Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
A few days ago, I linked to reports of an astroturf anti-marriage equality rally in Russellville that was countered by a couple of genuine grassroots pro-equality demonstrations. I mentioned that this was an important story that the national media was largely missing.
The press did, however, pick up on this superficially similar but utterly meaningless story about Eureka Springs.
I have lots of fond memories of Eureka Springs but, as anyone familiar with the state can tell you, it is literally the least representative spot you could find.
In addition to being very small and isolated, the town has been home to countless fringe movements, religious, political, and medical, since at least the early 20th century. It is associated as much with hippies and UFO enthusiasts as with religious fundamentalist, and all of these groups have long since made their peace and united behind the common goal of getting money from tourists. There are numerous highly convincing indications that places like Arkansas are moving dramatically toward acceptance of marriage equality, but using Eureka Springs as an example of changing attitudes is like using Knott's Berry Farm as an example of modern agricultural practices.
I'm going to spend quite a bit of time over the next couple of weeks talking about the price of food and about what it means to live on a food budget of less than thirty dollars a week. Before we can get very far with that discussion, however, we need to spend some time thinking about the metrics we want to track, the conditions we want to meet, and the properties we want to optimize some of the properties we need to see.
Here are the big four I would like to start with:
Protein – – extremely important and also the only completely objective item on the list. Any proposed diet must satisfy the heart condition of 50 g of protein a week.
Taste – – trying to save money by telling people to eat unappealing food is a false economy. This will lead to problems, particularly when asking people to budget their resources over the course of the week. Obviously, there's a big subjective component here but restaurants and food companies like Kraft have shown that it is a manageable problem, especially if we do a good job with the next item on the list...
Versatility – – we are interested here in variety not on the individual but on the aggregate level. For example, eggs make a good staple because, in addition to being a good source of low-cost protein, they can also be prepared in any number of ways. This is important not because an individual will necessarily want to have all of these different dishes, but because this variety increases the likelihood of our finding one or two dishes that the individual will like.
Satiation – – meals need to be filling and to alleviate hunger. This is largely a function of fiber and protein which is yet another reason why hitting that 50 g target is so important.
Clearly this is oversimplified but it does give us some kind of a framework to proceed. Now we need to address the central question, under what conditions is it possible to have a protein-rich, appealing, varied and filling diet for $28 a week?
We've previously talked about bloggers trying to live on a food stamp budget for a week (yeah, that's a thing). One of the many odd recurring elements of these post is a litany of complaints about life without caffeine because...
I had already understood that coffee, pistachios and granola, staples in my normal diet, would easily blow the weekly budget.
Which is really weird because coffee isn't all that expensive..
That comes out to a nickel a cup. This might be underestimating the amount of coffee you'll need. Six ounces is a fairly small cup and I find the recommended dosages a bit weak. Let's make it eight to ten ounces and double the amount of coffee we use. That takes us to a dime.
Just to check our assumptions, this is very much a mid-range estimate. There are, of course, more expensive options but there are also cheaper choices. You get substantial savings by going to a large economy size or by going with a store brand or both.
On the other end, if you go to $0.15 or $0.20 a cup and you know how to shop, you can move up into some surprisingly high-quality whole bean coffee (which should not taste like they came from Starbucks, but that's a topic for another post). Eventually, of course, you will reach the point where this gets too expensive to justify on a limited budget -- this stuff can get appallingly expensive -- but you can do better than the typical cup of diner coffee for a dime and better than what you'd get from most coffee houses for a quarter.
To be clear, I'm not recommending that everyone rush out to Wal-Mart for a big ol' barrel of Great Value Classic Roast. If your weekly food budget is more than fifty dollars a week, bargain coffee should be near the bottom of your concerns.
What we're interested in here are perceptions. The people we discussed earlier suffered through a week of headaches and other caffeine-withdrawal pains, not because they couldn't afford it but because the belief that they couldn't afford it was so strong that it trumped the evidence before them.
Though it's not a big part of our thread, there is a potentially insensitive aspect to the live-on-food-stamps challenge. Sometimes the line between empathizing and patronizing can be rather thin. That got me thinking about class tourism which led immediately to the song "Common People."
In a 2012 question and answer session on BBC Radio 5 Live [Jarvis] Cocker said that he was having a conversation with the girl at the bar at college because he was attracted to her, although he found some aspects of her personality unpleasant. He remembered that at one point she had told him she "wanted to move to Hackney and live like 'the common people'".
I'm not crazy about the video but the tune is catchy and the lyrics...
I took her to a supermarket,
I don't know why,
But I had to start it somewhere,
So it started there.
I said pretend you've got no money,
She just laughed and said,
"Oh you're so funny."
I said "Yeah?
Well I can't see anyone else smiling in here.
...
But she didn't understand,
She just smiled and held my hand.
Rent a flat above a shop,
Cut your hair and get a job.
Smoke some fags and play some pool,
Pretend you never went to school.
But still you'll never get it right,
'Cause when you're laid in bed at night,
Watching roaches climb the wall,
If you called your Dad he could stop it all.
...
Sing along with the common people,
Sing along and it might just get you through.
Laugh along with the common people,
Laugh along even though they're laughing at you,
And the stupid things that you do.
Because you think that poor is cool.
...
'Cause everybody hates a tourist,
Especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh,
There is a big and largely untold story here about cultural and political shifts south of the Mason Dixon Line. They don't get much coverage but I've been noticing items like this.
RUSSELLVILLE, AR -- Hundreds of people marched down Main Street in Russellville for the definition of marriage in Arkansas just three days before the U.S. Supreme Court considers the fundamental question of whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.
The rallies were on the same street at the same time, but were on opposite sides of the street because of people's opposing views on same-sex marriage.
The march started off calm. Nearly 80 people walked on Main Street to the Pope County Courthouse holding signs that read, "One man + one woman = marriage and family" and other signs that supported heterosexual marriage and disagreed with homosexual marriage. The group, which included members of the Tri County Tea Party, headed its own march with a separate march trailing behind.
...
All while hundreds of people rallying at the other march chanted "marriage equality" across the street.
...
That was the message speakers at the original rally tried to get out, but struggled because of the loud chants across the street.
Even though March for Marriage was the first march formally announced, supporters were outnumbered by the crowd across the street.
Because I've heard conflicting numbers regarding the folks on both sides of the two rallies in Russellville this weekend, I asked Travis Simpson, a reporter at the Russellville Courier, who was there on the scene on Saturday.
He said the crowd supporting marriage equality was the larger of the two, "no contest." Simpson said he estimated there were perhaps 30 rallying against same-sex marriage, but around 200 on the pro-equality side.
On Saturday, a group called Pope County for Equality organized a rally in Russellville to show support for marriage equality and LGBTQ civil rights in Arkansas. More than 300 people showed up — quite a significant turnout for a community of under 30,000. Klay Rutherford, an organizer of the event and an undergrad at Arkansas Tech University, sent this report to the Arkansas Times. All pictures are courtesy of Pope County for Equality's Facebook page.
Residents of Pope County gathered in Russellville at 3 p.m. on Saturday, May 2 for a march and rally for marriage equality. Over 300 attendees marched through downtown and congregated at a stage near the historic Missouri-Pacific train depot.
The event was sponsored by Pope County for Equality, an online organization that advocates for the equal treatment of all individuals, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. Speakers included Dr. MarTeze Hammonds, Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at Arkansas Tech University; Jeannie Fowler Stone, a proud Christian and an accepting mother of a transgender son; and, James Bittle, a retired sergeant in the U.S. Army who is gay and recently married. Hammonds, Stone and Bittle are all residents of Russellville.
Event organizers said, “Our goal is to be an overwhelming presence of love and acceptance. We aim to lift people up, start discussions, and show our community that we are more than a stereotype. We simply want to bring our community closer together in a setting of love and peace.”
The rally was held in part as a response to an event the previous weekend (Saturday, April 25) organized by an Arkansas River Valley Tea Party group in support of defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Protests that weekend were organized by pro-equality individuals not affiliated with Pope County for Equality. While many media outlets downplayed the presence and role of the protesters at the April 25 event, we estimate that there were at least 250 pro-equality protesters and no more than 50 participants among the the anti-equality crowd.
Pope County for Equality would like to thank the Russellville Police Department for their unbiased approach in handling both marches. Despite the surprising turnout at both events, they occurred without incident or injury.
In the fairly near future, I'm planning a deep dive into how the culture and politics of the South are shifting in ways that our standard metrics tend to miss. For now though, just remember that Russellville is in the most Republican part of the state.
As mentioned before, there are a couple of food-related megathreads in the queue, one on living on SNAP and one on the drought. Between those and the various posts we’ve run over the years, that’s a pretty big word count, so I decided to try a pop-up blog.
One of the disadvantages of eclectic blogging is that your target audience has to have compatibly eclectic tastes. By pulling all of the posts on one broadly appealing subject, I might just attract some readers who are interested in food and agriculture but aren’t interested in epidemiology, pedagogy, math puzzles, space travel, marketing statistics, bad business models, silly economic theories, education policy, games, negligent journalists, ddulites, old television shows, fitness landscapes, driverless cars...
A Statistician Walks into a Grocery Store will mainly consist of posts that have appeared or will appear here, so regular readers don’t have to add another link to their blog lists unless they have enough of a special interest in the topic to seek out the pieces too trivial to cross-post...
(I have a really tasteless joke on this one, though some of you will see it coming.)
I've been meaning to do a deep dive into how the language of the reform movement reflects its close connection with management consulting. If you've ever heard one of these consultants making a pitch to a high level executive, you may have noticed that while the words always have the connotation of precision and scientific rigor, the statements tend to be vague and inconsistent.
Diagnostic data needs to be specific and (to borrow a term from the business lexicon) actionable. It should also generally be multidimensional. On the individual student level, the tests being discussed here are not diagnostic data -- the results are neither timely nor specific enough to be actionable -- but Tisch suggests they are there to provide that level of information.("It is natural for parents to want to know how their kids are doing").
HAYES: OK. But there’s a whole — let’s sort of bracket the sociology of poverty for a moment… there’s lot of things I could contest about in what direct the causation of that link flows, right? But here’s the question to you, Miss Ravitch…I had someone who works in education who I respect compare testing opt out to people opting out of immunization, because basically it was like, look, yeah, your kid is probably not going to get measles and, like, if you think there’s some downside you can opt out, but then you’re just a free rider because the policy as a whole is a necessary means of figuring out where people are, assessing, right? You need this data.
If you start allowing people to opt out, you’ve just destroyed the entire dataset. Like, what are they going to do in West Seneca to judge anything year over year when one year they have data and the next they don’t have any data?
DIANE RAVITCH: It’s totally inappropriate to compare opting out of testing to opting out of immunization. One has a scientific basis, the other has none. The tests that kids take today have nothing to do with the tests that we took when we were kids. When we were kids, we took an hour test to see how we did in reading, an hour test to so how we did in math. Children today in third grade are taking eight hours of testing. They’re spending more time taking tests than people taking the bar exam.
Now, when we talk about the results of the test, they come back four to six months later. The kids already have a different teacher. And all they get is a score and a ranking. The teachers can’t see the item analysis. They can’t see what the kids got wrong. They can’t — they’re getting no instructional gain, no possibility of improvement for the kids, because there’s no value to the test. They have no diagnostic value.
If you go to a doctor and you say, ‘I have a pain,’ and the doctor says, ‘I’ll get back to you in six months,’ and he gets back to you and tells you how you compare to everyone else in the state, but he doesn’t have any medicine for you.
HAYES: Respond to that.
