Not So Efficient

TW: Gelman is a stats guru. This presentation frames a fundamental challenge we as a nation face- inefficient health care delivery. One can criticize the reform effort but to claim the status quo is viable and the "best" system in the world is laughable.


http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/healthcare-spending-and-life-expectancy.html

Some Stats On Climate Change

TW: Climate change is relatively complex. Faced with complexity many if not most folks simplify by falling back on biases or reliance on their reference groups or persons. I do not (unfortunately) follow too many statistical bloggers but one I do follow is pretty good at keeping things relatively simplified (within the context of stats). He and others on his site have made multiple climate change related posts. If you have the time take a peek at them. They seek to put meat on the bones of the climate change debate.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/12/say_a_little_pr.html

Who Would Have Known?

TW: The graphs below (click to enlarge) show the distribution of boys by the last letter of their first names for the periods- 1906/1956/2006. The names have converged.

From Andrew Gelman's Stat Modeling blog:

"...The quick story is that 100 years ago, there were about 10 last letters that dominated; 50 years ago, the number of popular last letters declined slightly, to about 6; but now, a single letter stands out: an amazing 36% of baby boys in America have names ending in N.

This is super-cool. As a commenter wrote, there should be some sort of award for finding the largest effect "in plain sight" that nobody has noticed before.

But, beyond pure data-coolness, what does this mean? My story, based on reading Wattenberg's blog, goes as follows:

100 years ago, parents felt very constrained in their choice of names (especially for boys). A small set of very common names (John, William, etc.) dominated. And, beyond that, people would often choose names of male relatives. Little flexibility, a few names being extremely common, resulting in a random (in some sense) distribution of last letters.

Nowadays, parents have a lot of freedom in choosing their names. As a result, there are lots and lots of names that seem acceptable, but the most common names are not so common as they were fifty or a hundred years ago. With so much choice, what do people do? Wattenberg suggests they go with popular soundalikes (for example, Aidan/Jaden/Hayden), which leads to clustering in the last letter. Even so, the pattern with N is so striking, there's gotta be more to say about it.

But I like the paradox: 100 years ago, the distribution of names was more concentrated but the distribution of sounds (as indicated by last letters) was broader. Nowadays, the distribution of names is more diffuse but the distribution of sounds is more concentrated.

Less constraint -> more diffuse distribution of names -> more concentrated distribution of last letters.

This must occur in other aspects of life. For example, consider food. We eat lots more different types of food than we used to, but a single ingredient--corn syrup--makes up more and more of our diet (or so I'm told). Again, lack of constraint (this time for economic reasons) leads to more diversity in some ways and more homogeneity (by choice) in others."

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/05/the_trend_in_la.html

The Implied Assumptions When We Write Or Think

TW: Andrew is a stats professor from Columbia (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/). Somewhat like Nate Silver he is good at looking at things from different angles. He dissects a story on Japanese consumption to provide an alternative viewpoint using the exact same facts.

From Gelman's blog:
"On the front page of Sunday's New York Times, the primest of prime real estate, Hiroko Tabuchi writes:

"As recession-wary Americans adapt to a new frugality, Japan offers a peek at how thrift can take lasting hold of a consumer society, to disastrous effect... Today, years after the recovery, even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills. Sales of whiskey, the favorite drink among moneyed Tokyoites in the booming '80s, have fallen to a fifth of their peak. And the nation is losing interest in cars; sales have fallen by half since 1990."

How is this "disastrous"? Using bath water to do laundry makes sense to me. Unfortunately our apartment is not set up to do this, but why not? Cars are much better made than they used to be, probably most people in Japan who want a car badly enough have one already, so it makes sense that car sales would fall--people can continue driving their dependable old cars. Finally, I have nothing against whiskey, but is it really "disastrous" that sales have fallen to a fifth of their peak? Fads and all that.

Sure, I can see that this is all evidence that Japan's economy is far from booming, but I'm a bit disturbed to see frugality treated as a "disaster" in itself.

What really bothers me, though, is that the assumptions in the article are completely unstated. I'd be happier if the reporter had written something like this:

You might think that it's a good thing that the Japanese have become more energy-efficient and less into trendy conspicuous consumption: even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills, and sales of whiskey, the favorite drink among moneyed Tokyoites in the booming '80s, have fallen to a fifth of their peak.Even the notorious Japanese tendency to buy new cars and appliances every two years, whether they need it or not, has abated. The nation is losing interest in cars--sales have fallen by half since 1990--and people are sticking with old-fashioned television sets rather than snapping up expensive flat-screen TVs.

But this frugal behavior is having a disastrous effect [or, is
symptomatic of an underlying economic disaster]...

This puts the assumptions front and center, at which point they could quote experts on both sides of the issue or whatever.

P.S. Just to be clear: my point here is not that a newspaper reporter wrote something I might disagree with, but rather that sometimes people seem trapped within their unstated assumptions. (Yes, I'm sure that happens to me too.)"