I am often surprised at the level of distortion that occurs when the conclusion of a statistical study is rewritten and edited for consumption by the wider news reading public. A case in point is the recent study by Dr. Luis Angeles, “Do Children Make Us Happier?” This is a statistical analysis of a life satisfaction survey that covered British adults from 1996 onwards. It found that children had little to no effect on life satisfaction for the population as a whole, however if divided into different groups then children tended to increase the satisfaction levels of married couples. However this is a statistical average – a fact that is often overlooked when the headlines get written:

• Children ‘make married parents happier’ – suggesting that this will apply to all married couples. The study doesn’t even say this would apply to most married couples. That’s the nature of statistics. The average of -2 -1 -1 1000 is 249 yet you’re more likely to choose a negative number when picking one at random.
• Kids Are The Key To A Happy Married Life – implying that childfree married couples are missing out on increased happiness. This also conveniently overlooks what the study found when they further divided the married couples into subgroups. Children lowered the satisfaction levels of higher income earners and had little effect on those with less than a full schooling education.
• Married with children the key to happiness? and Married With Children Paves Way to Happiness – implying that childfree singles are missing out too. The study doesn’t even do a direct comparison between childfree singles and wedded parents, and is not longitudinal. Bella DePaulo has a few words to say about happiness as it relates to marriage.

There is certainly a lot of confirmation bias amongst journalists and newspaper editors. Those with a large family are especially prone to see only what fits in with their beliefs. If they had read the study in detail they might have noticed that children had an even greater effect on raising the life satisfaction of widows. Which leads one to wonder why no one came up with a headline that read: “The key to happiness is kids and a dead husband”?

There is so much temptation to infer direct causality, but even the author of the original research cautions against this when he concludes with:

One is tempted to advance, on the contrary, that children make people happier under the “right conditions”. We do not mean this as a moralistic defense of marriage. Instead, by right conditions we have in mind the time in life when people feel that they are ready, or at least willing, to enter parenthood. This time can come at very different moments for different persons, but a likely signal of its approach may well be the act of marriage.

This is an example of a latent variable effect. Angeles did attempt to explain this to the mainstream media:

Dr Angeles, director of the university’s Centre for Development Studies, speculated that the reason for the difference in happiness levels lay in whether children were planned or not.

He said: “People who have decided to get married probably have in mind that they want to have children.

“But in the case of unmarried parents, children might not be expected.”

So children tend to make parents happier if they were planned for, and married couples tend to be experienced practitioners of planned parenthood. It is not a surprise that married couples (who themselves may have spent a few years living together unwed) tend to be more experienced with the use of contraception than unmarried cohabiting couples. Experience grows with length of time spent cohabiting, married or not. But no survey is going to ask parents if their children were expected or unplanned. Marital status merely serves as an imperfect proxy for this.

Furthermore there is an element of survivorship bias when one realises that the married group excludes the divorced. Weren’t they once married? It is unlikely that their children were conceived after the marriage was dissolved. (We’re assuming that the remarried would fall into the married group.) So any previously married couples that broke up after a fall in life satisfaction don’t get included in the statistical average for the married group. In the study, children exhibit a very wide variance on the divorced group that included both negative and positive ranges.

And so the conclusion we should have made, yet is almost never reported in the news, is that children make couples happy if they are well prepared to be parents. Who knew?

The childfree should stand proud as this is what they’ve been saying all along: Only have kids if you really want them, are prepared for the parenting role, and all the responsibilities, demands on time and resources that entails.

Wow! A climate scientist takes Steve McIntyre at face value. I would never have had the patience for someone showing such disrespect for science especially when they take such care to design their blog posts so as to provoke others to draw conclusions
that climate science is all fraud, without specifically spelling this out literally in the original post. And by avoiding taking any steps to prevent their post from being interpreted in this pernicious way, is simply adding insult to injury.

Professor Briffa’s patience is truly unfathomable. Although it could be argued that investing so much of one’s valuable time responding to Internet attacks on one’s reputation may only end up encouraging the denialists.

For those who didn’t see last night’s The Events on C4, it is the latest project from UK’s very own mentalist, Derren Brown. In the first installment he claims to have predicted Wednesday’s lottery draw, and then revealed how he did it two days later. The program turned out to be a wonderful piece of entertainment dressed up to look like something educational — or should that be the other way around?

