Sam Harris

Sam Harris has written interesting books on the topic of atheism. He presents great logic behind his ideas. I have seen it written (I can't remember where) that atheism is in many ways where being gay and lesbian was 30 years ago. That is, people are afraid to say they are atheist because of the ramification. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins both have written books that call for atheists to "come out" with their beliefs.

Here is an excerpt from an article that Sam Harris wrote in Newsweek:

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the Earth, more than half the American population believes that the entire cosmos was created 6,000 years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. Those with the power to elect presidents and congressmen—and many who themselves get elected—believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah's Ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the Earth and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in a garden with a talking snake, by the hand of an invisible God.

This is embarrassing. But add to this comedy of false certainties the fact that 44 percent of Americans are confident that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years, and you will glimpse the terrible liability of this sort of thinking. Given the most common interpretation of Biblical prophecy, it is not an exaggeration to say that nearly half the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. It should be clear that this faith-based nihilism provides its adherents with absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization—economically, environmentally or geopolitically. Some of these people are lunatics, of course, but they are not the lunatic fringe. We are talking about the explicit views of Christian ministers who have congregations numbering in the tens of thousands. These are some of the most influential, politically connected and well-funded people in our society.

It is, of course, taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs. The problem, however, is that much of what people believe in the name of religion is intrinsically divisive, unreasonable and incompatible with genuine morality. One of the worst things about religion is that it tends to separate questions of right and wrong from the living reality of human and animal suffering. Consequently, religious people will devote immense energy to so-called moral problems—such as gay marriage—where no real suffering is at issue, and they will happily contribute to the surplus of human misery if it serves their religious beliefs.

A case in point: embryonic-stem-cell research is one of the most promising developments in the last century of medicine. It could offer therapeutic breakthroughs for every human ailment (for the simple reason that stem cells can become any tissue in the human body), including diabetes, Parkinson's disease, severe burns, etc. In July, President George W. Bush used his first veto to deny federal funding to this research. He did this on the basis of his religious faith. Like millions of other Americans, President Bush believes that "human life starts at the moment of conception." Specifically, he believes that there is a soul in every 3-day-old human embryo, and the interests of one soul—the soul of a little girl with burns over 75 percent of her body, for instance—cannot trump the interests of another soul, even if that soul happens to live inside a petri dish. Here, as ever, religious dogmatism impedes genuine wisdom and compassion.

A 3-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all. The truth is that President Bush's unjustified religious beliefs about the human soul are, at this very moment, prolonging the scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings.

Given our status as a superpower, our material wealth and the continuous advancements in our technology, it seems safe to say that the president of the United States has more power and responsibility than any person in history. It is worth noting, therefore, that we have elected a president who seems to imagine that whenever he closes his eyes in the Oval Office—wondering whether to go to war or not to go to war, for instance—his intuitions have been vetted by the Creator of the universe. Speaking to a small group of supporters in 1999, Bush reportedly said, "I believe God wants me to be president." Believing that God has delivered you unto the presidency really seems to entail the belief that you cannot make any catastrophic mistakes while in office. One question we might want to collectively ponder in the future: do we really want to hand the tiller of civilization to a person who thinks this way?

Advice from the Movies, Part 1

From Mike Damone of Fast Times at Ridgemont High:

"Act like wherever you are, that's the place to be."

Single Women

The Social Science Statistics Blog has an entry about a recent article describing 51% of women now living without a spouse. Here is an excerpt:

"Fully understanding the assumptions and limitations of a study is challenging enough for those performing the research. In some ways, the journalists’ job is harder, finding lay language to summarize outcomes and implications without generalizing or ignoring uncertainty. I do not envy them the task.

Byron Calame, the public editor of the New York Times, recently discussed his paper's presentation of a study about marital status. On January 16, the front page read, "51% of Women are Now Living Without Spouse.” Calame’s response noted that in the study, “women” included females aged 15 and older; the Census set the lower bound at 15 to catch all married women. The original article did not call attention to the fact that teenagers living at home were counted as single women."

Correlation and Causation

Steven Levitt wrote about a study that looked at smoking and PTSD. Here is an excerpt:

The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry recently published a paper on the relationship between smoking and post-traumatic stress disorder. This newspaper report on the article starts out okay:“Post-trauma mental health disturbances such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are associated with increased smoking, either by starting to smoke or an increase of tobacco use,” write Dr Peter G Van der Velden, of the Institute for Psychotrauma, Zaltbommel, the Netherlands, and colleagues.

