This title is taken directly from this article which discusses research implies or explicitly says a number of “good” parent tactics are actually bad for your child. The actual list of things that seem good, but aren’t are
Giving Your Kids a Creative Name
Teaching Them To Be Themselves
Making Them Play Sports
Starting Them In School Early
Warning Them About Strangers
Heaping Praise On Them
Showing Them Educational Videos
The fantastic part of this article is the undertone of sarcasm. Just to be clear, the article states that the above tactics are actually bad for your child according to recent published scientific research. But by saying it in a sarcastic way, the author really says the science is shoddy and these tactics are still good.
From a statistics viewpoint, the research is interesting and following the links provided some of the discussion is right on. For example, following the link under “Giving Your Kids a Creative Name”, the 153rd comment (which happened to be at the top of the list when I looked) hits the nail on the head. The comment points out that the authors didn’t control for minority ethnic groups. So while the authors were trying to say that kids with creative names have a worse time in life, they instead just ended up showing that minority ethnic groups have a worse time.
Synthetic biology holds a lot of promise for developing organisms that perform functions that would otherwise require delicate and expensive devices. Imagine a bacteria designed to eat oil. Put some on an oil spill and they will clean up the area with minimal human intervention. They could even be dropped in from the air.
National Public Radio’s Science Friday had a segment on iGem, International Genetically Engineered Machine competition. This year’s winner was a group of undergraduates from Cambridge who designed a set of bacteria which turn colors in response to stimulus, literally (see image below). Imagine a developing country with possible arsenic in the water. Put some of the questionable water on a petri dish with these bacteria. If they turn green, the water is good and if they turn red you should try another well. This is a great advancement since no specialized equipment, e.g. flow cytometer, is necessary. Hopefully this machine will get incorporated into the BioBrick registry which maintains a list of building blocks for creation of genetically engineered machines.
This story that I picked up on slashdot says that the Centers for Disease Control have partnered with GE Healthcare to receive data on 14 million patients in their network. (Of course, I cannot actually find an announcement from the CDC about this.) The data will be collected on a daily basis and provide information on flu prevalence and spread. To see the current information the CDC uses for flu surveillance go here and for the most recent flu activity go here. Compared to previous CDC surveillance, this method has the advantage of a huge database with timely responses. Of course, samples will still need to be analyzed to classify flu as seasonal or H1N1 (or other variants) which will add some delay in knowing which flu is active and when. My hope is that the CDC allows easier access to the data. I understand we will not receive the medical records for individuals, but some summary statistics on a reasonable spatial/time scale would be helpful.
The other day, I criticized a graphic describing swine flu deaths in terms of its relevance to me. The figure below provides the estimates of the marginal probability of dying from different causes including H1N1 (swine flu). Of course, I will still complain and say, I’d prefer to see a figure that is conditional on my being a U.S. resident. Still this figure provides exactly the type of perspective that is needed concerning the impact swine flu is currently having on the world.
With that being said, I believe public health officials are mainly worried about the possibility of H1N1 mutating into something that is much more contagious, or more importantly more deadly. If this happens soon, the world will still not have enough immunity (either through having been infected already or a vaccine) and the deaths could be catastrophic.
[This image is no longer available. That's what I get for linking to the image rather than downloading it and linking to my own version.]
If you don’t know it yet, you will probably find out soon enough that I am a huge fan of Mars, the planet not the candy bar. This is a great picture of all the missions to Mars which I learned about through The Big Picture blog.
Andrew Gelman over at his Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog often brings up figures that he thinks are good, bad, and ugly. I would like to continue that tradition here. I saw the figure below on Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture blog. Now, Barry’s blog has nothing to do with statistics or swine flu, but since everybody is interested in swine flu these days, he decided to put this figure on his blog. From a probabilistic perspective, the point of the figure is very clear, conditional on having the disease what is the probability of dying from it. I would be very interested in this quantity if I had the disease, but since I don’t have any of these diseases (that I am aware of), I don’t care. The quantity I’m interested in is my marginal probability of dying from the disease. (Certainly I would prefer a conditional probability where we condition on my age, gender, geographical location, etc, but that is asking a bit much). So although this is an interesting and colorful figure, it has no relevance (yet) to my situation, although I will be happy to know that my chances of surviving swine flu once I get it are pretty good.
Separately, why is the subtitle “Average % of infected who die”? Shouldn’t it just be `% of infected who die’?
The video is of a mini meandering river constructed in a laboratory. Apparently this has been attempted for a hundred years without success. From a scientific perspective the question is what are the necessary components to allow/force a river to meander. The key ingredients are course and fine sediment as well as vegetation for bank strength. The findings are published here in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences.