The bit I found most interesting was the coin flipping experiment that he reframed as a competition between two coin flippers. One challenger flipped a coin until he observed three heads in a row, whilst another flipping on Derren’s behalf was looking for a pattern tail-head-head. They each took turns flipping and the side that saw their target sequence first was declared winner of that round. Intuitively, one would think that each of the 8 patterns of 3 coin flips (HHH, HHT, HTH, etc) would be equally likely to turn up, yet Derren’s side won most of the rounds in this game. Unlike the other segments of his show, this one used almost no trickery at all. The coin tossing problem is explained quite well by Oxford mathematician, Peter Donnelly in his TED Talk.

Derren Brown chose tail-head-head (he could have chosen head-tail-tail) precisely because he knew this sequence was the most likely one to turn up in a continuous stream of tosses. If both flippers were instead allowed to flip three coins during each turn, then the original intuition would apply — all 8 outcomes are equally likely. However, the winning strategy Derren claimed to be using makes absolutely no sense. What if the challenger chose HTT, they what would you do?

Update: I’ve looked this sequence over, it is now apparent that both teams are looking for the their chosen combination in one shared sequence of tosses, and not as I had assumed previously, two independent sequences of tosses. This set up makes the game non-transitive and is called Penney’s Game.

As for the rest of the explanation of using crowd sourcing to predict a purely random outcome, perhaps it is fitting that this stunt coincides with the week in which the financial media commemorates the one year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the near catastrophic meltdown of the financial market. A lot of people staked their entire future in the collective wisdom, rationality, and self-correcting crowd sourcing nature of the free market and then got it so spectacularly wrong.

So, how did Derren Brown really do it? One possible method is a camera trick:

Or any other method whereby you load the numbers on the rack moments after the lottery draw. It’s the bigger budget version of the trick demonstrated in this video clip:

The really clever bit is in delaying your “prediction” without people noticing.

In summing up what Derren purports to be the explanation, I’m tempted to cite Douglas Hofstadter’s comments on the Singularity movement that has grown up around Ray Kurzweil:

It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad. It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid.

The difference here is that Derren Brown is an entertainer and not a futurist, and he knows very well which is good and which is utter bollocks. Though I’m not so sure that the same can be said of many futurists.

I look forward to next week’s The Events in which Derren Brown claims to take control the nation of TV viewers. If the social media buzz so far is anything to go by, and especially if there is a significant increase in syndicates (most of which consisting of 24 gullible people) taking part in next week’s lottery, he can comfortably claim to have already achieved this feat.

It is how you approach an issue that determines what you see.

dick_cheney_patriot

It’s a pity that Leo Laporte didn’t save his Michael Wehner interview for until after the new podcast, Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour, had been officially launched. It would have been good to have pointers to this episode from the official Twit site, but as it stands one has to do a bit of Googling to find the video. Leo and Dr. Kiki originally asked Michael Wehner, a climate modeller at Laurence Berkeley Labs, to be interviewed to discuss his recently released analysis of the temperature record and why one could not conclude that global warming had stopped based on a short terms cooling trends. Wehner also did an excellent job explaining why there is scientific consensus on global warming being anthropogenic. Of course, this being a Twit interview, the chat room was populated by a strongly opinionated geek community whose familiarity with all things tech did not exactly translate to a likewise grasp of science. The comments from the chatroom that Leo passed to Wehner reflected this. But on the whole, Wehner did stick to the science of climate modelling while steering well clear of politics and policy making. His succinct explanation for why climate change is most likely due to CO2 and not to changes in the sun was particularly impressive — observed cooling of the stratosphere is consistent with a CO2 heat trapping blanket. If the sun was causing it, the stratosphere should warm up. Though I do wonder what the cosmic ray theory of climate change would predict for the stratosphere.

Things did get a bit repetitive towards the end where Wehner seemd to be answering the same denialist challenges he had already given answers for earlier in the hour. Just goes to show that some geeks only hear what they want to hear. Denialism is not reserved solely for the ignorant, but apparently highly intelligent technology fans can sometimes succumb to its lure.

Update: I now realise what Leo was refering to when he alluded to his own personal experience of a heated public exchange with someone on the subject of anthropogenic climate change. Perhaps this was part of the reason he has now teamed up with Dr. Kiki Sanford to produce her new science oriented podcast. There is a strong denialist bias that seems to thrive in the  Libertarian segment of the geek community. Given Dr. Kiki’s views on the matter, it will only be a matter of time before Leo alienates this segment of geeks, although I do wonder why libertarians in particular so easily fall victim to denialist arguments. Leo Laporte is also a fan of the Skepticality podcast and the scientific skepticism movement features quite a few Libertarians such as Michael Shermer, whose views on climate change are now consistent with the IPCC report. So there is hope yet for denialist geeks and hats off to Leo for at least trying to bring scientific enlightenment to the Twit Army, and for his continued engagement with denialist geek celebrities.