That certainly makes sense. The article continues:

However, few trauma studies have examined whether smoking is a risk factor, or “marker” for PTSD or other mental health disorders following a disaster.That seems a reasonable thing to test as well. You find a bunch of smokers and non-smokers before a traumatic event. You subject them to a traumatic event. Then you see how they fare. It won’t tell you anything about the impact that smoking has on coping with trauma, but it will tell you something about whether the kind of people who smoke might fare better or worse in response to a tragedy.

To look into that aspect, the researchers conducted surveys 18 months and 4 years after a fireworks disaster in Enschede, the Netherlands. Included were 662 adult victims and 526 residents of another Dutch city who were used as a comparison group.

Oops…by surveying victims for the first time 18 months after the disaster we cannot even answer the question about whether the kind of people who smoke respond badly to tragedy because they are classifying people as smokers based on whether they smoke 18 months after the event. If you look back up to the first passage in italics in this blog post, you will see that we already know that people start to smoke after traumatic events. Presumably, the harder the tragedy hits you, the more likely you are to take up smoking. Of course, you could ask people whether they smoked before the tragedy, but it appears that these researchers didn’t bother, or at least aren’t using the information (or maybe they do but it isn’t mentioned in this media report).

Victims who smoked at the first evaluation were more than twice as likely as those who did not smoke to have severe anxiety symptoms, nearly twice as likely to have severe hostility symptoms, and close to three times as likely to have a diagnosis of disaster-related PTSD at the 4-year evaluation.

Interesting, perhaps, but I have no idea how to interpret the result. One thing I can guarantee you I would not conclude with any confidence is what the authors conclude:

If these findings are confirmed by other studies, disaster victims who smoke may be able to reduce their risk of developing mental health disturbances if they quit smoking, Van der Velden and colleagues conclude.

What?! For starters, there is nothing in the study about quitting smoking — only about people who do smoke. Second, where do they get the idea this relationship is causal, or that the direction of causality runs from smoking to anxiety rather than vice-versa? This is not too different than advising sick people to avoid hospitals because people who visit hospitals die at a much higher rate than people who don’t.

From the Mahalonobis Blog:

"if you want to be good at checkers, and you are 7, a good strategy is just not to make mistakes, wait until your opponent makes one, and capitalize. If you are playing a skilled player, you need to develop a strategy that out-anticipates him. In drawing, a good beginner is measured by his realism, but later by his ability to see things no one else sees. Good wrestlers at that age don't make dumb mistakes, but the better high-school wrestlers are already strategizing: faking moves to open up others.

In the attached picture, Wilfred Dietrich of West Germany (bottom) is actually seconds away from pinning the heaviest man to be in the Olympics (410 pounds), Chris Taylor. You can see it on YouTube. Dietrich supposedly gave Taylor a hello hug at a meeting a few days earlier, in order to see if he could get his arms around him (he could, just barely). Then, he baited Taylor into a double-overhook and used Taylor's bulk against himself in one of the greatest wrestling moves of all time.

So much teaching has this dichotomy... In statistics, you first learn about basic concepts like means and standard devitions, and move into more complicated econometrics, but eventually you need a nuanced approach that is nothing like what is taught in any textbook--but you need to learn that textbook to get there. Thus a good teacher is often a poor practitioner precisely because he is good at things that work only at a lower level, among true novices. A great practitioner finds these basics boring, and so is bad at teaching them."

Traffic Jams

In periods of high traffic, one person can have a great influence on cars behind him or her. Livescience.com describes how reaction times, lapses in attention, and erratic driving (faster or slower than other traffic or the switching of lanes) can cause ‘traffic jams.’

Behavioral economists explain that in most places roads are free, so there is little incentive for drivers not to over-utilize them. Economic incentives or road pricing are measures that can prevent recurring congestion. Evidence based on the induced demand hypothesis suggests that building more freeways increases traffic congestion. With extra road capacity, more cars will use the road and as a result more traffic congestion will arise. It has also been likened to an obese person loosening their belt as a cure for obesity.

Some economists have argued for congestion pricing, which is charging higher tolls for driving on roads when there is more congestion. This idea is thought to change the incentives, so that people will find alternatives to driving in the most congested times (e.g., taking public transportation, leaving at different times, car pooling, etc.). Daniel Gross has an article in the NY Times describing his ideas.

Happiness

Some say that happiness can be found in the pursuit of goals. That is, happiness is achieved by wanting of things and not in actually having the wanted ‘thing.’

An interesting book that I recently read is “Stumbling on Happiness” by Dan Gilbert. The book is about how what we think makes us happy and what really does make us happy are often two completely different things. Gilbert describes many studies on happiness and memory bias to present his theory on happiness.

