First, I never indicated a belief that nobody is ready for sex until college. Some are, but some are not. I think the difference comes down to emotional maturity. Sex is very powerful, and for many physical maturity arrives well before emotional maturity. The lengths we go to in order to prolong adolescence into our 20's (sometimes late into our 20's), has lead to an overall decrease in the rate of emotional maturation of our youth.
Back when the average age at first child was closer to 20 than 30, your average 18 year old was far more emotionally mature than your modern 18 year old. The average 18 year old of yore was capable of leaving home, getting a job, paying their bills, and contributing to society. The modern 18 year old is largely incompetent and unskilled, unwilling to accept many of the jobs available to them, unable to balance a budget (along with their parents and government), and completely unprepared for parenthood, no matter how much sex they've had.
The fact is that culture changes. Our culture no longer values personal accountability and responsibility like it used to, so our children are not learning it until later in life. This is unfortunate, and not necessarily applicable to everyone, but still generally true. This lack of maturity makes many unprepared for the inevitable end result of sex, which is a pregnancy. My Brother-in-law is so infantilized that he has never held a job for more than 3 weeks and has 5 children that he does nothing to raise or provide for. If a 26 year old (my Bro-in-law's age) cannot be trusted to use a condom, and his girlfriends (all of similar age) cannot be trusted to use birth control, why should I expect better of the average 14, 15 or 16 year old. It has been shown that the part of the brain responsible for inhibition (AKA self control) is not fully developed until the early 20's, thus making those in their early teens More likely to mess up and end up pregnant. And as I've outlined above, they are woefully unprepared for that eventuality.
IMO, there should be no distinction made for those who are not legal adults. As "dependents" their parents are legally responsible for them. I can decide to risk getting caught breaking the law, because I will be the one dealing with the consequences. That does not hold completely true for those less than 18 (yes I know that sometimes teens are tried as adults, but that is the exception not the rule).
Until someone is completely and independently accountable for their own actions, legal wrong == ethically wrong. The exception being when the parent has explicitly stated that a specific legal transgression is acceptable to them, for example when parents say you can drink at home before being 21 as long as they are home. In that situation the legal adult has intentionally taken on the liability that goes along with knowingly allowing the child to break the law.
No offense taken. I was not trying to make it seem like we were a house of wild children, only illustrating a point. We were far better behaved than many of my peers, because unlike most of my peers I was more afraid of my parents than the law or school. As I pointed out, my brother and I were given adult responsibilities, and we did make it work.
Teenagers have been shown to have lower brain function in the region responsible for inhibition. Being responsible for the welfare of my younger siblings was an outside source of inhibition that complemented the internal inhibition that my parents instilled in me through the value system in my home. It is my opinion, that most parents are not doing a good enough job instilling that internal value system that is supposed to encourage good behavior. Couple that with a complete lack of real responsibility (keeping out of trouble for 2-3 hours after school is not real responsibility in my opinion) and you get teenagers that are physically mature, but emotionally ill prepared to take care of themselves.
As I indicated before, I agree that many kids can be responsible for themselves. But, many cannot and they need to be considered as well when coming up with policies related to them. Unfortunately, the good get lumped in with the bad.
The vast majority of 14 year olds that I've met are emotionally immature, despite their level of physical maturity. Some 14-16 year olds are emotionally mature enough for sex, but many (most?) are not. It is the conflict between physical and emotional maturity that defines teenagers as different from adults and children.
And they don't really make worse decisions about partners and sex than most 30 year olds do.
I think you are giving teenagers too much credit, and being overly cynical with regards to adults, but that's just an opinion.
cultural norms don't evolve in a vacuum. Age of consent is higher in cultures in which adolescence is extended (ie the US), because the culture hinders the maturation of the child's emotions and social skills. In cultures where adolescence is very short, the children are emotionally mature at an earlier age because the culture imposes adult responsibility, and more importantly accountability, earlier in life. Physical maturity is not irrelevant, but can be much less important than emotional and psychological maturity.
In the US we prolong adolescence. Drive at 16, vote or enlist in the military at 18, but can't drink until 21. College until 22, but many don't pay their own way and only go because mom & dad are paying for them. The lack of pressure to force maturation results in physically mature individuals with the emotional maturity of a much younger person.
