Group items tagged

Occurrences of crime are properly expressed as the number of incidences per 100,000 people. Total numbers are not informative on their own and it is very easy to manipulate an argument by cherry picking between a total number and a rate.  Beware of claims about crime that use raw incidence numbers. When a change in whole incidence numbers is observed, this might not have any bearing on crime levels at all, because levels of crime are dependent on population.

Whole Numbers versus Rates

Reliability Not every criminal statistic is equally reliable. Even though we have measures of incidences of crimes across types and subtypes, not every one of these statistics samples the actual incidence of these crimes in the same way. Indeed, very few measure the total incidences very reliably at all. The crime rates that you are most likely to encounter capture only crimes known and substantiated by police. These numbers are vulnerable to variances in how crimes become known and verified by police in the first place. Crimes very often go unreported or undiscovered. Some crimes are more likely to go unreported than others (such as sexual assaults and drug possession), and some crimes are more difficult to substantiate as having occurred than others.

The dangers are clear. As PR becomes ascendant, private and government interests become more able to generate, filter, distort, and dominate the public debate, and to do so without the public knowing it. “What we are seeing now is the demise of journalism at the same time we have an increasing level of public relations and propaganda,” McChesney said. “We are entering a zone that has never been seen before in this country.”

Michael Schudson, a journalism professor at Columbia University, cjr contributor, and author of Discovering the News, said modern public relations started when Ivy Lee, a minister’s son and a former reporter at the New York World, tipped reporters to an accident on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Before then, railroads had done everything they could to cover up accidents. But Lee figured that crashes, which tend to leave visible wreckage, were hard to hide. So it was better to get out in front of the inevitable story. The press release was born. Schudson said the rise of the “publicity agent” created deep concern among the nation’s leaders, who distrusted a middleman inserting itself and shaping messages between government and the public. Congress was so concerned that it attached amendments to bills in 1908 and 1913 that said no money could be appropriated for preparing newspaper articles or hiring publicity agents.

But World War I pushed those concerns to the side. The government needed to rally the public behind a deeply unpopular war. Suddenly, publicity agents did not seem so bad.

The problem of replicability in science from xkcdby Massimo Pigliucci

In recent months much has been written about the apparent fact that a surprising, indeed disturbing, number of scientific findings cannot be replicated, or when replicated the effect size turns out to be much smaller than previously thought.

Arguably, the recent streak of articles on this topic began with one penned by David Freedman in The Atlantic, and provocatively entitled “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science.” In it, the major character was John Ioannidis, the author of some influential meta-studies about the low degree of replicability and high number of technical flaws in a significant portion of published papers in the biomedical literature.

Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off.

An examination of 101 popular smartphone "apps"—games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.

The findings reveal the intrusive effort by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them.

most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even many of their heralds realize.

In terms of immediate political stability, there is less to the income inequality issue than meets the eye. Most analyses of income inequality neglect two major points. First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease. To be sure, Gates receives the very best care from the world’s top doctors, but our health outcomes are in the same ballpark. I don’t have a private jet or take luxury vacations, and—I think it is fair to say—my house is much smaller than his. I can’t meet with the world’s elite on demand. Still, by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.

when average people read about or see income inequality, they don’t feel the moral outrage that radiates from the more passionate egalitarian quarters of society. Instead, they think their lives are pretty good and that they either earned through hard work or lucked into a healthy share of the American dream.

In the realm of public policy, we live in an age of numbers.

do wehold an outsize belief in our ability to gauge complex phenomena, measure outcomes and come up with compelling numerical evidence? A well-known quotation usually attributed to Einstein is “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” I’d amend it to a less eloquent, more prosaic statement: Unless we know how things are counted, we don’t know if it’s wise to count on the numbers.

The problem isn’t with statistical tests themselves but with what we do before and after we run them.

leaving aside the fact that from the figures given by Prof Feng, about 80 per cent of obese people are NOT "perfectly healthy with normal cholesterol and blood sugar", and 70 per cent of people who die suddenly of heart attacks ARE obese (see my take on the 'fat but fit' argument here), and that Prof Feng has written in a previous letter of obesity being "a serious medical problem and [that] studies in the United States show that obesity will be the No. 1 public health problem and cause of death in five years' time", I am amused by Prof Feng's definition of good health as "not a number... [but] a sense of well-being physically, mentally, socially and spiritually".

much of what we do in "medicine" today is about numbers. Your "weight, body mass index, how often you jog or the number of kilometres you run", your "cholesterol and blood sugar", your smoking, alcohol intake, exercise, sexual behaviour, diet and family history are all quantified and studied, because they give us an idea of your risk for certain diseases. Our interventions, pharmacological or otherwise, aim to modify or reduce these risks. These are numbers that translate to concrete events in real-life.You may argue that one can have bad risk factors and still have a sense of "physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being", in which case you don't need a doctor or drugs to make you feel better - but that doesn't mean you are not going to die of a heart attack at 40 either.

