Super Crunchers – Ayres (2007) – 1/2

With the Triumph of Numbers, I read and wrote about the power of using numbers, and how the observation of empirical regularities led to the basic knowledge on how to use such numbers. Already in the triumph of numbers, it was indicated how valuable (numerical) data were regarded to be, for instance by the recollection how the first censuses were regarded as state secrets, because the information could be used to make assertions about the military strength of (rival) nations.

Unfortunately, I.B. Cohen’s Triumph of Numbers ended quite abruptly with a description of Florence Nightingale. It felt unfinished. But the use of numbers has evolved since, and quite substantially so.

How much our use of numerical data has evolved, and to what extent is has invaded our daily lives (without many of us knowing it!), is convincingly described by Ian Ayers, in his magnificent book ‘Super Crunchers’ (2007).

Companies know more and more (and more!) about you: you buy products online, you speak with the customer relations department (with a person behind a computer), you gain discounts with customer cards, and of course you are careful to make sure you receive you frequent flyer miles. Right? If not, you may have bought it all using a credit card, the transactions of which are stored anyway. … Continue Reading

Bad Science overestimates psychological consequences induced abortion

Can bad science lead us to draw wrong conclusions about the world we live in? “Of course it can“, we are inclined to think. And if so, can this have real-life consequences? Investigating these meta-questions is not as easy as it might seem, for it would require an exact manner to distinguish the good from the bad science, and it would require a subject that has been thoroughly investigated in both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ ways to compare the outcomes.

One such subject would be the vast amount of research done on the psychological consequences of undergoing an induced abortion. This heavily researched (and heavily debated!) subject focusses primarily on the questions whether or not a women has a higher chance of suffering from anxiety, feeling of guilt, depression, or (other) mental disorders caused by undergoing an induced abortion. … Continue Reading

Curving Normality Blog Carnival #2

With a new year, and a new month, it is time for the second edition of the Curving Normality Blog Carnival on quantitative social sciences. Just started a month ago, I look forward to continue this carnival into the next year and have some nice editions. This one, however, will be an odd one out, for it has just one single entry.

This has had all to do with personal circumstances. The tag-line of my blog states that the extra-ordinary lies within the curve of normality. While this is the case in general, this year both ends of this curve have been sincerely over-represented in my personal life. … Continue Reading

Curving Normality Blog Carnival #1

Today, I am happy to present to you the first edition of the Curving Normality blog carnival. It is all about the quantitative social sciences, and aims at bringing together high quality blog posts about our lovely profession. With just a few weeks of preparation, I am very pleased with the number of submissions, and especially glad with their quality. Apparently, the quantitative social scientists are quite well represented in the blogosphere!
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Podcast: The Naked Scientists

Not only blogs can inspire scientists, but podcasts can do too. I regularly listen to some science podcasts, and will start a short series on Curving Normality to introduce these to you. Probably the most fun science podcast I listen to is ‘The Naked Scientists‘, the science show that ‘boldly goes where no science show has gone before‘.

The show is hosted by Cambridge University’s Dr. Chris Smith. Clearly having fun, he interviews top scientists and ‘catches up with the latest top science news stories’, focused to a large exten on medicine, technology, and biology. The interviews are accessible for people not familiar with the specific discipline, and the findings are always placed into a wider context.
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Abortion Activism in 1971 Science?

Science changes, as does the way scientists report on their work. Reading a 1971 article in Science, on attitudes towards induced abortion, I was truly amazed by the sheer amount of apparent activism that might have influenced the interpretation of the findings. Let’s have a look.
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Researchblogging.org: Updated and Running Strong!

Today, Researchblogging.org has been thoroughly updated; a good moment to reflect on the initiative of researchblogging.org itself, my participation in it, and on the phenomenon of blogging on peer reviewed research itself.

Researchblogging.org is a non-profit initiative, and provides in a web-based gathering of posts from weblogs on science. Not all posts are gathered (‘aggregated’) though, only the ones that explicitly address research that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. In that, it distinguishes itself clearly from similar (collections of) scientists’ blogs, for everything else but the research itself is left out. This is achieved by having bloggers to administer their posts on the researchblogging.org website manually, after which some PHP-code is provided. This code is added to the blog-post, resulting in a bibliographic reference to the article that is discussed, as well as the aggregation of the article to the researchblogging database.