TISCH: Well, I would say that the tests are really a diagnostic tool that is used to inform instruction and curriculum development throughout the state. New York State spends $54 billion a year on educating 3.2 million schoolchildren. For $54 billion a year I think New Yorkers deserve a snapshot of how our kids are doing, how our schools are doing, how our systems are doing. There is a really important data point…
HAYES: Wait. … I just want to point out something. That was interestingly nonresponsive to what she said, right? She’s saying this does not work as diagnostic tool for the child or for the teacher, you’re saying this is a diagnostic tool for the taxpayer who is funding the system to see if the system is working, right? Those are distinct.
TISCH: No, let me finish because we’re talking about what happens when parents opt out and what the system can then report back to parents and to the state. The point of the matter is, you know, two weeks ago I was with my grandson at a pediatric visit. There was a new mother sitting next to me and she was comparing growth charts for her 4-month-old son. She wanted to know how he was doing on a continuum.
It is natural for parents to want to know how their kids are doing. And as for the diagnostic nature of these tests and the amount of
information that is gleaned from them, school districts report to us all the time that they design curriculum around the results of these tests.
I agree with Diane. There is no such thing as a perfect test, absolutely not. But the ability to glean information from these tests and
use them in very direct ways to inform instruction and curriculum in classrooms is actually really important.
If these tests aren't diagnostic, what are they? Mike the Mad Biologist has a suggestion:
What Ravitch touches on, but I wish had made more clearly, is that these tests are not about assessing individual students. The rhetoric Tisch uses is disingenuous, as the tests can not–as a matter of education policy and contractual obligations with test providers–to tell individual students (and their teachers and parents) where they need to improve.
The tests exist solely to grade teachers. These are not educational tools, as Ravitch notes, but managerial ones. They are used to hire and fire teachers. That is why the NY Department of Education is panicked by the opt-out movement. It’s not the potential inability to assess state-wide or even school level student performance (certainly for the former, there are enough students in the state of New York taking the exams for the statistics to work).
No, it’s the possibility that the state won’t be able to evaluate individual teachers with the exams. I’ve discussed many times before how sample size issues make teacher evaluations incredibly imprecise and are inappropriate in hiring and firing decisions. Imagine if a significant number of teachers can’t be evaluated because too few of their students decide to take the tests (there aren’t a whole lot of strong conclusions that can be reached if only eight students per class take the tests). It certainly would give grounds for teachers to challenge the conclusions drawn from the tests.
What Tisch doesn’t want to say out loud, what she politically can’t say out loud, is that she, along with many other reformers, believe if only we could fire the bad teachers–and she believes there are a lot of them–then our educational problems would vanish. But many reformers, having realized the majority of parents* don’t believe this, understand they can’t explicitly make that claim. So they lie about why we supposedly need annual high-stakes* testing.
A good brief overview of the main criticisms of standardized tests. Very entertaining and yet more balanced and thoughtful than what you would normally see in more "serious" formats.
Pay close attention to the opening segments. We'll be coming back to the analytic importance of keeping not just the content but the conditions and the incentives of these tests standardized. (Remind me to use the blood pressure analogy.)
I had actually forgotten how on-topic this video was.
As mentioned before, there's a thread coming up on hunger in this country prompted by yet another journalist who would apparently drop dead of malnutrition if she had to live on a budget for an extended period.
A big part of this story is the way different classes perceive budgets and shopping and the way most journalists have internalized upper and upper-middle class perceptions. It's telling that when a journalist had to find the cheapest place to buy food, she thought of Trader Joe's rather than a warehouse grocery like Food-4-Less or Aldi (which actually owns Trader Joe's but it's a very different brand).
Don't get me wrong. I shop at Trader Joe's all the time -- It's convenient, it's reasonable and the store brands are excellent.-- but if I were trying to feed myself on less than thirty dollars a week, I would shop there less.
A big part of the secret to the chain's success lies in its ability to offer pretty good bargains while maintaining its foodie street cred. The stores tend to cater to upscale, urban singles and couples whose cooking often consists of throwing frozen dinners in a microwave. Trader Joe's has discovered that, if you make these dinners seem a bit fancier or more exotic, your customers will feel more like urban sophisticates and less like pathetic losers.