The problem with using the term "well-being" in defining something as important as healthcare or medicine, is that it is a vague term (a weasel word, I like to call it) that allows quacks to ply their trade, and for people to medicalise their problems of living - and that is something Prof Feng disapproved of, isn't it?Do I have a better definition for "health"? Well, not yet - but I certainly don't think my job is only about giving people "a sense of well-being".

On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties.

the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.

The latest from University of Virginia cognitive scientist Jonathan Haidt is that people holding to conservative values may be discriminated against in academia. The New York Times’ John Tierney — who is usually a bit more discriminating in his columns than this — reports of a talk that Haidt had given at the conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (this is the same Society whose journal recently published a new study “demonstrating” people’s clairvoyance when it comes to erotic images, so there). Haidt polled his audience and discovered the absolutely unastounding fact that 80% were liberal, with only a scatter of centrists and libertarians, and very, very few conservatives.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” said Haidt, noting that according to polls, 40% of Americans are conservative and only 20% liberal. He then went on to make the (truly astounding) suggestion that this is just the same as discrimination against women or minorities, and that the poor conservative academics are forced to live in closets just like gays “used to” in the 1980s (because as we all know, that problem has been solved since).

I have criticized Haidt before for his contention that progressives and conservatives have a different set of moral criteria, implying that because progressives don’t include criteria of “purity,” in-group loyalty and respect for authority, their moral spectrum is more limited than that of conservatives. My point there was that Haidt simply confuses character traits (respect for authority) with moral values (fairness, or avoidance of harm).

People need language to fully understand numbers. This discovery – long suspected, and now backed by strong evidence – may shed light on the way children acquire their number sense.

The commenter starts with some ad hominems, asserting that my post is biased and emotional. They provide no evidence or argument to support this assertion. And of course they don’t even attempt to counter any of the arguments I laid out. They then follow up with an argument from authority – he can link to a PhD creationist – so there.

The article that the commenter links to is by Henry M. Morris, founder for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) – a young-earth creationist organization. Morris was (he died in 2006 following a stroke) a PhD – in civil engineering. This point is irrelevant to his actual arguments. I bring it up only to put the commenter’s argument from authority into perspective. No disrespect to engineers – but they are not biologists. They have no expertise relevant to the question of evolution – no more than my MD. So let’s stick to the arguments themselves.

The article by Morris is an overview of so-called Creation Science, of which Morris was a major architect. The arguments he presents are all old creationist canards, long deconstructed by scientists. In fact I address many of them in my original refutation. Creationists generally are not very original – they recycle old arguments endlessly, regardless of how many times they have been destroyed.

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.

Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.

On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.

1. Distributed cocreation moves into the mainstreamIn the past few years, the ability to organise communities of Web participants to develop, market, and support products and services has moved from the margins of business practice to the mainstream. Wikipedia and a handful of open-source software developers were the pioneers. But in signs of the steady march forward, 70 per cent of the executives we recently surveyed said that their companies regularly created value through Web communities. Similarly, more than 68m bloggers post reviews and recommendations about products and services.

for every success in tapping communities to create value, there are still many failures. Some companies neglect the up-front research needed to identify potential participants who have the right skill sets and will be motivated to participate over the longer term. Since cocreation is a two-way process, companies must also provide feedback to stimulate continuing participation and commitment. Getting incentives right is important as well: cocreators often value reputation more than money. Finally, an organisation must gain a high level of trust within a Web community to earn the engagement of top participants.

2. Making the network the organisation In earlier research, we noted that the Web was starting to force open the boundaries of organisations, allowing nonemployees to offer their expertise in novel ways. We called this phenomenon "tapping into a world of talent." Now many companies are pushing substantially beyond that starting point, building and managing flexible networks that extend across internal and often even external borders. The recession underscored the value of such flexibility in managing volatility. We believe that the more porous, networked organisations of the future will need to organise work around critical tasks rather than molding it to constraints imposed by corporate structures.

The INES scale is an internationally agreed-upon standard. Signatory nations are themselves responsible for interpreting the scale and assigning numbers to their own incidents. There is not a single international body that does this. Indeed, from the INES web site: What the Scale is Not For It is not appropriate to use INES to compare safety performance between facilities, organizations or countries. The statistically small numbers of events at Level 2 and above and the differences between countries for reporting more minor events to the public make it inappropriate to draw international comparisons.

the INES number is not a “threat level”. It’s a rough assessment of the scale of a mess that has been created. It does not portend coming danger, it characterizes an incident.

Nuclear incident severity levels. Click on it to see it in full readable size.

We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"

For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did. COMMENTS (7) SHARE: Twitter   Reddit   Buzz   More... But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night?

unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage.