I'm sure there are 15 year old who are ready for the responsibility (biological and emotional) that comes with sex. However, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that most American children are not.
Responsible kids will act responsibly. Whether that's because of good parental instruction, or personal moral fiber is irrelevant. Reasons are not really relevant to the discussion. Leaving these kids alone for long periods of time will not result in delinquent behavior. From your description, you were a "Responsible Kid".
Irresponsible kids will act irresponsibly. Whether it's because they are a developing sociopath (very rare), Daddy hit them too much (less rare), or Mommy infantilizes them and shields them from consequences is irrelevant (far too common in my experience). If there are adults around to supervise, then they are less likely to do anything major. If adults are absent, then they are more likely to do serious harm to themselves and others.
Most kids fall within a continuum of accountability and inherent responsibility. What the particular cause of the delinquent behavior differs by child, and type of behavior. However, that does not change that the correlation between unsupervised time and mischief. Not all of the kids will be a problem. I'd guess that it is a small percentage of kids that are responsible for the correlation in the first place. When a community is making a decision of this nature, they need to decide based on averages, not standout examples of good or poor behavior. You are correct that correlation != causation, but it does imply causation. The old saying "Idle hands are the devils playground" exists for a reason. Unsupervised children are more likely to get into trouble (generally speaking).
Being horny (the biological drive to procreate), and being emotionally capable of handling an adult sexual relationship are too different things. In my own case, I was horny 16hr/d from the age of 12 until about 25, but I did not believe myself ready for that kind of responsibility until I was in college. I saw and avoided opportunities for dating and sex (there weren't a lot, but some did happen) before college because I did not feel mature enough.
Horny can be handled (no pun intended) via masturbation, without all of the complex emotional entanglements that sex inevitably causes.
Yes I am, but it was responsibility for someone else, not myself. On the handful of occasions that my older brother and I were left to our own devices, we got into a lot more mischief. I would never have thought to steal a couple of beers from my friends dad, ride bikes down to the swamp, and get drunk when watching my 10 year old sister and 12 year old brother. However, that was my first experience with beer my 16th summer when my younger siblings were at a camp for the week and my parents were working. Same thing for my first time smoking weed.
As a former baystater, I can attest to the idiocy that the puritan legacy has played on that state. However, I don't see that this has anything to do with the puritans. AFAIK, the current schedule for schools was worked out based on what was cheapest for communities to pay for. Students start at approximately 9:30, 8:30 or 7:30 depending on their grade level (Elementary, Middle, or High School) so that older children will get out befor the younger, thus providing supervision until the parents get out of work, and so that the school only needs to buy enough busses for 1/3 of the total student population in the town.
I think a big part of the problems I've seen with the Massachusetts education system is the use of new "Progressive Education" techniques pioneered in the 60's, shown to be largely counter productive by the late 70's, but still en vogue in the late 90's (when I graduated HS). They care far too much about self esteem and student's feelings, and far to little for making the students perform. I believe that I did well in spite of many of my teachers instead of because of their efforts. Only a handful of my teachers actually challenged me, and that's because they didn't accept excuses or care too much about how a 'C' or a 'D' made me feel. Those rare grades made me feel bad, but they also motivated me to improve my performance (and not because I was getting paid for A's as many of my peers were).
IIRC, start times for school in my town were 9:30 AM for elementary school, 8:30 AM for Middle School, and 7:30 AM for High School. The reasoning being that the older kids would get out early enough to watch their younger sibilings until the parents got home. There is also the budget issue of need 1/3 as many busses, becuase each bus driver's route took less than an hour and they could thus serve all 3 schools starting with the HS and working down. Fortunatley for me, I lived just down the street from the Elementary and Middle schools I attended, so I didn't have to deal with the bus. OTOH, my parents opted to send me to HS in a different town so we had a 45min drive in the morning to get to school, but after my older brother got his lisence they didn't have to drive us anymore and we tended to get there only 15 min before first bell.
It's about teaching some responsibility to the kids, rather than saying "hell, turn up when you like, it'll be cool".
And how, exactly, does moving the school day from 9-3 to 10-4 teach kids to show up when ever they feel like it? They still have to put in 6 hours/d x 5d/wk. They don't get to choose the hours. The kids at this school just get a 6 hour block that is more convenient from a biological perspective. Besides, the best way to teach your kids about punctuality is not school. It is far to easy for perpetually tardy kids to learn how to game the system by kissing up to certain teachers. What they need to do is get a part time job. If they are late or absent too often they will get fired. The loss of money this causes will be far more motivating than detention or being sent to the office where a completely impotent administrator will give them a stern lecture and then send them off to class at worst, and just make them sit in a chair in the waiting room for the rest of the period more often then not (my wife is a middle school/HS teacher).
I agree that the OP is guilty of a broad generalization. Plenty of kids developed the ability to supervise themselves before they turn 18. However, unsupervised time is directly correlated with delinquent behavior. You sound like someone who developed a strong ethic early on, but many children at 14, 15 or even 16 are still highly impressionable by peer pressure, gang culture, etc. It's not that an increase in unsupervised time will always result in increased deliquent behavior in every child, but that it increases the proportion of children that will engage in such behavior, and increase the amount of deliquent behavior in others.
Four of the 5 kids in my house participated in delinquent behaviors to some extent (my youngest sister is damn near a saint) with similiar exposure to unstructured/unsupervised time. When that time increased my youngest brother increased the amount of delinquent behavior, but it stayed below the level of police invovlement. The same cannot be said of my other sister. My older brother and I managed to keep our delinquent behavior relatively unchanged, in part becase we were responsible for watching our younger siblings during that time.
With all of that being said... I don't believe that starting HS an hour later will be the problem they invision. The added hour of unsupervised time in the morning is most likely going to be taken up by sleep or time in front of the TV. Besides, starting an hour later in the AM means getting out an hour later in the PM. That means there will be 1 less hour between release from school and when the parents get home. I almost never got into trouble before noon on the weekends, and never during the school week. If anything I believe that this will lead to decreased delinquent behavior in the hours after school.
There is a difference between an 18 year old HS student deciding to have sex and a 14 year old HS student deciding to have sex. Only one of them is of the legal age of consent in most western countries. If a child is bound and determined to have sex they will. There is little to be done to prevent it when the child is actively trying to make it happen. However, there are a lot of children (and a 14-16 year old is still a child no matter how much they protest) whom are willing to accept prolonged virginity if the opportunity does not present itself. One of my sisters sought out opportunities to have sex, while my other sister, myself and 2 brothers were willing to wait. Nothing my parents did could prevent her (she ended up nocked up by 19), but their involvement in our lives, and perpetual presence in our home probably kept some of us from having sex earlier than we did.
Furthermore, my wife lost her virginity at 14 and said she felt it was a huge mistake. In fact, most of the women I know who lost their virginity before 18 have told me they wished they hadn't. That's not my perception as a new father, but what women have been telling me for over a decade and I have no reason to believe they lied to me. Many of them did so out of a perception that "everyone is doing it", but felt totally unprepared before, during and after the event. Many of them didn't have sex again for several years after breaking up with their first partner because they didn't feel they could handle it yet (my wife incuded). I realize that the Baby Boomers here in the US believe that they are the first generation to have ever had a good idea, but I though that most/.ers were smarter than that. Cultural norms with regards to age of consent, and age appropriate behavior evolved over time for a reason. They many not be the best, but their is usually a good reason for the norms being what they are/were.
Now, with all of that being said... I don't believe that pushing back the start of classes at the HS by an hour will result in increased teenage sex. The vast majority of students will use the extra hour in the morning to get more sleep. I could see a little more recreational drug use (had a friend who used to get high before school), but it's not like it's going to make kids use drugs that wouldn't have anyway. I've been wanting schools to move start times back for years. I was a morning person in HS, but my older brother was not. I had to get up an extra half an hour early just to get my brother out the door on time. Even as a morning person, I would have appreciated the extra hour of sleep.
That people are trying to use peer-review as a method to detect fraud, does not make it a good method for doing so. I've mentioned this before on/., although not in this thread, but I have no way of telling if the numbers in a table were generated by the experiment described, some other experiment, a random number generator, or the PR department at the company who's product is being evaluated. As long as the numbers are internally consistent, I have to "trust" that what they describe, happened. I can catch obvious errors, such as the SEM not supporting claims of statistical significance made by the authors. However, if during the review process, they claim that the SEM was a typo (numbers were actually SD and not SEM for example) and change it, I have no way of verifying that their explanation was true.
