Chance News 18
Quotation
Single 40-year-old woman have a better chance of bing killed by a terrorist than getting married.
Newsweek, June 2, 1986
(See: Newsweek says they were wrong)
Forsooths
These Forsooths are from the June 2006 RSS News.
This summer there's about a 50 per cent probability that there will be above normal temperatures for much of Britain and Europe.
The Times
5 March 2004
To convert kilometres to miles multiply by .6214; kilometres/hour to miles/hour multiply by .6117
Schott's Almanc, page 193, Table of Conversions.
The BBC remains just ahead of commercial radio in the UK, with a 67% share of all listeners compared with 64%.
BBC news website
2 February 2006
How to Lie with Statistics Turns Fifty.
A review of How to Lie with Statistics Turns Fifty
Media Highlights, The College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 37, No 3, May 2006
Norton StarrThe College Mathematics Journal (CMJ) Media Highlights covers mathematics generally and its reviews often involve probability or statistical concepts, so Chance News readers would enjoy these reviews. The reviewer of this article, Norton Starr, has been a great help to Chance News.
Here Norton reviews a special section of Statistical Science, August 2005 that recognized the 50th birthday of Darrell Huff’s famous book "How to Lie with Statistics" by asking several authors to contribute the articles for this birthday party. These articles are:
"Darrell Huff and Fifty Years of How to Lie with Statistics", Michael Steele.
"Lies, Calculations and Constructions: Beyond How to Lie with Statistics", Joel Best.
"Lying with Maps", Mark Monmonier.
"How to Confuse with Statistics or: The Use and Misuse of Conditional Probabilities", Walter Krämer and Gerd Gigerenzer.
"How to Lie with Bad Data", Richard D. De Veaux and David J. Hand.
"How to Accuse the Other Guy of Lying with Statistics", Charles Murray.
"Ephedra", Sally C. Morton.
"In Search of the Magic Lasso: The Truth About the Polygraph", Stephen, E. Fienberg and Paul C. Stern.
Norton gives a nice description of each of the papers but we (Laurie Snell) will restrict ourselves to some quotes from the articles that we found particularly interesting.
Michael Steeles tells us the story of the life of Darrell Huff and begins with:
In 1954 former Better Homes and Gardens editor
and active freelance writer Darrell Huff published a slim (142 page) volume, which over time would become the most widely read statistics book in the history of the world.
There is some irony to the world’s most famous statistics book having been written by a person with no formal training in statistics, but there is also some logic to how this came to be. Huff had a thorough training for excellence in communication, and he had an exceptionalcommitment to doing things for himself.
In his article Joel Best reminds us of the failure of the "critical thinking" movement in the late 1980's and the 1990's and asks "who would teach it”. He is not very optimistic about this being done in statistics courses or in social science courses. And we were not very successful in getting people to teach our Chance course. He concludes his article with:
We all know statistical literacy is an important problem,
but we’re not going to be able to agree on its place in the curriculum. Which means that "How to Lie with Statistics" is going
to continue to be needed in the years ahead.
When we read the "The Bell Curve" by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray to review for Chance News, it seemed to us that the reviewers in the major newspapers could not have actually read the book. So we wrote a long review of the book for Chance News (Chance News 3.15, 3.16, 4.01).
In his article Charles Murray explains six ways to knock down a book. He discribes these as:
Tough but effective strategies for making people think that the target book is an irredeemable mess, the findings are meaningless, the author is incompetent and devious and the book’s thesis is something it isn’t.
Our experience with "The Bell Curve" made us realize that we may have seen an example of his Method 6 which he calls "THE BIG LIE" and describes as follows:
THE JUDICIOUS USE OF THE BIG LIE.
Finally, let us turn from strategies based on halftruths and misdirection to a more ambitious approach: to borrow from Goebbels, the Big Lie. The necessary and sufficient condition for a successful Big Lie is that the target book has at some point discussed a politically sensitive issue involving gender, race, class or the environment, and has treated this issue as a scientifically legitimate subject of investigation (note that the discussion need not be a long one, nor is it required that the target book takes a strong position, nor need the topic be relevant to the book’s main argument). Once this condition is met, you can restate the book’s position on this topic in a way that most people will find repugnant (e.g., women are inferior to men, blacks are inferior to whites, we don’t need to worry about the environment), and then claim that this repugnant position is what the book is about.
What makes the Big Lie so powerful is the multiplier effect you can get from the media. A television news show or a syndicated columnist is unlikely to repeat a technical criticism of the book, but a nicely framed Big Lie can be newsworthy. And remember: It’s not just the public who won’t read the target book. Hardly anybody in the media will read it either. If you can get your accusation into one important outlet, you can start a chain reaction. Others will repeat your accusation, soon it will become the conventional wisdom, and no one will remember who started it. Done right, the Big Lie can forever after define the target book in the publicmind.