The authors of the new paper point out just how hard it is to study languages. We're aware of over 7,000 of them, and they vary significantly in complexity. There are a number of large language families that are likely derived from a single root, but a large number of languages don't slot easily into one of the major groups. Against that backdrop, even a set of simple structural decisions—does the noun or verb come first? where does the preposition go?—become dizzyingly complex, with different patterns apparent even within a single language tree.

Linguists, however, have been attempting to find order within the chaos. Noam Chomsky helped establish the Generative school of thought, which suggests that there must be some constraints to this madness, some rules that help make a language easier for children to pick up, and hence more likely to persist. Others have approached this issue via a statistical approach (the authors credit those inspired by Joseph Greenberg for this), looking for word-order rules that consistently correlate across language families. This approach has identified a handful of what may be language universals, but our uncertainty about language relationships can make it challenging to know when some of these are correlations are simply derived from a common inheritance.

For anyone with a biology background, having traits shared through common inheritance should ring a bell. Evolutionary biologists have long been able to build family trees of related species, called phylogenetic trees. By figuring out what species have the most traits in common and grouping them together, it's possible to identify when certain features have evolved in the past. In recent years, the increase in computing power and DNA sequences to align has led to some very sophisticated phylogenetic software, which can analyze every possible tree and perform a Bayesian statistical analysis to figure out which trees are most likely to represent reality. By treating language features like subject-verb order as a trait, the authors were able to perform this sort of analysis on four different language families: 79 Indo-European languages, 130 Austronesian languages, 66 Bantu languages, and 26 Uto-Aztecan languages. Although we don't have a complete roster of the languages in those families, they include over 2,400 languages that have been evolving for a minimum of 4,000 years.

history of voting math comes mainly in two chunks: the period of the French Revolution, when some members of France’s Academy of Sciences tried to deduce a rational way of conducting elections, and the nineteen-fifties onward, when economists and game theorists set out to show that this was impossible

The first mathematical account of vote-splitting was given by Jean-Charles de Borda, a French mathematician and a naval hero of the American Revolutionary War. Borda concocted examples in which one knows the order in which each voter would rank the candidates in an election, and then showed how easily the will of the majority could be frustrated in an ordinary vote. Borda’s main suggestion was to require voters to rank candidates, rather than just choose one favorite, so that a winner could be calculated by counting points awarded according to the rankings. The key idea was to find a way of taking lower preferences, as well as first preferences, into account.Unfortunately, this method may fail to elect the majority’s favorite—it could, in theory, elect someone who was nobody’s favorite. It is also easy to manipulate by strategic voting.

If the candidate who is your second preference is a strong challenger to your first preference, you may be able to help your favorite by putting the challenger last. Borda’s response was to say that his system was intended only for honest men.

We have carried out a three-part study comparing the research performance of Indian institutions with that of other international institutions. In the first part, the publication profiles of various Indian institutions were examined and ranked based on the h-index and p-index. We found that the institutions of national importance contributed the highest in terms of publications and citations per institution. In the second part of the study, we looked at the publication profiles of various Indian institutions in the high-impact journals and compared these profiles against that of the top Asian and US universities. We found that the number of papers in these journals from India was miniscule compared to the US universities. Recognizing that the publication profiles of various institutions depend on the field/departments, we studied [in Part III] the publication profiles of many science and engineering departments at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, the Indian Institutes of Technology, as well as top Indian universities. Because the number of faculty in each department varies widely, we have computed the publications and citations per faculty per year for each department. We have also compared this with other departments in various Asian and US universities. We found that the top Indian institution based on various parameters in various disciplines was IISc, but overall even the top Indian institutions do not compare favourably with the top US or Asian universities.

The comparison groups of institutions include MIT, UMinn, Purdue, PSU, MSU, OSU, Caltech, UCB, UTexas (all from the US), National University of Singapore, Tsing Hua Univerrsity (China), Seoul National University (South Korea), National Taiwan University (Taiwan), Kyushu University (Japan) and Chinese Academy of Sciences.

... [T]he number of papers in these [high impact] journals from India was miniscule compared to [that from] the US universities. ... [O]verall even the top Indian institutions do not compare favourably with the top US or Asian universities.

My column today is about the need for birth control as a key to fighting poverty. In short: let’s make contraception as available as sex.

all the numbers on a subject like this are dubious. The U.N. or research groups put out nice reports with figures for all kinds of things, and I sometimes worry that they imply a false precision. The truth is we have very little idea of some of these numbers.

in my column today, I refer to the 215 million women around the world who have “an unmet need for contraception.” That means they want to delay pregnancy for two years or more,  are married or sexually active, and are not using modern contraception. I use that figure because it’s the best there is, but in the real world many women are much more ambivalent. They kind of don’t want another pregnancy, unless maybe it’s a boy. Or you ask them if they want to get pregnant, and they reply: “Not really, but I leave it to God.” Or they say that in an ideal world, they’d prefer to wait, but their husband doesn’t want to wait so they want another pregnancy now. So many people answer in those ways, rather than in the neat, crisp “yes” or “no” that the statistics suggest.