Stats Chat

There’s a fairly overblown story in the Guardian about religion and altruism

“Overall, our findings … contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” said the authors of The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World, published this week in Current Biology.

“More generally, they call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that secularisation of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness – in fact, it will do just the opposite.”

The research found that kindergarten (update: and primary school) children from religious families scored lower on an altruism test (a version of the Dictator game).  Given ten stickers, non-religious children would give about one more away on average than religious children.

While it’s obviously true that this sort of simple moral behaviour doesn’t require religion, the cause-and-effect conclusion the story is trying to draw is stronger than the data. I’m pretty confident the people quoted approvingly wouldn’t have been as convinced by the same sort of research if it had found the opposite result.

The research does provide convincing evidence on another point, though: three-dimensional graphics are a Bad Idea.

Today (assuming nothing went wrong overnight) the Herald is giving data journalism a much higher profile: Insights

Harkanwal Singh and Caleb Tutty have been working frantically to assemble and format the past data visualisations and do new stuff for the launch. You should check it out: the way to convince the Herald management that good local data journalism is more valuable than bogus UK health stories is for it to get pageviews.

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:

• Anyone may add a comment on this post to nominate their Stat of the Week candidate before midday Friday November 13 2015.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of November 7 – 13 2015 inclusive.
• Quote the statistic, when and where it was published and tell us why it should be our Stat of the Week.

Next Monday at midday we’ll announce the winner of this week’s Stat of the Week competition, and start a new one.

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This story/ad/column hybrid thing on the Herald site is making a good point, that people don’t read the detailed terms and conditions of things. Of course, reading the terms and conditions of things before you agree is often infeasible — I have read the Auckland Transport HOP card T&Cs, but I don’t reread them to make sure they haven’t changed every time I agree to them by getting on a bus, and it’s not as if I have much choice, anyway.  When the small print is about large sums of money, reading it is probably more important.

The StatsChat-relevant aspect, though is the figure of $1000 per year for failing to read financial small print, which seemed strange. The quote:

Money Advice Service, a government-backed financial help centre in the UK, claims failure to read the small print is costing consumers an average of £428 (NZ$978) a year. It surveyed 2,000 consumers and found that only 84 per cent bothered to read the terms and conditions and, of those that did, only 17 per cent understood what they had read.

Here’s the press release (PDF) from Money Advice Service.  It surveyed 3000 people, and found that 84 per cent claimed they didn’t read the terms and conditions.

The survey asked people how much they believed misunderstanding financial terms in the last year had cost them. The average cost was £427.90.

So the figure is a bit fuzzier: it’s the average of what people reported believing they lost, which actually makes it more surprising. If you actually believed you, personally, were losing nearly a thousand dollars a year from not reading terms and conditions, wouldn’t you do something about it?

More importantly, it’s not failure to read the small print, it’s failure to understand it. The story claims only 17% of those who claimed to read the T&Cs thought they understood them — though I couldn’t find this number in the press release or on the Money Advice site, it is in the Mirror and, unsourced, in the Guardian.  The survey claims about a third misunderstood what ‘interest’  meant and of the 15% who had taken out a payday loan, more than half couldn’t explain what a ‘loan’ was, and one in five didn’t realise loans needed to be paid back.

As further evidence that either the survey is unreliable or that it isn’t a simple failure to read that’s the problem, there was very little variation between regions of the UK in how many people said they read the small print, but huge variation (£128-£1014) in how much they said it cost them.

I’m not convinced we can trust this survey, but it’s not news that some people make unfortunate financial choices.  What would be useful is some idea of how often it’s really careless failure to read, how often it’s lack of basic education, how often it’s gotchas in the small print, and how often it’s taking out a loan you know is bad because the alternatives are worse.

STAT (statnews.com) is not, sadly, a statistics news site. On the upside, it’s a very promising site covering medicine and medical science.  It’s owned by the same person as the Boston Globe, but is a separate venture.

Their front page has a lot of news items already; for a look at the sort of more detailed story they can handle, there’s one on whether antioxidants have positive or negative effects on cancer. That’s by Sharon Begley, a highly-regarded and award-winning science writer.

STAT has recruited, either as staff or columnists, a lot of impressive people. It’s definitely worth looking at.

• Cancer cure hype: In a five-day period in June, 36 cancer drugs were described in the news as “breakthrough”, “game-changer”, “miracle” or similar words. Five of them had not yet been tested in humans.

• Similarly , from Vox, on a 2003 study: “They looked at 101 studies published in top scientific journals between 1979 and 1983 that claimed a new therapy or medical technology was very promising. Only five, they found out, made it to market within a decade.” Most promising treatments don’t work: that’s not cynicism, it’s empirical fact. Of course, it’s only with new pharmaceuticals that we find out they don’t work.

