Greetings from Maine

/ bs king

After a treacherous journey up Route 1 (over an hour to clear the city of Boston), I’m pleased to tell you that we’re coming to you tonight from Portland, Maine.

I’m running a conference tomorrow at University of Southern Maine about bone marrow transplant patients who have to travel long distances….or as it’s more flourishingly called “Improving Patient Pathways for Complex Care Across Multiple Healthcare Systems”.  This is not my forte, and thus I have nothing long winded tonight….but after the stress of conference planning, I’m sure I’ll have to spend several weeks with nothing but numbers and spreadsheets before I calm down.

While we wait to see where that takes me, I thought I’d continue my pattern of figuring out a good Google Ngram for the trips I take.  This time I decided to run all the New England states to see who got mentioned the most.  

I’m happy to see Massachusetts made a strong showing.  Connecticut managed to eek a win over Maine, and it looks like Vermont, New Hampshire and Rhode Island have just been hanging out for years.

Who represents you best?

/ bs king / 5 Comments

Another day, another infographic:
Via: TakePart.com

 Sigh. It’s an election year, so I know I’m going to be seeing a lot of these types of things and I should just get over it but…I can’t.

I really dislike this one, because while the data may be good (I haven’t checked it), I think the premise is all wrong and perpetuates faulty ideas.

Congress is a nationally governing body that is split up by state.  Thus, even if Congress was perfectly representative on a state to state basis, it would still very likely not look like the USA as a whole.  

For example, let’s take Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.  According to the census bureau, 51% of this demographic lives in just 3 states:  California, New York and Hawaii. Nine states pull fewer than 1% of their population from this demographic:  Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, West Virginia, North Dakota and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Maine.  4.2% may be the national average, but Hawaii is 58% Asian, and West Virginia is 0.7% Asian.  For one, it would be ethnically representative to have at least half of their reps be Asian every year, for the other it’s statistically unlikely to happen.

If you wanted a really impressive infographic, you’d take each state’s individual ethnic breakdown and cross reference it with how many representatives they had in Congress to figure out what a representative sample should be.  Adding those up would give you the totals for racial diversity when judged on a state level, not a national level.

Of course, that’s only the racial numbers, though the same could apply to the religion questions.  This doesn’t work for the gender disparity…gender ratios are pretty close to 50/50 (Alaska has the highest percentage of men, Mississippi has the lowest).  I think that’s a more complex issue, since you have to take in to account the number of women desiring to run for office (lower than men), and then the counterargument that fewer women want to run because they believe they’re less likely to win or more likely to be crticized.  It’s a tough call how many women there should be to be truly representative since both sides can argue the data.

The income, age, and education numbers I’d argue are all due to the nature of the job.  Campaigning is expensive, and neither Representative nor Senator are not exactly entry level jobs.

As the comments from yesterday’s post showed,  one of the least representative parts of Congress is profession.  Lawyers make up 0.38% of the population, and yet 222 members of Congress have law degrees (38% of the House, 55% of the Senate).  That seems highly unrepresentative right there.

At the end of the day, we vote for people who represent our state, not necessarily our gender, religion or race.  In Massachusetts, our current Senate race is between a 52 year old white male lawyer and a 62 year old white female lawyer. The biggest difference demographically in my eyes?  One has lived in Massachusetts for decades, and the other….lived here long enough to qualify to run.  No one’s going make a pretty picture out of that factor, but it’s pretty important when it comes to getting adequately represented.

Are Republicans Stupid?

/ bs king / 11 Comments

One of my favorite things about blogging is it’s potential to actually change the way I personally think about things.  I don’t mean just through the comments section, though that is immensely helpful, but more so through the process of researching, writing, posting and following up.  A few posts on one topic, and suddenly I find myself passionate on topics that had previously been mere blips on my radar.  God bless the internet.

All that is to say, a month ago I didn’t really care what people said about politics and science.  Sure, in my own blog rules, rule number 2 said I would stay non-partisan:

I will attempt to remain non-partisan. I have political opinions.  Lots of them.  But really, I’m not here to try to go after one party or another.  They both fall victim to bad data, and lots of people do it outside of politics too.  Lots of smart people have political blogs, and I like reading them…I just don’t feel I’d be a good person to run one.  My point is not to change people’s minds about issues, but to at least trip the warning light that they may be supporting themselves with crap. 