I recently got back in touch with a classmate who graduated  a decade ago and had migrated halfway around the world to marry the women he fell in love with back then. I had promptly lost contact with him while dealing with my own personal issues, but thanks to the current global popularity of social networking websites we were able to update each other  via messages sent back and forth. Proudly he told me of his two kids and in reply I revealed that I’m still single and childfree, and that given my age and the uncertainties in the British economy, it looks likely to stay that way indefinitely. However, he was of the opinion that being a male, I still had plenty of time to start a family of my own. As if by coincidence, I happened to stumble upon this blog posting on recent research on male fertility. It seems, that men approaching midlife need to be everybit as aware of the ticking of their biological clocks as women already are today. Raising a child in today’s resource constrained and environmentally challenged world is already a significant gamble for healthy couples in their 20’s. Couples who waited until their financial situation was more secure before starting to have kids could face additional financial burdens due to increased health risks to their children. Furthermore, some of the problems their kids might face, such as autism, lower IQ,  and schizophrenia, may not be easily compensated for through financial means alone.

What time I have left to begin healthily reproducing offspring is most likely a lot shorter than most of my friends think.

But I’m not bitter. In fact, I’ve been a subscriber and advocate of the childfree philosophy for over three years now. And when I read in monetary terms how much new parents spend and have given up during the first few years of a baby’s upbringing, I find myself even more convinced that I’ve made the right choice.

Parents spend an average of £13,696 in their baby’s first year with more than £2,000 of that going towards childcare.

In the first three years of their child’s life, parents spend £1,496 on feeding them, £1,142 on clothes and £1,289 on books and toys.

However, one should not infer that I think all parents have made the wrong choice, since everyone’s situation is different and we all should be left to make up their own mind. But I cannot help but wonder how much forethought goes into such an important decision when I read about the conditions some struggling families are forced to endure due to the worsening economy. But is it really fair to demand that couples who are contemplating the step toward parenthood, should be able to predict economic conditions over the two decades it takes to raise a human from birth to adulthood, when top economists cannot even tell whether the recovery will come this year or next? And yet there are parents out there who expect way too much of themselves and end up overreaching. When circumstances do not go the way they hoped the consequences can be disasterous.

A spate of high-profile mass killings in the United States in recent months — including half a dozen rampages since March — shows the impact the economic meltdown is having on rising violence, experts say.

…

Direct correlations may not always immediately surface, but criminologist Jack Levin, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, says the trends are clear.

“Catastrophic losses serve as inspiration, or precipitant,” he told AFP.

In a severe recession there are simply more people suffering such a loss, he says.

In an economic downturn, the United States often sees “many more large-body-count murders — on the job, in the family — as many more Americans feel desperate in a situation they feel got completely out of control.”

Parenthood is indeed a leap into the unknown and I think anyone making that leap, especially after considering the same things that I have, are very courageous people.

I wondered what they meant when a republican grassroots movement said they were going to “teabag the whitehouse“  this April 15th

Now it all makes sense.

When the CEOs of the major American car companies travelled to Washington to beg Congress for a bailout, the most memorable moment in the popular media was when Representative Brad Sherman grilled the CEOs about their use of individual corporate jets.

The issue was deemed sufficiently important for public relations that General Motors wants to block the public from tracking its leased planes. Japanese CEOs seem to have a completely different attitude when dealing with potentially embarrassing corporate perks:

Why the big difference in approach between US and Japanese company leadership? According to Steven Levitt, in his TED talk on Crack Economics, the Americans seem to be following a fairly new principle in economics that is common in gangland hierarchies. This principle is so new that economists don’t have a proper academic term for it, so Levitt uses a gang leader’s parlance:

Indeed, the “weak and shit” hypothesis seems to fit the car company CEOs quite well.

That’s a good start. Hopefully this is one campaign promise the president elect does not break in the next four years. What is really sad however is that the audience was moved to loudly applaud such a basic statement of belief. That just goes to show how damaging the past eight years of the Republican war on science has been to human progress.

The trouble with treating all basic science research as an earmark in the same class as that infamous bridge to nowhere, are all those nasty unintended consequences.

Is it now a scientist’s responsibility to defend the funding of basic research against cuts made by a Christian fundamentalist who denies anthropogenic global warming, defends creationism being taught alongside evolution as science, entertains thoughts of banning books, and believes she needs protection from witchcraft?

UPDATE: Keith Olbermann also weighs in: