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.
Max and Ida Caesar ran a restaurant, a 24-hour luncheonette. By waiting on tables, their son learned to mimic the patois, rhythm and accents of the diverse clientele, a technique he termed double-talk, which he used throughout his career. He first tried double-talk with a group of Italians, his head barely reaching above the table. They enjoyed it so much that they sent him over to a group of Poles to repeat his native-sounding patter in Polish, and so on with Russians, Hungarians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Lithuanians, and Bulgarians. ... Of his double-talk routines, Carl Reiner said, "His ability to doubletalk every language known to man was impeccable," and during one performance Caesar imitated four different languages but with almost no real words. Despite his apparent fluency in many languages, Caesar could actually speak only English and Yiddish. In 2008, Caesar told a USA Today reporter, "Every language has its own music ... If you listen to a language for 15 minutes, you know the rhythm and song." Having developed this mimicry skill, he could create entire monologues using gibberish in numerous languages, as he did in a skit in which he played a German general.
One very important shift in modern thinking has been the notional of private property as an absolute and natural right, as opposed to a social convention. I very much like David Hume's take on this issue:
Thus, “the rules of equity or justice [regarding property] depend entirely on the particular state and condition in which men are placed, and owe their origin and existence to that utility, which results to the public from their strict and regular observance” (Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3).
In other words, property rights arise because they are useful and are an imposed social construct by a polity. It is a measure of how incredibly successful that the modern state has been at protecting property rights that we see property rights as an innate right.
So why do I bring this up?
Mark has been talking about how to live on extremely small amounts of money. But it is not necessary that resources be allocated in the way that they are. In fact, it may well be the case that the wealthiest members of society benefit the most from the conventions and constructions of society. I don't think attacking people for being selfish is ever productive,
But I do think it might be worth considering whether a new social contract can be developed that is not anti-statist. Perhaps, instead, we could focus on efficient and effective government. Or am I an idealist?
Charles Pierce continues to track the movements of Politico's Dylan Byers who continues not to get it.
Distressed at being outmaneuvered in this way, I wandered on over to the joint hosted by Dylan Byers, Tiger Beat On The Potomac's media "reporter." There, I found him where I'd left him back in 2012, lashed to the side of the white whale, andbeckoning for the Pequod's remaining whaleboats to continue the pursuit.
"[T]here are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry," Silver concluded, citing a range of factors. "There may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry." This is quite a notable statement. The former New York Times statistician gained national fame for correctly anticipating the outcome of the 2008, 2010 and 2012 U.S. elections. He did this largely by understanding how to read the polls, and by knowing which polls were worth reading. (Never mind that he wasn't the only one. In fact, in 2012, the Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas was more accurate than Silver in predicting the outcome of the 2012 electoral college. Needless to say, Moulitsas was not offered a high-paying job at ESPN.) If Silver is declaring that the world has a polling problem, and that there may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry, what is Silver's added value in an election cycle? His ability to forecast elections is largely dependent on the accuracy of polling. Without that, what is his raison d'etre -- other than to point out how bad polling caused him to make inaccurate forecasts?
Oooooh, Nate. Burn'ch-ya! Can ya feeeeeel it?
Recall that Silver spent the end of the 2012 election cycle helping Byers look stupid in print. Byers, as is his custom, was the last one to get the joke. That Byers embarked on this doomed crusade as part of his other job as the sidewalk shill for MSNBC's ratings-challenged Morning Zoo Crew only made the whole thing more hilarious.
As Silver readily admits, the results in the UK elections on Thursday confounded his predictions -- andthose of everyone else, truth be told. His musings on the state of the polling industry are worth reading and considering as the election cycle over here grinds on. But there is one thing on which most polls agree -- having Dylan Byers question anyone else's professional raison d'etre is like subscribing to the classical music criticism of a puck goat.
Putting aside the childishness of his feud with Silver, this is yet another reminder that Byers still can't or won't face the central point.
All political journalists play the horse-race game. I personally don't see a great deal of value in this -- reporters telling voters who the reporters think the voters will vote for -- but Byers, the consummate establishment apologist, wouldn't go there at gunpoint. What Silver and company showed was that the kind of horse-race journalism Byers constantly defends is so devoid of value that labeling it 'news' borders on the fraudulent.
The Markos Moulitsas link is particularly rich. Here's what you see if you follow the link:
Math-based prognostication is superior to the old-school way of talking about gut feelings, or vibrations, or outright dishonest hackery.
Remember that Byers has emphatically thrown his support behind the old-school approach. Even those that Byers links to for support appear to think he's full of crap.