Also, in your quote you highlighted 2 different lines. The first has to do with the soundness of the conclusions. This is most definitely a role of peer review, but not related to accuracy. It doesn't mean that they verify that your conclusions are correct. Conclusions are not objective. The data gives you objective facts from which to draw subjective conclusions. This line indicates that your discussion will be evaluated for how well the data (yours and previous literature) supports your conclusions. If you extrapolate, or ignore important results then your paper will be rejected.
The second bolded section just indicates that if serious errors are found (using insufficiently large sample size, extrapolating results, etc.) then the paper will be rejected. That's totally understandable to reject, but obviously serious errors of this sort are uncommon. Most errors are much harder to detect, and are not picked up by the peer review process in my experience.
Any introductory statistics text should cover the issues of multiple comparisons. Basically, if you have 6 treatments, that gives you 5 degrees of freedom to perform contrasts. That 5 specific comparisons, one for each degree of freedom. However, with 6 treatments, there are 6 x 6 or 36 possible comparisons. If you want to have a 5% probability that differences are based on random chance, then you use a P-value 0.05 as your cut off for statistical significance. However, if you want to do all 36 comparisons, that is 36 * 0.05 or 180% chance that one of your comparisons is a false positive. In order to keep the overall chance of false-positives below 0.05, you use an adjusted P-value for any individual comparison (0.05/36) or 0.00139, so that the cumulative chance of a false-positive is 0.05. (there are other methods for adjusting, but they are all based on adjusting the P-value for individual comparisons to achieve the desired overall P-value.
The problem comes from the fact that none of the procedures for correcting the overall P-value include a method for accounting for contrasts (linear effect, quadratic effect, etc.) run on the same dataset, so using both ends up giving 2 P-values for comparisons of the same data without any of the necessary adjustment for the extra comparisons.
I have to say I agree with the OP. I got my Ph.D. in Animal Sciences from a University with a Vet School. Several of the courses I took were taught over in the Vet School and later I taught in a couple of classes attended by Vet Students. MS and Ph.D. students (ie scientists) are expected (and in turn expect) to learn concepts, apply critical thinking skills, and reason out problems from day one. Vet Students (the AnSci equivalent to Med Students) are expected to memorize facts for 2 to 2.5 years. There is no expectation of critical thinking, no reasoning out complex problems, no application of previously learned concepts to novel situations until year 3 in Vet School.
They are very highly trained, but the training they recieve is very different from the training I recieved. I very quickly started thinking of MD's and DVM's as biological mechanics by default. Nothing I've seen in my interactions with them has led me to believe that I am mistaken to think of the individuals that way until they proove otherwise on a case by case basis.
this is why people now consider master's degrees to be the equivalent of a high school diploma.
Who are these "people"? I am a research scientist and I don't know anyone who thinks of a MS as an equivalent to a HS diploma. Hell, as biased as I am (and I know I am), I don't even consider a humanities MA as an equivalent to a BS.
As I stated in response to FrozenGeek (the OP), the ability to add fractions and the skills acquired in the pursuit of a research MS degree are not connected. My step father is a carpenter and he can add fractions without even thinking about it. He deals with them every day. I OTOH, need to write out any remotely complicated math that I do if I want it done quickly and acurately. He would be the first to tell you that he doesn't know shit about higher math, while I am considered by my peers to be above par in my statistical knowledge and understanding (as indicated by their frequent visits to my desk for help with their statistical work).
The ability to math in your head (rapidly), and the ability to perform statstical analysis that is appropriate and interpret it in a way consistent with the limiations of the model/design used are not even remotely related. I cannot do math in my head quickly. I tend to drop a digit somewhere and come out with the wrong answer. However, I have extensive training in statistical design and interpretation, and can spot errors in both much easier than my peers. The skills involved, while both mathematical, are not necessarily connected.
There is no real life experimental data can 100% fit the assumptions of commonly used statistical models. Real life data is messy.