Finally I agree with Norton's final remark in his review:
The articles are both a compliment to and a complement of Huff's pathbreaking venture in writing. This issue of Statistical Science is destined to be a collector's item.
Submitted by Laurie Snell
What does "unable to replicate" mean?
"Freakonomics" Author and HarperCollins Sued for Defamation, Kevin Orland, April 11, 2006, Bloomberg.com.
John Lott is an economist who has published a book "More Guns, Less Crime" that uses a multiple linear regression model to demonstrate that crime rates go down when states pass "concealed carry" laws. Concealed carry laws allow citizens to apply for the right to legally carry a concealed gun for their own protection. The regression model controlled for a large number of possible confounding variables. The theory is that if criminals do not know which of their victims might be armed, they would be more reluctant to mug strangers. This theory is very controversial and has come under attack from gun control advocates.
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are economists who published a book "Freakonomics" that uses a multiple linear regression model in Chapter 4 to demonstrate that states which have a high abortion rate saw a larger drop in crime than states with a low abortion rate. The regression model controlled for a large number of possible confounding variables. The theory is that if abortion laws reduced the number of "unwanted children" fewer children would grow up in an environment of neglect and end up becoming criminals. This theory is very controversial and has under come under attack from right-to-life groups.
It is not too surprising that the authors of two such provocative regression models would end up in a public clash. Levitt and Dubner criticize Lott's research in their book, and Lott has responded by suing.
Lott said in a federal lawsuit filed yesterday in Chicago that Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, defamed him when he wrote that other scholars have been unable to replicate Lott's research linking lower crime rates with the right to carry guns. The passage amounts to an allegation that Lott falsified his results, according to the suit.
There are actually much stronger allegations about fraud concerning Lott's research. Timothy Noah, for example, published an article in Slate magazine about Lott with the title "Another firearms scholar whose dog ate his data."
But apparently, the allegation of failure to replicate is more serious.
The allegation "damages Lott's reputation in the eyes of the academic community in which he works, and in the minds of the hundreds of thousands of academics, college students, graduate students, and members of the general public who read 'Freakonomics,'" Lott said in the lawsuit.
The remedies suggested by Lott are rather harsh.
Lott's suit asks for a halt in sales, a retraction in the next printing of the book and unspecified damages from Levitt and HarperCollins.
Interestingly enough the suit does not mention the co-author, Stephen Dubner.
Questions
1. What does the phrase "unable to replicate" mean to you? Does replication mean different things in economics versus medicine? Is "unable to replicate" a code phrase used to hint that the data is fraudulent?
2. Why do you think that Lott sued Levitt and not Noah?
3. What impact might this lawsuit have on scientific criticism?
Submitted by Steve Simon
Newsweek says they were wrong
Marriage by the Numbers
Newsweek, June 6, 2006, society; Pg. 40
Daniel McGinn; With Andrew Murr, Karen Springen, Joan Raymond, Marc Bain, Alice-Azania Jarvis and Sam Register
Too Late for Prince Charming
Newsweek, June 2, 1986, Lefestyle, Pg.58
Rennee Michael, Mark Starr, Shawn Doherty, amela Abramson, Pat, Wingert.Lies, damn lies and marriage statistics
Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2006 Editorial Pages Desk; Part B; Pg. 17
Meghan Daum.The 1986 Newsweek article begins with:
HIGHLIGHT:
A new study reports that college-educated women who are still single at the age of 35 have only a 5 percent chance of ever getting married
BODY:
Her sister had heard about it from a friend who had heard about it on "Phil Donahue" that morning. Her mother got the bad news via a radio talk show later that afternoon. So by the time Harvard graduate Carol Owens, 23, sat down to a family dinner in Boston, the discussion of the man shortage had reached a feverish pitch. With six unmarried daughters, Carol's said her mother was sounding an alarm. "You've got to get out of the house and meet someone," she insisted. "Now."
After two more such examples the article goes on to say:
The traumatic news came buried in an arid demographic study titled, innocently enough, "Marriage Patterns in the United States." But the dire statistics confirmed what everybody suspected all along: that many women who seem to have it all -- good looks and good jobs, advanced degrees and high salaries -- will never have mates. According to the report, white, college-educated women born in the mid-'50s who are still single at 30 have only a 20 percent chance of marrying. By the age of 35 the odds drop to 5 percent. Forty-year-olds are more likely to be killed by a terrorist: they have a minuscule 2.6 percent probability of tying the knot.