Even so, if someone had casually made the comment that Republicans were anti-science, I probably would have let it go.  After all, I spent most of my pre-adulthood years in a Baptist school that had plenty of Republican voting ignorants to color my view.

But…..then I did this post.
And this one.
And of course this one.

And now I don’t feel those comments are quite as innocuous as I once did.

My feelings on this were backed up by this article from Forbes magazine (where this posts title came from), which I really really recommend if you have the time.

I’m not going back on my non-partisan premise, but as Mr Entine so eloquently posits, one party laying claim to “science” does nobody any good.  Science never fares well when put in the hands of politicians (does anything really?) and giving one party the moral upper hand in a subject as broad as “science” can cause damaging oversights.

To be honest, I don’t know which party is more “pro-science”.  The data required to prove that one way or the other would require compiling a complete list of scientific topics, ranking them in order of possible impact to both people and the world at large, ranking the conclusiveness of the data, and conducting public opinion polls broken down by party and controlled for race, class and gender.  That’s an enormous amount of work, and nobody has done it.

Thus, until further research is done, I will stick with the following conclusions:

  1. Politicians will exploit everything they can if they think it will get them more votes
  2. Ditto for journalists (sub “readers” for “votes”)
  3. Saying you’re “pro-science” is not the only requirement for being “pro-science”
  4. Increasing the general level of knowledge around research methods, data gathering and statistical analysis is probably a good thing
Seriously though, read the Forbes article.  

You are getting sleepy….

/ bs king / 6 Comments

It’s been one of those weeks.  I feel I would pay good money to be able to fast forward through tomorrow and jump straight to the weekend, as I’m pretty sure my brain is leaking out of my ear.

Given that, the headlines about this announcement by the CDC caught my eye.  The headline reads “30% of US Workers Don’t Get Enough Sleep”.

Now, I’m in a pretty forgiving mood towards that sentiment.  I’m tired today, and I know when I got in this morning most of my coworkers were dragging too.  Any comment on sleep deprivation would have most certainly gotten lots of knowing looks and nods of commiseration.  This study backs us up right?  We’re all veeeeeeeeery sleepy.

Except that studies like this are almost all misleading.

Several years ago, I read a pretty good book by Laura Vanderkam called 168 Hours: You have more time than you think.  It was through this book that I got introduced to the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey.

Now, most time use surveys….the type that people use to give reports about how much we sleep or work….are done by just asking people.  Now that’s great, except that people are really terrible at reporting these things accurately.  The ATUS however, actually walks people through their day rather than just have them guess at a number.  It’s interesting how profound these differences can be.  In another survey using time diary methodology, it was found that people claiming to work 60 – 64 hours per week actually averaged 44.2 hours of work.  More here, if you’re interested.

Unsurprisingly, sleep is one area that people chronically underestimate how much they’re getting.  The CDC study, which it admits was all data from calling up and asking people “how many hours of sleep do you get on average?” found that 30% of workers sleep fewer than 6 hours per night.  The ATUS however, finds that the average American sleeps 8.38 hours per night….and that’s on weekday nights alone.  Weekends and holidays, we go up to 9.34.

I couldn’t find the distribution for this chart, but I did find the age breakdown, so we can throw out those 15-24 and those over 65 (all of whom get about 9 hours of sleep/night).  We’re left with those 25 – 65 who average roughly around 8.3 hours of sleep per night.

Alright, now lets check the CDC number and figure out how much sleep the other 70% of the population would have to be getting in order to make these two number work.

If we take some variables:
a = percent of people sleeping an average of fewer than 6 hours per night
x = the maximum number of hours to qualify as “fewer than 6 hours”
b = percent of people sleeping more than 6 hours per night
y = average amount they are sleeping to balance out the other group
c = average amount of sleep among workers according to the ATUS survey

We get this:  ax + by = c
And then substituting:  (0.3*5.9) + (0.7*y) = 8.3
Solving for y:  y = 9.33 hours of sleep per night

Are 70% of Americans of working age actually getting 9.33 hours of sleep per night?  That would be pretty impressive.  It would also mean that instead of a normal distribution of sleep hours, we’d actually have a bimodal distribution….which would be a little strange.

