I missed this when it came out in early August. Alan Schwarz, of the New York Times, has won this year’s award for excellence in statistical reporting, from the American Statistical Association.
He’s probably best known for his reporting on concussion and brain injury in footballers, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. Similar issues are now being raised in rugby.
From the Herald (and originally the Daily Mail)
People who bottle up their feelings are at least a third more likely to die young than those who regularly express what they’re thinking.
Not what the study says — there is a hazard ratio of 1.35 but even the researchers only claim this is a 3 year reduction in life expectancy and they don’t say anything about how likely people are to die young.
But when the researchers looked at specific causes of death they discovered that the risks increased by 47 per cent for heart disease and 70 per cent for cancer.
This was a fairly small study, with only 34 heart disease deaths and 37 cancer deaths, and the authors make it pretty clear the evidence for heart disease was too weak even for them to be comfortable — they say
Findings for CVD death were in a direction and of a magnitude consistent with prior work though they did not reach statistical significance.
How do I know all this? Well the story doesn’t give the names of any of the researchers, let alone link, but it does give the journal name and it turns out the paper appeared only a month ago, so it didn’t take too much work.
Assuming the correlation is real, it could still easily be due to other factors. The researchers deliberately didn’t attempt any control for health risks, in case these were due to emotion suppression. For example, they didn’t distinguish smokers and non-smokers, because of the concern that smoking might be due to emotion suppression. They didn’t even ask if people already had a cancer diagnosis at the start of the study.
The story does quote an independent expert. Well, sort of.
London-based business psychologist Voula Grand said: “It has long been thought that cancers are partly the result of suppressed emotions.
Judging from their web sites about cancer prevention, neither the American Cancer Society nor Cancer Research UK seems to know about this. They might be more reliable than the Daily Mail.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a Sydney Morning Herald story on new electorate-specific robopolls and their surprising predictions. Tim Colebatch at the SMH wrote
Uh-huh. Lonergan’s own national poll reports only a 2 per cent swing against Labor. Yet in the three seats it polled individually, it found an average swing of 10 per cent. That’s huge, far bigger than we have seen in any Federal election since 1943.
and I was similarly dubious.
We now have the facts: the national (two-party preferred) swing against Labour is just over 3%, and the swing in Kevin Rudd’s seat of Griffith, one of the three specifically polled and predicted to have a swing of 10.5%, was 5.42%. The other two seats mentioned in the story as polled by Lonergan were Forde (robopoll swing 8.5%, actual swing 2.5%) and Lindsay (robopoll swing 11%, voters 3.9%)
It looks as though the robopoll skeptics were right. Even though the national swing was larger than the poll predicted, the swings in the target electorates were much smaller.
Wednesday, Sept 4, NZ Herald, lead
Latest Auckland house price stats show a largely flat property market over the past five months and one economist says we may have seen the first sign of regional price pressure easing.
Monday, Sept 9, NZ Herald, lead
Rising New Zealand property values accelerated last month as the lack of listings in Canterbury and Auckland continue to overheat the market,
From Slate
The most important difference between the world today and 150 years ago isn’t airplane flight or nuclear weapons or the Internet. It’s lifespan. We used to live 35 or 40 years on average in the United States, but now we live almost 80. We used to get one life. Now we get two.
The medical developments in the story are important
but also tend to emphasize treatment over cure.
For example, St Anthony’s Fire and scarlet fever (both serious streptococcal infections) could kill, but only in a minority of cases. Type I diabetes and pernicious anemia used to be uniformly fatal, but Type I diabetes occurs in 1-25 per 100,000 and pernicious anemia in about 1 per 1000. Treatment of streptococcal infections was a breakthrough, and we should be really scared of the possibility than Strep. pyogenes finally learns how to beat penicillin, but they aren’t responsible for that much of the improvement in life expectancy.
Dehydration due to gastrointestinal disease, one of the really important killers of infants and children, isn’t mentioned, because the lack of it isn’t salient. Hardly anyone says “I shouldn’t be alive now because I should have caught rotavirus or cholera at age 2 and died, but didn’t because of clean water, ” but that’s probably the most important single change we have seen.
Prevention isn’t visible, but it’s still real.
From the Broadcasting Standards Authority, via @ColeyTangerina
Scope
- Quantitative research to provide a monitor of the acceptability of the use of swear words, blasphemies and other expletives in broadcasting over time
Methodology
- Administered national survey with 1,500 randomly selected individuals aged 18 years and over, stratified by region, age group, gender and ethnicity
- Online methodology survey was the same approach as used in 2010. This is differentiated from the 1999 and 2005 surveys which made use of a face-to-face interview technique.
It’s pretty clear that the report is going to be unsuitable for some workplaces (that’s kind of the point) but the findings are interesting. The ranking of unacceptability is not what I would have expected (I’m biased having lived in the US).
Of the 31 words they surveyed, in the context of a movie screening after 8:30pm with a criminal swearing at a police officer, the 27th is one that has been used on this blog (“bullshit”), with 20% unacceptability rating. The worst-ranked word had 70% unacceptability. Personally, I don’t think any of the words is unacceptable in that context, but there are several whose use would lower my opinion of the speaker.
They also looked at other scenarios, and the general conclusion seemed to be that it was worse not as bad for actors than for ‘real people’ to swear.
There’s a website that shows a map of all the buildings in the Netherlands, colour-coded by age. To start you off, here’s central Amsterdam
(from Abi Sutherland)
Two examples from other blogs
Mark Liberman, in two posts at Language Log, tackles the claim
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the paper, “Cluttered Writing: Adjectives and Adverbs in academia,” finds that social science papers contain the highest density, followed by humanities and history. Natural science and mathematics contain the lowest frequency, followed by medicine and business and economics.
The difference between the social and the natural sciences is about 15 percent. “Is there a reason that a social scientist cannot write as clearly as a natural scientist?” the paper asks.
He shows that the paper doesn’t provide reliable evidence for the claims, and, in the second post, that neither the claim that social scientists use more modifiers, nor the claim that clear writing uses fewer modifiers is supported by data.
Frances Woolley, at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, uses life tables to examine the question of grandparents’ funerals as a student excuse. She finds
It turns out, given the age and gender distribution assumed above, and Canadian mortality rates, the odds of all 200 grandparents surviving the term is just 16 percent. In large undergraduate classes, some grandparents will pass away almost every semester.
and
I think some undergraduate students don’t realize just how public and well documented deaths are. It’s far easier to verify whether or not a grandmother died than it is to know whether or not a student was genuinely too sick to complete an assignment.
Each week, we would like to invite readers of Stats Chat to submit nominations for our Stat of the Week competition and be in with the chance to win an iTunes voucher.
Here’s how it works:
Next Monday at midday we’ll announce the winner of this week’s Stat of the Week competition, and start a new one.
If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!