We see that the study reported on white, college-educated women, it was clearly the sentence "Forty-year-old are more likely to be killed by a terrorist" that made the article have such a big impact on the public. We read further:
Within days, that study, as it came to be known, set off a profound crisis of confidence among America's growing ranks of single women. For years bright young women single-mindedly pursued their careers, assuming that when it was time for a husband they could pencil one in. They were wrong. "Everybody was talking about it and everybody was hysterical," says Bonnie Maslin, a New York therapist. "One patient told me 'I feel like my mother's finger is wagging at me, telling me I shouldn't have waited"." Those who weren't sad got mad. The study infuriated the contentedly single, who thought they were being told their lives were worthless without a man. "I'm not a little spinster who sits home Friday night and cries," says Boston contractor Lauren Aronson, 29. "I'm not married, but I still have a meaningful life with meaningful relationships."
On the cover of the 2006 article we see::
<font= 5>20 Years Ago
<font= 3>Newsweek Predicted a Single 40-Year-Old Woman
Had a Better Chance of Being Killed by a Terrorist
Than Getting Married. Why We Were Wrong.From the 2006 Newsweek article we read:
To mark the anniversary of the "Marriage Crunch" cover, NEWSWEEK located 11 of the 14 single women in the story. Among them, eight are married and three remain single. Several have children or stepchildren. None divorced. Twenty years ago Andrea Quattrocchi was a career-focused Boston hotel executive and reluctant to settle for a spouse who didn't share her fondness for sailing and sushi. Six years later she met her husband at a beachfront bar; they married when she was 36. Today she's a stay-at-home mom with three kids--and yes, the couple regularly enjoys sushi and sailing. "You can have it all today if you wait--that's what I'd tell my daughter," she says. " 'Enjoy your life when you're single, then find someone in your 30s like Mommy did'." </blockquoate>
The writers for Newsweek go on to say:
The research that led to the highly touted marriage predictions began at Harvard and Yale in the mid-1980s. Three researchers--Neil Bennett, David Bloom and Patricia Craig--began exploring why so many women weren't marrying in their 20s, as most Americans traditionally had. Would these women still marry someday, or not at all? To find an answer, they used "life table" techniques, applying data from past age cohorts to predict future behavior--the same method typically used to predict mortality rates. "It's the staple [tool] of demography," says Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin. "They were looking at 40-year-olds and making predictions for 20-year-olds." The researchers focused on women, not men, largely because government statisticians had collected better age-of-marriage data for females as part of its studies on fertility patterns and birthrates.
Enter NEWSWEEK. We were hardly the first to make a big deal out of their findings, which began getting heavy media attention after the Associated Press wrote about the study that February. People magazine put the study on its cover in March with the headline the new look in old maids. And NEWSWEEK's story might be little remembered if it weren't for the "killed by a terrorist" line, first hastily written as a funny aside in an internal reporting memo by San Francisco correspondent Pamela Abramson. "It's true--I am responsible for the single most irresponsible line in the history of journalism, all meant in jest," jokes Abramson, now a freelance writer who, all kidding aside, remains contrite about the furor it started. In New York, writer Eloise Salholz inserted the line into the story. Editors thought it was clear the comparison was hyperbole. "It was never intended to be taken literally," says Salholz. Most readers missed the joke.While Newsweek admits they were wrong one gets the impression that their real mistake was the use of terrorist in their comparison.
Finally, some comments by Megham Daum from her June 3, 2006 Los Angeles Times column.
Since at least the 1970s, we've surfed the waves of any number of media-generated declarations about what women want, what we don't want, what we're capable of and, inevitably, what it's like to figure out that we're not capable of all that stuff after all, which doesn't matter because it turns out we didn't want it anyway.
Like hem lengths, scare tactics wrought by questionably massaged statistics change with the seasons. After the difficulty of marrying came the challenge of getting pregnant later in life. The panic du jour, of course, is the apparent near-impossibility of effectively raising kids while maintaining a career. Somehow this topic registers as sexier than what's happening in, say, Iraq or Darfur. In our more myopic moments, we seem to believe that people in refugee camps aren't nearly as stressed out as your average law school grad with a Baby Bjorn.Well, we did not add anything to this story but sometimes it seems best to let the players speak for themselves.
Discussion questions
(1) The article includes several graphics giving the results of studies on women and marriage. Here is one of these. Note that the first two studies were reported at about the same time.
Three studies tried to gauge the odds of an
40-year-old woman's eventually marrying.Bennett, Bloom & Craig
2.6%
1996 Census report
1986 Census report
17%-23%
40.8%Do you think that "eventually marrying" is correct? See if you can find the first two studies and see if you can explain the difference in the first two outcomes.
(2) Do you think that the Newsweek editors were really suprised that their readers did not recognize their joke?
Submitted by Laurie Snell
Independence of a DSMB is questioned
Conflicted Safety Panel Let Vioxx Study Continue, Snigdha Prakash, June 8, 2006, National Public Radio.
Vioxx is a pain reliever manufactured by Merck which has a complex and controversial history. There have been recent revelations about serious conflicts of interest in the Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) for a large scale trial, the Vioxx Gastrointestinal Outcomes Research study (VIGOR). This is not the trial that resulted in Vioxx being removed from the market, but rather an earlier trial.