There is, of course, the caveat that those answering the ATUS represent the whole population while the CDC targeted working adults.  It’s a little tough figuring out how profoundly this would affect the numbers since the BLS reports workforce participation rates for those 16 and up.  The unemployment rate for 2010 (the year the survey was completed) hovered just under 10%, but the “not in labor force” numbers are a little harder to get without skewing by the under 25 or over 65 crowd.  The CDC also didn’t report an average, so I can’t compare the two….but given the 30% number, the six 6 hours or less would be less than half a standard deviation from the mean (if the sleep data was roughly normal).

So does this mean I’m not as tired as I think I am?  Nope, I’m pretty sure I’m still going to bed early tonight. I will however, be aware that a tiring week does not necessarily mean a sleep deprived one.

Hey, at least someone’s thinking

/ bs king / 2 Comments

Best idea I’ve seen all day….people taking Congress to task for having no system for vetting scientific testimony.  (H/T to Maggie’s Farm)

Apparently what sent them over the edge was when a scientist misquoted his own paper during testimony,  skewing his own research.  Yikes.

One of the authors website is here….haven’t had time to look around much.

Everybody loves a (certain sort of) hypocrite

/ bs king / 3 Comments

Last week I posted my annoyance at studies that put more work in to proving that substitute a potential proximal cause for the real issue without adequately proving that was a valid substitution.  At the time I was talking about food deserts, but today I found another great example.  A study that has gone viral links homophobic behavior with secret homosexual desires.

Now, when I first heard these results in passing, I was pretty surprised.  I spent years in a Baptist school with plenty of people who were quite clear about their homophobia, and I have always thought it overly simplistic when people say that’s all repressed homosexuality.  I think the reasons behind any prejudice are likely to be complicated and multifaceted.  Plus, the logic seemed pretty sensationalistic…..and after all, we don’t accuse misogynists of wanting to be women.

Anyway, I hadn’t had time to look in to this study, but I ran across this takedown by Daniel Engber on Slate today.   I thoroughly enjoyed the article (and extra credit to Slate for not being 100% PC).  The author points out that the results of this study are only as trustworthy as the semantic association method (the implicit association test) they used to prove it.  This technique, which essentially involves showing a subliminal message followed by a picture, can be questionable.  From the Slate article:

Should we trust this interpretation of the data? In the Times op-ed, the authors claim that the reaction-time task “reliably distinguishes between self-identified straight individuals and those who self-identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual.” Their formal write-up of the work for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a bit less sanguine on the method, citing just one other study that has used this approach, and saying it “showed moderate correspondence with participants’ self-reported sexual orientation.”

So there’s that.

The other issue that Engber didn’t mention is that this study was performed on college freshmen.  I REALLY hate when people generalize from that age group because….stop me if I’m getting crazy here…I am pretty sure kids that age have a less well developed sense of identity than the adult population at large.

Even if the data were 100% accurate, I think that the youngness of this sample would skew the results.  At least when I went to college, quite a few kids came out during that time, and it was a time of questioning  identity for pretty much anyone.  According to the best research I could find, the average gay person doesn’t even self-identify as gay until 16, and the majority of people come out either in college or after developing an independent life.  So the chances that expressions of sexual identity, especially subconscious expressions, may look different at 18-20 is pretty well supported.

Now I’m pretty sure there will always be Ted Haggard’s or Larry Craig’s in this world…just like there will always be John Edwards or Elliot Spitzer’s.  Sex, gay or straight, will always capture headlines more than boring things like tax evasion, even though they are both hypocritical.   Still, with studies like this, I urge caution. Accepting the result means accepting that words on a screen and hundreths of a second of reaction time can accurately capture homophobia, and that a 19 year olds perspective on the world can translate to all adults.  If you believe both of those, then go ahead and quote the study.  Otherwise, you may want to hold your judgement for a bit longer.

