’s statement on the soda ban:

“As much free will as you can have in a society is a good idea,” Davis said Tuesday. “… But with a public health issue, you look at those things that are dangerous for people, that need government regulation.”

Is no one interested in finding out if this idea will actually work before implementing it?  The leading researchers in the field seem to think it won’t.   I tend to agree with them.  You know what though?  I’m game.  Let’s put it to a randomized trial.  There are those who think the constitutionality of this should be worked out first, but I think a well run trial could open the door for an opt in system rather than a mandatory one.

Hey, maybe if politicians stayed a little more open to testing their ideas, you wouldn’t wind up with cartoons like this one:

Quote of the Week

/ bs king

Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong. If the guess that you make is poorly expressed and rather vague, and the method that you use for figuring out the consequences is a little vague – you are not sure, and you say, ‘I think everything’s right because it’s all due to so and so, and such and such do this and that more or less, and I can sort of explain how this works’…then you see that this theory is good, because it cannot be proved wrong! Also if the process of computing the consequences is indefinite, then with a little skill any experimental results can be made to look like the expected consequences.                                      -Richard Feynman                                                                                                          “The Character of Physical Law”  1992  pp.158-159

I feel this quote should be a mandatory back drop for every political speech given, especially in election years.