The DSMB reviewed data in 2000 that indicated a difference in risk of cardiovasclar between vioxx and the comparison drug, naproxen. If the VIGOR trial had been ended early because of an increased risk of heart problems, perhaps the vioxx would have been removed from the market four years earlier, avoiing countless lives and avoiding a flood of lawsuits that Merck is now facing.
The DSMB, however, did not stop the study early and offered several explanations. First, the DSMB
couldn't tell if Vioxx was causing the heart problems or if naproxen, acting like low-dose aspirin, protected people from them, making Vioxx just look risky by comparison.
This contention was disputed by several experts that NPR interviewed who pointed out that the reason for the discrepancy was irrelevant to those patients in the VIGOR trial that suffered harm as a result of their participation in the study. Also, there was no solid evidence that naproxen had a protective effect.
The DSMB was also concerned about the small sample size. One of the experts disagreed with this contention also. The results were indeed statistically significant, and were consistent across all subgroups.
Curt Furberg concedes the number of heart problems and deaths was small. But he says it's clear the results weren't due to chance. He says the patterns were the same in every population group in the study.
FURBERG: In old people, young people, those who have hypertension, those who don't, etc. And the findings were very, very consistent. So in my mind, this confirms that the findings are real.
The DSMB also did not stop the study early because the trial was almost completely over.
Again, Dr. Furberg objects to this logic.
Curt Furberg says it does take time to stop a large, multinational study, and only a few additional heart attacks or deaths could have been predicted to occur in the remaining time. But he says:
FURBERG: I think we have obligations -- ethical, moral obligations. You don't want to expose patients to a harmful drug in a drug study. They should not be treated like guinea pigs. They are human beings. And we need to respect their rights.
The DSMB also wanted the trial to continue because it was addressing a very important question.
Vioxx could save lives, if the study showed that Vioxx caused less gastrointestinal bleeding.
Another expert interviewed by NPR disagreed.
But cardiologist Paul Armstrong counters such bleeding isn't common.
ARMSTRONG: The frequency with which that occurs is minor, and I would say unlikely to be counterbalanced by this excess in death and cardiovascular events
There were several conflicts of interest among members of the DSMB. The chair of the DSMB owned $73,000 in Merck stock. Shortly after the DSMB finished it's work, the chair received a consulting contract for 12 days of work at $5,000 per day. Although it probably wasn't as lucrative, another member of the DSMB particpated on the speaker bureau at Merck.
Another concern raised was the presence of Merck statistician during all deliberations of the DSMB. It is not unusual for a company statistician to present data to the DSMB, but in most situations, the statistician then removes himself/herself from any additional discussion.
Questions
1. If there is a statistically significant difference in the risk of side effects between two arms of the study, should the DSMB stop the study? Does the reason for the discrepancy have any relevance?
2. Why would consistency across a wide range of subgroups in a study strengthen the credibility of a finding. How would you interpret such a finding if was restricted to a specific subgroup? What action would be appropriate for that subgroup?
3. How large a financial stake should a person have before he/she should be barred from serving on a DSMB.
4. If you were serving on a DSMB, would you be troubled by the presence of a company statistician during all deliberations?
5. The members of a DSMB are typically selected by the company whose drug is being studied. Is there a problem with this approach? Can you suggest an alternative method for selecting members of a DSMB?
Impact Factors
It always comes as a shock to students fresh out of high school chemistry and physics classes--where data is deemed sacred--to be told that in statistics it is legitimate to remove outliers. What is beyond the pale is to add data that didn't happen. This obvious restriction is now being loosened in a strange way. According to the Wall Street Journal of June 5, 2006, researchers submitting papers to a particular scientific journal are being pushed to augment their articles with bibliographic citations of that specific journal. "Scientists and editors say scientific journals increasingly are manipulating rankings--called 'impact factors'--that are based on how often papers they publish are cited by other researchers."
Why? Because "Impact factors are essentially a grading system of how important the papers a journal publishes are." Besides inflating a journal's reputation, "Journals can [also] limit citiations to papers published by competitors, keeping their rivals'impact factors down." As always, follow the money: "Impact factors matter to publishers' bottom lines because librarians rely on them to make purchasing decisions. Annual subscriptions to some journals can cost upwards of $10,000."
Discussion
1. In the Wall Street Journal article, several scientific journal editors deny that the impact factor plays any role in the selection of papers. Assume you are the editor, what would you tell would-be authors? What would you tell your reviewers?
2. The article further states, "Scientists and publishers worry that the cult of the impact factor is skewing the direction of scientific research." Elaborate.
3. A standard technique in frequentist inferential statistics is known as "p-value" which deals with data this extreme or more extreme. How does this square with the sentence " What is beyond the pale is to add data that didn't happen"?