For me, this results in a very interesting collection of blog-posts, that are nicely categorised and stored in a searchable database accessible though the web. And this is where the new version of researchblogging.org becomes really interesting, because next to a visual update, new features have been added. Bloggers now can categorise their posts manually, making them easier to find by prospective readers.
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Beijing 2008 and Sports Equality

Now that the Beijing Olympics have come to an end, people in the Netherlands are pretty satisfied with the amount of medals won by Dutch sportsmen and -women. Interestingly though, these medals have been predominantly won by Dutch women. This has been widely analyzed in newspapers and on television, but unfortunately I think some of these analyses were completely wrong.

It was often argued that it is inherent to women in general to have a stronger will and desire than men to reach the goals they set for themselves. This might very well be, but that cannot explain the relative success of Dutch women over Dutch men, unless this stronger feminine willpower is a phenomenon exclusive to the Dutch. Otherwise, the strong will-powered Dutch women just compete against other strong will-powered women from other countries, and the weakly will-powered Dutch male athletes compete with other rather weak opponents. Clearly, this did not seem to be the case …

In general, the analysts shouldn’t have argued about differences between men and women in general, but about differences between the relative strength of Dutch women over other women, compared with the relative strength of Dutch men over other men.

Unequal women empowerment?

What might be an explanation then? We might find one by looking at the position that women have in their society. Traditionally, sports in the world have been dominated by men, but due to their increasingly equal opportunities in society, their participation in sports increased as well. If indeed a relationship exists between women empowerment and their results on the sports fields, we might not only expect better results over the years, but also smaller differences between the results of men and women.

To test this, I made some plots. Below, the results needed to win the Gold Medal on Javelin throwing on the Olympics, 100 meters running on the Olympics, and 500 meters speed skating on the World Championships, are shown. The red dots show the results of the men, the blue dots those of the women. The grey lines represent the general tendency of the lines, and in all three graphs, it is clear that the two lines tend to converge. Don’t be mislead by the small decrease of the differences between men and women: the initial differences were already very small, so a small absolute decrease is rather large on a relative scale.

Golden

Does this tell us anything about why Dutch women performed so much better than Dutch men did? No, of course not, for I did not take into account the Beijing Olympics, nor nationality. Nevertheless, if we accept that the increasingly strong position of women in society (in general) indeed leads to their achieving better sports results, we might also want to compare the position of Dutch women in Dutch society with that of women in many other countries. Compared to many other countries, Dutch women have a strong position in society. Perhaps, the Dutch think more seriously about women sports than is done in other countries.

If this is the case, the sport results of Dutch women is due to their empowerment in Dutch society. Perhaps women sports will increasingly receive more attention in other countries as well. Wouldn’t that be golden?

What is an explanation?

Yesterday, I was discussing a book with an anthropologist. What could have been an interesting discussion, became, from my perspective, a futile one. We could not even agree on what constitutes an explanation and how such an explanation should be put to the test. This caused me to think: `What exactly is an explanation?’

To my opinion, the book we discussed is a very interesting and possibly inspiring one, but it does not yet offer an explanation ((NOTE: this is my first and preliminary reaction to a discussion I’ve had recently. It still fascinates me, so I’ll probably find myself writing about it more often in the near future. I will then give more details on the book I mentioned as well.)). Focused on the ‘narcissism of the minor differences‘, it states that conflicts arise especially when differences between groups are very small. I think this is an interesting thesis, but not yet an explanation. My main reason for this is that it does not explicate when a difference is small (as opposed to large) and what exactly is a conflict. According to my debating-partner, all can be interpreted as conflict and in every context it differs what is a ‘minor’ difference. Thereby, the supposed `explanation’ does not lead to new insights, for every ‘explained’ situation is described by even so much determinants. To me, that is not an explanation, but a label on a correlation.
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Measurement Accuracy and the belief in an Afterlife

Is there an afterlife? The Lancet-published cardiologist Pim van Lommel believes there is. I believe his central statements are based on inaccurate (interpretation of) measurements.

Based on findings on Near Death Experiences (NDE) that he reported upon in the Lancet, van Lommel recently wrote a popularized book in which he explains his beliefs and research findings to a larger public. There, he argues that our consciousness is not located within our physical body. As could be expected, this book (called `Endless Consciousness’, my translation) raised a lot of discussion between ‘believers’ and ‘critics’.
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