Note: Audible.com Is a great place to find audio books. I find I can read more by listening to books on my iPod--thus, increasing my ‘happiness.’

Slate.com has a piece on the economics of happiness comparing how much happiness a new PlayStation will buy compared to getting married.

Discover magazine has an article on Martin Seligman’s latest work on happiness training.

Livescience.com also has a summary of other findings on happiness.

Is Vanuatu or Denmark the happiest place on earth? It all depends on how you measure happiest.

Manufactured Fear

Some fears are emphasized by the media or politicians to create a change in our behavior to suit their purposes. John Twelve Hawks, in his essay "How We Live Now," discusses this topic:

"In his insightful book The Culture of Fear, Barry Glassner shows how many of our specific fears are created and sustained by media manipulation. There can be an enormous discrepancy between what we fear and the reality of what could happen to us. Glassner analyzes several "threats" such as airplane disasters, youth homicide, and road rage, and proves that the chance of any of these dangers harming an individual is virtually nonexistent.

Although Glassner accurately describes the falseness of a variety of threats, he refrains from embracing any wide-reaching explanation. It can be argued that the constant message of impending destruction is simply a way for the media to keep us watching television - "Are cyber predators targeting your children?" is a tagline that is going to get the audience's attention. What interests me is not the reality of these threats, but the effect they have on our view of the world. Fear encourages intolerance, racism and xenophobia. Fear creates the need for a constant series of symbolic actions manufactured by the authorities to show that yes, they are protecting us from all possible dangers."

Good, Bad, Who Knows?

After reading a quote from Phil Mickelson, who won a golf tournament this weekend, I was reminded of a story. I'm not sure of the source of this story, but there was a farmer who used a horse to till his fields. One day, the horse escaped. The farmer's neighbor came over to sympathize with him and told him how awful it must be to lose his horse. The farmer replied, "Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?"

A week later, the horse returned with a herd of horses from the hills and this time the neighbors congratulated the farmer on his good luck. His reply was, "Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?"

When the farmer's son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses, he fell off its back and broke his leg. Everyone thought this very bad luck. The farmer's reaction was, "Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?"

Some weeks later, the army marched into the village and conscripted every able-bodied youth they found there. When they saw the farmer's son with his broken leg, they decided not to take him. Good luck or bad luck? Who knows?

Last year, Phil Mickelson was about to win a major golf tournament, when he hit a double bogey and lost the tournament. Here is his quote from yesterday:

“Winning today gives me satisfaction, I believe I can take what happened at Winged Foot and make it a plus for the rest of my career.”

Good luck, bad luck, who knows?

Analogies in Statistics

The Mahalonobis Blog has a great entry on using analogies to teach statistics. Here is part of their entry:

"An educational experiment in 1989 pitted a group of students with high reading scores, selected especially for their lack of interest in baseball, against a group of low-scoring students who happened to be avid baseball fans. The two groups were asked to demonstrate their reading comprehension of a passage on baseball. Can you guess which team won? Answer: the baseball experts. The idea is that reading is primarily about analogies and metaphors, and so the more things you really know that are related to the subject under discussion, the easier it will be to understand what someone is saying about it. Stephen Pinker's new book The Stuff of Thought emphasizes this point. A good analogy is meaningful if it resonates with one's knowledge base, as opposed to those old 19th century writers who use phrases that have lost their meaning (eg, "long in the tooth"--very few people are up on horses today). So a vibrant speech contains many meaningful analogies because you know exactly what they are talking about when they say "it's like rebooting your computer." The more you know, the more meaningful the analogy and what it relates to, and so you know it's strengths and limitations. Sure you have to know what analogies do (ie, process), but knowing the facts is perhaps more important. For example, say someone said that Microsoft's Xbox strategy is like the Schlieffen plan? You need to know both facts, The Xbox strategy and the Schlieffen plan, to assess this statement. In fact, knowing the definition of an analogy is pretty superfluous in evaluating it if you know the facts.

It's a simple point, but remember that most educators today emphasize learning to learn, and consider facts as less important than process.

I think this is where really mathematical people fail, in that without a good knowledge base about the subject in question, their ability to write down a partial differential equation or fancy algorithm is insufficient for the average problem that is really interesting. Sometimes these savants will have a neat problem fall into their lap, but many really smart mathematicians or programmers can't prioritize because they don't know the facts, so they can't rank anything--they just connect things in often irrelevant ways."

Super Bowl XLI Coin Toss

According to the announcer at last night's game, the NFC has won the coin toss 10 consecutive times. He indicated the probability of this happening is extremely low. To calculate this probability, we need to assume that the coin is balanced (thus, there is a 50% chance of it landing on either side) and that there is no skill involved with tossing the coin or calling the toss that would change the 50% chance of it landing on any particular side.

