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Choosing definitions: BMI vs. DXA (or, Why BMI Is Not a Lie)
There is a great post over on Kaiser Fung’s blog on the BMI/DXA debate. I suggest you go read it. What it is about is this — there’s a claim to be made that BMI doesn’t measure fat accurately, and a number of people are saying BMI should be replaced by this other measure (DXA)… Continue reading
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Comparison of the Day: Unemployment by College Major
In the COMPARABLE framework the “E” is for “Edges”, and part of the “question of edges” is whether there are significant subpopulations. In the case of unemployment of recent college grads, the answer is yes: The center would tell you only that the average unemployment for college grads is about 9%. But the lowest rates… Continue reading
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Mental Experiments and the Mancovery
This is the new story out — it’s a mancovery! From Bloomberg: Men, who lost more than twice as many jobs as women during the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, have landed 88 percent of the non-farm jobs created since the recession ended in June 2009. The share of men saying the economy… Continue reading
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When Percentages Go Wrong
A poor man said to a rich one: “All my money goes for food.” “Now that’s your trouble,” said the rich man. “I only spend five percent of my money on food.” (From a Sufi tale, recounted here.) Percentages are a really helpful tool, obviously. But raw numbers can matter too. Continue reading
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Comparison of the Day: Conservative vs. Liberal Trust of Science
From Kevin Drum’s Chart o’ the Day: Lots of interesting stuff going on there. Notice, in particular, how the trust in science falls off a cliff for moderates in the 70s. It’s also fascinating that conservative trust in science used to be as high (if not higher) than that of liberals 40 years ago. This is still… Continue reading
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Comparison of the Day: CFL vs. Incandescent Mercury Pollution
From EnergyStar.gov: Lifecycle impact is an invaluable tool in making fair comparisons. It’s easy, for example, to get hung up on the small amount of mercury in a CFL bulb, a percentage of which can escape into the environment if the bulb is crushed in a landfill. But the biggest contributor to mercury pollution is coal-fired plants, which… Continue reading
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Comparison of the Day: BMI/Mortality J-Curve
My new favorite term from epidemiology: J-Curve. There’s a lot of things that increase your mortality in a more-or-less linear way. The more you smoke, the greater your all-cause mortality risk, for example. This isn’t to say you increase your chance of death by 100% moving from one pack a day to two. But on… Continue reading
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Pro-Privacy Viruses
The Silicon Valley conception of privacy isn’t working for anyone except Silicon Valley. We know that. Charlie Stross, who is one smart dude, points out that if you follow the corporate-driven push to overshare to its logical conclusion your phone becomes a handy-dandy genocide machine, or, in the near term, the perfect device for this year’s Rufie-carrying… Continue reading
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Does More Books Mean More Titles or More Editions? (A critique of that graph going around)
This has been one of the most interesting charts of the week, but it is also one generating a lot of wrong pronouncements I think: The buzz around this is it shows the influence of copyright — and it definitely does — far less of the 2500 books sampled come from the period of copyright.… Continue reading
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Comparison of the Day: Heavy Metal Bands per 100,000 People
We gotta a lot of hard work to do today, so I will just leave you with this little bit of awesomeness: From here. Continue reading
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