The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

Maybe I should cut Boston Globe some slack on this, since their entire science and medicine department got sacked due to budget cuts… except that every single newspaper makes exactly this mistake, including the Boston Globe when it still had a fully-staffed science department. Wait, shit, I’m burying the lede, aren’t I? Damn, maybe those journalists are good for something after all.

You may have noticed that whenever you read a science article in a newspaper, even when they’re just quoting from a press release, journalists will almost never give the title of the study they’re talking about. If you’re lucky, they’ll give the lead author’s name or the name of the journal in which the study was published.

I can kind of see how they might justify this. After all, most academic journals are subscription-only, so most newspaper readers wouldn’t be able to look up the article if they wanted to. But, even for the pay journals, usually an abstract is available online, as it is in the case of the New England Journal of Medicine article that the linked Boston Globe story references. However, failure to give citations is less about whether Joe Average has a subscription to NEJM and more about respecting the process of science. As Ben Goldacre writes here about the media’s propensity to treat science as “absolute truth statements from arbitrary authority figures in white coats, rather than clear descriptions of studies, and the reasons why people draw conclusions from them”.

You can certainly see that at work in the Boston Globe article on vetebroplasty. The writer sets up a tired old “he said, she said” frame, pitting the arbitrary authority of “two recent studies” against the anecdotal wisdom of “many patients – and their doctors”. It’s as if the study authors just randomly decided (is that what they mean by a “randomised trial”?) one day that vertebroplasty is crap, the experience (read: anecdotes) of real-world doctors and patients be damned! Ivory tower! Arrogance!

Of course, that’s not how it works. In reality, the authors of the vertebroplasty studies wanted to figure out whether this popular procedure has any effect, so they designed an experiment to figure it out. (I just picked one study I found in NEJM that was published this month. I have no idea whether it’s either of the studies Boston Globe is talking about, since they didn’t give the article titles, so I just have to assume it is. This is why the titles are fucking important to know.) As per the academic gold standard of the Randomised Controlled Trial, they collected volunteers to undergo either a sham surgery (the controlled part) or the real deal, selected at random (the random part). It’s unclear whether the surgeons were blinded, but that’s usually difficult to do with surgery.

The results? “Improvements in pain and pain-related disability associated with osteoporotic compression fractures in patients treated with vertebroplasty were similar to the improvements in a control group.” This is something we typically see, a non-significant difference between the treatment and the placebo drug or sham procedure. The abstract even includes exact numbers, for those with the statistical knowledge to interpret them.

An obvious criticism leaps out at me: the study has a sample size of 131, which is too small to be really conclusive. But note that this isn’t a criticism anybody makes in the Globe article. The Globe’s not interested in what the study actually says or what its actual flaws might be. It’s only interested in pitting authority versus authority, because that’s easy and doesn’t require any knowledge of the subject area or tedious investigation.

But, hey, it’s not for us plebes to go questioning authorities like academic medical researchers or some doctors or newspaper writers. Just sit back, relax, and take their word for it.

Crossposted from Boston Skeptics.

While everybody else is celebrating some holiday with an imaginary fat guy or whatever, let’s all take a moment to remember the real reason for the season:

And to remember why we celebrate the birth of this great man, here’s a clip of him in his prime:

(Of course, the other reason I chose that clip is that it’s also Lauren Bacall in her prime. Can you blame me?)

Despairing.

Been a bit of a shitty week. The bailout mess and the election are both driving me insane, although I note with no small pleasure that Obama has been pulling way ahead in recent polling. Anyway, then I got hit by a car and then my MacBook died. And other stuff.

Not seeking pity, just sayin’.

I’ll probably post a proper something or other eventually.

I haven’t been actually watching the Democratic National Convention because, for one thing, I’ve already made up my mind to support Obama no matter what and, for another, because I tend to find political speechifying, even at its best, to be dreadfully boring.

And so John Cole just linked to this video of John Kerry. Supposedly, he’s John Kerry. He’s definitely not the John Kerry of 2004 who I refused to vote for because he failed to stand up for, well, much of anything. (Standard disclaimer: I vote in Massachusetts, so it’s not like it mattered in 2004 that I wrote in “none of the above”.)