I'm about to start another thread on how clueless most journalists are about living on a tight budget, so to do some research and because I was out of tamarind bars...
(mainly because of the tamarind bars), I dropped by the 99 Cent Only Store.
Much if not most of the food you'll find here is junk or junk adjacent, but there are healthy options. You can prepare some tasty, nutritious, filling and very cheap meals if:
You have access to one of these stores (preferably with a car so you don't have to haul groceries on a bus);
You're flexible about your menu (inventories are driven by odd lots and approaching expiration dates so you don't know what you'll find);
You have time to shop and to cook;
You have the facilities to cook and store lots of food;
You like beans.
And potatoes (rice works too)
,
Hot sauce is your friend.
It's not obvious from the picture but this is a pretty big can.
I don't want to oversell the virtues of these stores or understate the challenges of maintaining a healthy diet near the poverty line, but too many of the people driving the hunger debate are coming from a Whole Foods sensibility and they inevitably screw up the discussion no matter how good their intentions may be.
I don't have time to delve into this as deeply as I would like, but there's an interesting labor story developing here in LA. It pits union management against people who are normally very pro-labor.
Here's a slightly edited rant on the subject by Ken Levine.
What’s the point of having a union if it goes against the overwhelming wishes of its members? That’s exactly what happened last week when Los Angeles Actors Equity members voted over 2-1 to keep things status quo in the small theater (99 seats or fewer) LA scene; to not demand they be paid minimum wage per hour for all performances and rehearsals – and the New York board completely dismissed their vote and implemented it anyway. ... Why even conduct a vote if you completely ignore the results? Jesus! Elections in Iran are more legitimate.
My hope is that the LA branch breaks off from Actors Equity. Or files such a blizzard of lawsuits against the union that it completely strangles its ability to govern.
Here’s the issue: Small theaters make no money. For the most part they lose money. Everyone concerned does it for the love of theater. No one really gets paid – not actors, playwrights, directors, crews. The Whitefire Theatre in Studio City will be doing a one act play in June my partner, David Isaacs and I wrote. I’m also directing it. We’re making nothing. Not $9.00 an hour. Not $.09 an hour. But we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to see our work performed. We’re also employing eight actors. That means eight actors get to work on their craft, have a nice showcase, and perhaps get discovered.
And the evening will feature three one acts. Both the others also have casts of about eight. So do the math. Twenty-four actors, all the hours of rehearsal and performances – even at $9.00 an hour that adds up pretty quickly. Especially for a production where we have to buy our own props. If this ruling had already been in effect we simply would not do the production.
And this is what’s going to happen all over town. Producers will stop staging shows, small theaters will close, actors won’t work, and everybody loses (but Actors Equity).
LA actors understand this. They make their living in TV or films or commercials. And again, they voted 2-1 to not implement new restrictions. That's a mandate, folks.
...
But your union clearly doesn’t care. So what if they destroy the LA theater scene? As long as they maintain their control.
At your expense.
And by the way, I’m very pro-union. I’m a proud member of the WGA, DGA, AFTRA-SAG. I totally understand that without unions the studios and networks would pay us all less than a janitor makes in Cuba while raking in billions on the wings of our work. But no one is making money in small theaters.
So now it’s time for actors to take action. Your union is supposed to represent YOU. Actors Equity most definitely does NOT. Are you going to stand for that? Are you going to let a board with its own agenda dictate your career path? Send the message. Your vote COUNTS.
It’s bad enough actors face rejection every day, but to be rejected by its own union is, to me, intolerable.
This is consistent with something I've noticed about bicoastal musicians I've gotten a chance to talk with over the past few years. At least for small venues, everyone makes much more money back east, particularly in NYC. Audiences just seem to be willing to pay more.
In LA, performers tend to make their money in recorded media. Live performance plays more of a supporting role, developing craft, making connections, workshopping material. The proposed rule changes probably make sense from a New York vantage point, but most LA actors don't think they make sense here.