The probability of any team winning the coin toss is 50%. The probability of an NFC team winning the coin toss two years in a row is .5 x .5 or .25. Thus, the chance that one division wins the coin toss two years in a row is only 25%. The probability that the NFC will win the coin toss ten years in a row is .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 or .00097. Thus, the chance that the NFC team would win 10 years in a row is very small.

The probability of the NFC winning the coin toss next year is .50, but the probability that one conference wins 11 years in a row is .00049.

Almost surely your birthday

If I were to wager that at least two people in my classes do not share a common birthday, I would ‘almost surely’ be wrong. In my class of 28 students, there is about a 70% chance of two people sharing the same birthday.

Let’s say I am to ask everyone their birthday. The second person I ask has a 365 out of 366 chance that they have a different birthday from the first person. That is about a 99.7% certainty that their birthday does not match. The third person also has a pretty good chance that his or her birthday does not match either one of the first two people (364 out of 366 chance). The 28th person has a 338 out of 366 chance of not sharing anyone else’s birthday (still a 92% chance of not having a matching birthday). Thus, each individual’s chance of missing everyone’s else birthday is pretty good. However, we want to know the likelihood of no one having matching birthdays. With all those chances combined, we actually have a very good chance of two people sharing the same birthday. To compute the likelihood that all of my students do not share a birthday, we can first determine the likelihood that two people share the same birthday. To calculate, we multiply together all the individual chances: 365/366 x 364/366 x 363/366 ... x 338/366. In that case, we get a number around .345. Thus, we only have a 35% chance of two people not sharing the same birthday. That give me a 65% chance of being correct if I guess that two people share the same birthday.

This example is quite interesting and fun to demonstrate at parties (I no longer get invited to fun parties). However, there is a much better application of these ideas. One example is applying for a job or internship. Let’s imagine that I am really an awful candidate and that I don’t fit well at any position. Maybe I have a 1 in a 100 chance of getting a job. Let’s say there are 50 places at which I have that same chance of getting a job. Amazingly I have about a 40% chance at getting at least 1 job if I apply to all 50 places. The first job I apply to I have a 1 in a 100 chance. The second one I also have that same chance. Now, if I multiple 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100, I get the probability that I won’t find a job. If I subtract that number from 1, I get the probability of finding a job. Thus, I have above a 39.4% chance of getting at least one of those jobs.

The simplest formula for these problems is: 1-p^n, where p is the probability of finding a job and n is the number of jobs of which I applied.

Barbaro (from The Onion)

Millions Of Americans Travel To Kentucky To Attend Barbaro's Funeral

LOUISVILLE, KY—In a stirring show of love and respect, millions of people—including Barbaro's owners, breeders, associates, foreign dignitaries and heads of state from over 90 countries, celebrities, and throngs of grief-stricken...

Cohen's d Syntax for SPSS

Here is syntax to calculate Cohen's d in SPSS. The final table provides a t-statistic, associated p-value and Cohen's d.

**Assuming two variables in the SPSS data file labeled.
** IV - Independent variable (Groups 1 & 2);.
** DV - Dependent variable.

**First we conduct a t-test.
T-TEST
GROUPS=iv(1 2)
/VARIABLES=dv
/CRITERIA=CIN(.95) .
**The next step gives a graph with 95% CI.
GRAPH/ERRORBAR(CI 95)=DV BY IV
/TITLE='Confidence Intervals for Means'.

**In the next step, make sure that the data is saved.
**because it changes the current data file.
AGGREGATE/OUTFILE=*/BREAK=iv/m2=MEAN(dv)/sd2=SD(dv)/n2=N.
COMPUTE N1=LAG(N2,1).
COMPUTE M1=LAG(M2,1).
COMPUTE sd1=LAG(sd2,1).
EXECUTE.
SELECT IF(IV=2).
EXECUTE.

* Compute Statements for Cohens d.
COMPUTE SP2=(((N1-1)*(sd1**2))+((N2-1)*(sd2**2)))/(N1+N2-2).
COMPUTE T=(M1-M2)/SQR(SP2*((1/N1)+(1/N2))).
COMPUTE DF=(N1+N2-2).
COMPUTE P = CDF.T(t,df) .
COMPUTE d=T*SQR((1/N1)+(1/N2)).
COMPUTE d=ABS(d).

FORMATS ALL(F8.2) DF N1 N2(F8.0) P(F8.4).
SUMMARIZE
/TABLES=d T DF P N1 N2
/FORMAT=NOLIST TOTAL
/TITLE='t test and cohens d'
/CELLS=FIRST.