Online Mentors to Guide Women Into the Sciences

18 Sep 2012

Online Mentors to Guide Women Into the Sciences

Chinese Company to Acquire DNA Sequencing Firm

18 Sep 2012

Chinese Company to Acquire DNA Sequencing Firm

Sunday Data/Statistics Link Roundup (9/16/12)

16 Sep 2012

1. There has been a lot of talk about the Michael Lewis (of Moneyball fame) profile of Obama in Vanity fair. One interesting quote I think deserves a lot more discussion is: “On top of all of this, after you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it. People being led do not want to think probabilistically.” This is a key issue that is only going to get worse going forward. All of public policy is probabilistic - we are even moving to clinical trials to evaluate public policy. 
2. It’s sort of amazing to me that I hadn’t heard about this before, but a UC Davis professor was threatened for discussing the reasons PSA screening may be overused. This same issue keeps coming up over and over - screening healthy populations for rare diseases is often not effective (you need a ridiculously high specificity or a treatment with almost no side effects). What we need is John McGready to do a claymation public service video or something explaining the reasons screening might not be a good idea to the general public. 
3. A bleg - I sometimes have a good week finding links myself and there are a few folks who regularly send links (Andrew J., Alex N., etc.) I’d love it if people would send me cool links when they see them with the email title, “Sunday LInks” - i’m sure there is more cool stuff out there. 
4. The ICSB has a competition to improve the coverage of computational biology on Wikipedia. Someone should write a surrogate variable analysis or robust multiarray average article. 
5. I had not hear of the ASA’s Stattrak until this week, it looks like there are some useful resources there for early career statisticians. With the onset of fall, it is closing in on a new recruiting season. If you are a postdoc/student on the job market and you haven’t read Rafa’s post on soft vs. hard money, now is the time to start brushing up! Stay tuned for more job market posts this fall from Simply Statistics. 

Statistical analysis suggests the Washington Nationals were wrong to shut down Stephen Strasburg

15 Sep 2012

Statistical analysis suggests the Washington Nationals were wrong to shut down Stephen Strasburg

The statistical method made me lie

14 Sep 2012

There’s a hubbub brewing over a recent study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that compares organic food (as in ‘USDA Organic’) to non-organic food. The study, titled “Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives?: A Systematic Review” is a meta-analysis of about 200 previous studies. Their conclusion, which I have cut-and-pasted below, is

The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods. Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

When I first heard about this study on the radio, I thought the conclusion seemed kind of obvious. It’s not clear to me why, for example, an organic carrot would have more calcium than a non-organic carrot. At least, I couldn’t explain the mechanism by which this would happen. However, I would expect that an organic carrot would have less pesticide residue than a non-organic carrot. If not, then the certification isn’t really achieving its goals. Lo and behold, that’s more or less what the study found. I don’t see the controversy.

But there’s a petition over at change.org titled “Retract the Flawed ‘Organic Study’ Linked to Big Tobacco and Pro-GMO Corps”. It’s quite an interesting read. First, it’s worth noting that the study itself does not list any funding sources. Given that the authors are from Stanford, one could conclude that therefore Stanford funded the study. The petition claims that Stanford has “deep financial ties to Cargill”, a large agribusiness company, but does not get into specifics.

More interesting is that the petition highlights the involvement in the study of Ingram Olkin, a renowned statistician at Stanford. The petition says

The study was authored by the very many [sic] who invented a method of ‘lying with statistics’. Olkin worked with Stanford University to develop a “multivariate” statistical algorithm, which is essentially a way to lie with statistics.

That’s right, the statistical method made them lie!

The petition is ridiculous. Interestingly, even as the petition claims conflict of interest on the part of the study authors, it seems one of the petition authors, Anthony Gucciardi, is “a natural health advocate, and creator of the health news website NaturalSociety” according to his Twitter page. Go figure. It worries me that people would claim the mere use of statistical methods is sufficient grounds for doubt. It also worries me that 3,386 people (as of this writing) would blindly agree.

By the way, can anyone propose an alternative to “multivariate statistics”? I need stop all this lying….