Seriously, though, this John Kerry, I like. A lot:

Talk about being for something before you’re against something. … Before he ever debates Barack Obama, John McCain should finish the debate with himself. –John Kerry

Mark Chu-Carroll likes to say that the worst math is no math. John Cole brings us an example from CNN. I posted a comment on their article, but it’ll probably get bigger exposure here. (Assuming CNN’s moderators approve it at all.) This was the offending quote:

There were 143 gun-related murders in Washington last year, compared with 135 in 1976, when the handgun ban was enacted.

Needless to say, this is completely useless. It’s two data points with absolutely no context.

My stats here are kind of an ass-pull, but they’re meant more as a demonstration of how fucking easy it would be to improve on the utterly useless, context-less numbers that CNN gave than a real analysis of the effect of the gun ban. I used two web-accessible sources, U.S. Census QuickFacts with historical census data and District of Columbia Crime Rates 1960-2006.

I strongly recommend following the last link in particular to show how completely asinine it is to use only two data points to judge the effect of the handgun ban. Anyway, here’s my comment:

As stated, this is a useless statistic, because it contains no information about either the population of Washington in the two years examined or about the total number of murders (regardless of weapon) in each year. Either one of those things would tell us something about the effect of the ban. The number of gun murders by itself, with no context of the city’s population or overall murder rates, tells us nothing.

The per capita rate of gun death for last year would be 143/572,059 (2000 Census) or about 2.5. The per capita rate of gun death for 1976 would be 135/702,000 (1970 Census) or 1.92. This doesn’t change the implication of the quote, but DOES provide actually useful information to the reader.

Also, there were 188 total murders and 135 gun murders in 1976, for a ratio of 71%. In 2006, there were 169 total murders. (Numbers for 2007 are not available.) Assuming no dramatic change in gun murders between 2006 and 2007, that gives a ratio of 86%. Again, this doesn’t change the implication, but it does provide more useful information about the overall murder/crime rate between the two years. (Murders actually went DOWN overall.)

But even this doesn’t come close to telling a full story, for a number of reasons. For example, there were 235 total murders in 1975, and in fact every year from 1969 to 1975 had more than 200 murders per year. The years 2004-2006, on the other hand, all had less than 200 murders, down from a peak between 1990-1993 which had over 450 murders per year. This clearly indicates that there is something OTHER THAN gun control legislation affecting the total murder rate. In fact, this factor, whatever it is, completely swamps any difference seen in murders between 1976 and 2006, which the article tries to pretend is a valid measure of the effect of gun control legislation in D.C.

Bottom line: quoting random numbers from random years doesn’t tell us anything. So don’t do it unless you’re willing to invest in a complete statistical analysis. (For the record, I haven’t done anything remotely like that here, but I did considerably more than the article did, and I didn’t spend more than 15 minutes doing it.)

I’ve linked some friends to this video of Will Wright discussing his upcoming game Spore, and I also linked to it in the comments to this post about the IDers trying to claim it for their own. (Which is completely asinine, as Tyler explains.)

The reason I like it is that it shows what the game is all about, which is translating a passion for real, actual science (which ID, I need not tell the folks who read this blog, is emphatically not) into the idiom Wright is familiar with, namely video games. It’s not meant to be a perfect representation of biological evolution, because of course such a representation would have no room for a player in it. It’d be a fish tank simulation, which would no doubt be kind of fun to watch, but has less impact than a more interactive experience would provide.

For that matter, Wright seems far less interested in biological evolution per se than in the behaviour that emerges from biological novelties. Spore, then, is less a game about how three-legged creatures evolve from single-celled life than a game about how three-legged creatures (who happened to evolve from single-celled life) learn to dance. Which is pretty cool.

I never thought I’d see the day, but holy shit. This guy is a fucking moron. A comically shrill and obtuse one, at that.

And then, shock and awe, Chris Matthews kicked his ass. I think he’s a sleazy, sexist prick, but in this case I have to give credit where it’s due. Matthews hit the nail on the head. It’s not enough to cry “appeasement!” or “Neville Chamberlain!”. As Matthews himself said, “When you’re going to make a direct historic reference, get it straight.”

Beautiful, man. Beautiful.

Oh my shit, this is seriously the funniest thing I’ve seen in weeks. Go watch, while I attend to my aching sides:

Via Jill.

(P.s.: Damn he’s pretty. I know that people usually only point that out to trivialise him, but it’s true anyway. Somebody out there has to have written Edwards/Obama slashfic, and I want that person to send it to me right now.)