• An XKCD comic on Bill Gates’ blog, talking about the importance of being boring and non-innovative to finally finish off polio

• London has a smaller proportion of residents born overseas (37%) than Auckland (39%). So does New York (37%). No real conclusion, just that it’s interesting. (via Hayden Glass)

• “Cartography — what maps reveal about ourselves” from the BBC

• Typically beautiful use of interactive graphics and maps in a New York Times story about ice melting in Greenland.

One News says “The family dog or growing up on a farm could be the keys to reducing the chances of a young person suffering from asthma.”

This is pretty good research. It’s obviously not a randomised experiment, but it uses the population administrative and medical data of Sweden to get a reasonable estimate of associations, and it is consistent with other population studies and has a reasonable explanation in immunology. One News gave all the relevant numbers, and got Dr Collin Brooks from Massey in as an expert. So that’s all good.

But (you knew there was a ‘but’), the population impact is smaller than the news story suggests.  That has to be the case: New Zealand, with very high asthma rates by international standards, already has fairly high dog ownership rates.  In fact, as often happens, this new study has found less benefit than earlier, smaller studies.

At current NZ asthma rates, for every extra 100 little kids who live with dogs, the research would predict that you’d prevent one or two cases of asthma. And that’s without worrying about, say, reduced housing options for households with pets.

Q: Did you see that an Asian diet helps ward off the effect of menopause?

A: An “Asian diet?” Do they mean Afghan, Punjabi, Bengali, Goan, Kirghiz, Uighur, Malaysian, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Korean, Beijing, Sichuan, Shanghai, …

Q: Ok, yes, I get the point.  Did you see that a diet with lots of soy, similar to Japanese and some Chinese diets, helps prevent fractures and heart attacks?

A: The story about phytoestrogens? Yes.

Q: And do they?

A: Hard to tell.

Q: Was it mice again?

A: No, this was a proper randomised trial in women. It’s just they didn’t measure fractures or even bone density.

Q: What did they measure?

A: The concentration of two proteins that are involved in bone formation

Q: How reliable is that?

A: By the standards of purely biochemical laboratory markers, not bad. An article in the newsletter of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry said “Commercially available immunoassays for all the markers are reasonably bone-specific and reflect bone turnover in postmenopausal osteoporosis and following anti-resorptive therapy.”

Q: I can sense a ‘but’ coming on here

A: The story doesn’t say how big the changes were, and since this is only a forthcoming conference presentation, it’s hard to find out much detail. The abstract is here.

Q: How does it work?

A: Soy beans contain chemicals that weakly stimulate oestrogen receptors and so have some of the effects of oestrogen.

Q: Oh, like the dangerous endocrine disrupting pollutants I keep hearing about?

A: No, those are synthetic chemicals, not natural dietary components.

Q: That’s a remarkably good poker face you have

A: Can we move on?

Q: Ok, so what about the cardiovascular risk factors? The story says “They were also less at risk of heart disease, which oestrogen is also thought to protect against.” Did they measure heart disease?

A: No, they measured “cardiovascular risk markers”

Q: Does oestrogen improve these “risk markers”?

A: Yes, it does.

Q: Wait, wasn’t there a big trial of oestrogen and heart disease risk?

A: You mean the Women’s Health Initiative? Yes, there was.

Q: Did they see these improved risk markers?

A: Yes

Q: And a reduction in fractures?

A: Yes.

Q: But they didn’t see a reduction in heart disease, did they?

A: No, an increase. Over all, serious chronic disease was very slightly worse with oestrogen supplements.

Q: So why do we expect soy to be different?

A: An excellent question

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:

• Anyone may add a comment on this post to nominate their Stat of the Week candidate before midday Friday November 6 2015.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of October 31 – November 6 2015 inclusive.
• Quote the statistic, when and where it was published and tell us why it should be our Stat of the Week.

Next Monday at midday we’ll announce the winner of this week’s Stat of the Week competition, and start a new one.

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I don’t know why this feels worse that the bogus clicky polls on newspaper websites. Maybe it’s the thought of someone actually believing the sampling scheme says something useful. Maybe it’s being in Twitter, where following a news headline feed usually gets you news headlines. Maybe it’s that the polls are so bad: restricting a discussion of Middle East politics to two options with really short labels makes even the usual slogan-based dialogue look good in comparison.

In any case, I really hope this turns out to be a failed experiment, and that we can keep Twitter polls basically as jokes.