Never trust an infographic over 30

/ bs king / 3 Comments

I’ve been tinkering with improving my data visualization skills recently, as I’m sick of using nothing but Excel (although if you want to continue using Excel for everything, this is a pretty useful website).

As anyone who takes a look around the interweb can tell you though, there is a pretty insidious type of data visualization that’s been flooding our society.

Oh yes, I’m talking about the infographic.

While sometimes these are endearing and amusing, they are often terrible, misleading and ridiculous.  I was going to formulate some thoughts on why they were terrible, and then I found out that Megan McArdle already had in a column for the Atlanic.  It’s a pretty good read with lots of pictures.  Her summation at the end pretty much says it all:

If you look at these lovely, lying infographics, you will notice that they tend to have a few things in common:
  1. They are made by random sites without particularly obvious connection to the subject matter. Why is Creditloan.com making an infographic about the hourly workweek?
  2. Those sites, when examined, either have virtually no content at all, or are for things like debt consolidation–industries with low reputation where brand recognition, if it exists at all, is probably mostly negative.
  3. The sources for the data, if they are provided at all, tend to be in very small type at the bottom of the graphic, and instead of easy-to-type names of reports, they provide hard-to-type URLs which basically defeat all but the most determined checkers.
  4. The infographics tend to suggest that SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS HAPPENING IN THE US RIGHT NOW!!! the better to trigger your panic button and get you to spread the bad news BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
If that’s too many words for you though, she also includes this graphic:

So while the infographic can be quite useful when tamed and sedated, if you meet one in the wild, be very very careful.  Do not approach directly, do not look it in they eye.  


Friends don’t let friends use lousy infographics (I’m looking at you facebook).

Weekend Moment of Zen 4-29-12

/ bs king / 1 Comment

Since my mother still doesn’t agree with any of my food desert postings, I thought of this comic.

Mom, I think we should consider that maybe obesity causes food deserts.  Think about I’m pretty sure I heard about obesity before I heard the phrase food desert.  I’m pretty sure that proves something.

Circumventing the Middle Man

/ bs king / 6 Comments

Well, my post on justifiable skepticism (Paranoia is just good sense if people actually are out to get you) certainly was the big winner for traffic/comments this week.  I was happy to see that…I had a lot of fun putting that graph together and thought the outcomes were pretty striking.  Thanks to Maggie’s Farm for linking to it.

It was my post on food deserts however, that got me the most IRL comments.  Both my mother and my brother commented on it, and not terrifically positively.  In retrospect, I wasn’t very clear about the points I was trying to make, though to be fair I had spent a lot of the day on an airplane.

My issue with food desert research, or any similar research, is that what we’re really talking about is a proposed proximate cause to a larger issue: obesity.  In my experience, just having people tell you why they think something’s happening, isn’t good enough to prove that’s the actual reason.  Thus my quibble with much of the theorizing about obesity problems….you have to make sure that what you’re theorizing is the cause is actually the cause (or one of the causes) before you start dumping money in to it.  You cannot make the middle man the holy grail if you haven’t established that it’s really a cause.

Unfortunately, people love to jump on good ideas before truly establishing this link.

Example:  A few years ago, it was discovered that 22% of school children were eating vending machine food.  This school had an obesity problem, the food in the vending machines was unhealthy, so a push began to remove vending machines from schools.  Schools balked, as they make money from vending machines, but the well being of children came first…..until of course this study came out proving that reducing access to vending machines didn’t actually effect obesity rates.   Oops.

It’s really a simple logic exercise…proving that kids are (a) obese and (b) eating from vending machines does  not actually prove that getting rid of (b) will reduce (a).

That’s why I liked the research in to the difference food deserts make in obesity.  It’s a question that needs to be asked more often when trying to address a large issue:  are we sure that the issue we’re trying to address will actually help the issue we were concerned about it the first place???


If you haven’t established that it will, then be careful with how you proceed.  Addressing food deserts (or vending machines or whatever) is  a means to an end, and you shouldn’t confuse it with the end itself…unless you have really good data backing you up.