We been down this road before, but this time it's going to be a bit bumpier.
A couple of years ago I criticized Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich for the way he handled what we now call the "food stamp challenge." The intention with these efforts is always good – – bringing attention to the issue of food insecurity – – but almost invariably the people taking the challenge are so far removed from below-the-poverty-line conditions and so lacking in the necessary life skills that they make a complete hash of the attempt and end up misrepresenting the problem.
Shaich made errors largely of omission. Among other things, he skimped on high-protein foods that would've helped him stave off hunger. I am starting to feel a little bad about being so harsh in that case because I now see how much worse it could have been.
This Business Insider entry by Kathleen Elkins manages to demonstrate virtually every mistake you could make when trying to feed yourself on a tight budget, starting with where not to shop.
On Monday night I headed to the most affordable grocery store I could think of: Trader Joe's.
I was super conscious of sales as I wove through TJs, and the steals of the night included: sweet potatoes ($0.49 each), bananas ($0.19 each), and a 16-ounce bag of bowtie pasta ($0.99).
As mentioned before, Trader Joe's is not a bargain grocery. The target demographic might be best described as budget-conscious foodie. If you're looking for imported, organic and (most importantly) prepared food, you will find some very reasonable options.
For the severely price-constrained, though, Trader Joe's shouldn't be your first or even second choice. Dried rice is only available in pricey varieties. Dried beans aren't available at all. Even the supposed "steals" of the night are available elsewhere at comparable or better prices.
But, even within the confines of this third-best choice, Many of Elkins' decisions were disastrous.
Red split lentils ($1.69)
Bowtie pasta ($0.99)
Can of garbanzo beans ($0.89)
Can of black beans ($0.89)
Butternut squash soup ($2.79)
Chunky peanut butter ($2.49)
8 corn tortillas ($1.99)
Half-gallon of almond milk ($2.99)
Dozen organic eggs, since the only remaining non-organic eggs were cracked ($3.99)
8-pack of maple and brown sugar oatmeal ($2.99)
7 bananas ($1.33)
Bag of spinach ($1.99)
1 yellow onion ($0.79)
3 sweet potatoes ($1.47)
Sea salt ($0.99)
One of the biggest mistakes I made was not buying butter or oil, essential cooking ingredients that I take for granted and therefore completely overlooked.
You'll also notice there is no coffee, a staple in my normal diet but one that would blow the budget.
There are a few reasonable choices here -- the beans, the pasta, the bananas, the sweet potatoes -- but after that it gets ugly quickly. By my calculations and based on a couple of trips to Trader Joe's for research (with the caveat that some foods are cheaper in LA), more than half of Elkins' money went to purchases that were either bad or which could be replaced by much cheaper alternatives.
Elkins bought prepared food.
(You can make your own soup much cheaper and with less sodium)
She passed over frozen produce which was a fraction of the price of fresh.
She paid extra to make questionable nutritional choices. Keeping in mind that protein is our first priority and that a half gallon of milk costs $1.99 rather than $2.99, take a look at this:
Elkins would probably have been better off going for coffee instead of almond milk (she complained bitterly about caffeine withdrawal) and she would have had a dollar left over.
Then there's $2.99 for an 8-pack of oatmeal. Here's how much oatmeal $2.50 gets me at the grocery store down the street.
Oatmeal is remarkably nutritious and a big bowl does an excellent job staving off hunger. At less than ten cents a serving, this is one of the places we want to indulge.
Even at Trader Joe's, Elkins could have done much better.
Like the oatmeal, the eggs Elkins bought are a good food at a very bad price. Non-organic are $1.99 at my Trader Joe's. That's a pretty good price per gram of protein but it's far from the best the store has to offer.
We're shooting for 50g a day. $4.00 worth of chicken goes a long way toward hitting that target. With a few other smarter choices (including more beans, more pasta, and, of course, no almond milk), she probably could have avoided the hunger pangs altogether.
Elkins' heart is in the right place and I appreciate her willingness to suffer for a story, but this is still bad and dangerous journalism. It misses the reality of poverty, it understates the effectiveness of an excellent program, and it can be more than a little insulting to those facing these challenges for real. Mary Elizabeth Williams put it best when writing about Gwyneth Paltrow’s SNAP Challenge for Salon:
And I’ve had an awful lot of conversations with people who think they’re being insightful when they declare that it turns out it’s really hard to get a job or to stretch a dollar. That it just can’t be done. Actually, guys, it’s hard for you to be poor. Lots of us are great at it. Lots of us do it every goddamn day.
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.)