Hence, "All models are wrong, but some models are useful" that every stat's professor has on at least one slide the first day of any experimental design class. I gave a presentation a couple of days ago at a scientific meeting in which I harped on the practice of blindly accepting a model as being appropriate in the face of evidence to the contrary simply becuase "We've always done it that way" and "It'd be inconvenient to use any other model". Anyone with any statistical training should be aware of this issue when performing their own statistical analysis, reviewing a manuscript, or reading a journal article. If not, then they are not doing their job.
In addition, many many medical scientists use statistics as a tool to filter things (e.g. candidate genes, target enzymes, treatments, etc). In this case, 100% accuracy is not really important. Once the scientists narrow down the genes, they can test the validity directly in either test animals or real people.
This is why microarrays are waining in popularity in research. Less than 10 years ago they were being touted as the "Big Thing" that was going to revolutionize investigative genetic research. However, I was sitting at a table with 3 geneticists last night and they were talking about how everyone was moving away from microarrays toward hyperfast sequencing. Their explanation was that microarrays gave soo much information (and consequently so many chances for false positives/negatives) that the reproducibility was very poor. Sequencing on the other hand has excellent reproducibility. That improved accuracy is worth the much higher price tag.
I am in the life sciences (ie not a computer programmer).
If MD's are reading medical journals and interpreting their results, which they all are expected to do (especially those with a Board Certified Specialty like Endocrinology) then there is no excuse for them to have forgotten what what the standard deviation is a measure of. They should be using the variance estimates provided in a data table to interpret the results it contains every time they read an article. If not, then they aren't worth the exorbinant fee's they are charging, because critical thinking is part of a physicians job description, and accepting whatever gets publish in the New England Journal of Medicine at face value is not.
I can accept forgetting the equation, but there is NO EXCUSE for forgetting that SD is a measure of varition (along with SEM, SED, and CV) as opposed to a measure of central tendancy (mean, mode, median). That is something they teach you in the first week of a statistics course, and is used every subsequent class because it is so fundamental to the interpretation of statistics. If I were cytoman, I'd be looking for a new Endocrinologist.
We are talking the most basic stuff that anyone with a degree in the sciences should know.
I'm sure this is going to come across as snarky, or as an attempt at being Jaded and thus cool, but I'm of the opinion that MD's and DVM's are not scientists as a general rule. I view them as biological mechanics. Their education in the nuts and bolts of the scientific method is practically non-existant in my experience as a Ph.D. student at a univeristy with a vet school, where I took more than a couple of classes. If the MD or DVM also has a Ph.D. or even an MS, then the story is usually different.
If you chose a random set of conference proceedings, it is almost certain you will find at least one paper (and I suspect usually a dozen or more) that have statistical mistakes in them.
As someone who is sitting in a hotel room after the Midwest ASAS meeting in Des Moines, IA, I can personally attest to seeing improper statistics in the majority of the presentations I saw between 9 and 11am. There were at least 7 presentations in which they "Double Dipped" by running orthogonal contrasts (linear & quadratic) and mulitple comparison of simple effects (Tukey's HSD) on the same dataset with alpha = 0.05 for each type of test.
Peer review is not about catching mistakes, although it can on occation. Peer review is about clear communication, such that the experiment can be repeated as identically as possible and that the readers can understand the authors justification for their conclusions. At least that's what every journal article I've read on the topic indicateded was the reason for the peer review processes creation. One of my advisors asked me about it on my written preliminary exam and I needed to do a lot of reading to be prepared for the oral exam. There were several different societies that claimed to have originated the idea, but no one claimed that the purpose was to catch mistakes, fabrications, or data manipulations.
That particular oversight drives me nuts. An extension of that is when someone uses orthogonal polynomial contrasts and multiple comparison tests on the same data without adjusting their alpha level. If Tukey's HSD accounts for all tests and gives you an overall alpha of 0.05, and you then proceed to run linear and quadratic contrasts, the combined alpha level is actually 0.10, not 0.05 because Tukey's doesn't adjust for contrasts and contrasts don't contain adjustments for multiple comparisons.
I'm actually at a scientific meeting and saw 7 presentations in which they "double dipped" on their statisitics before we broke for lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I never indicated a belief that nobody is ready for sex until college. Some are, but some are not. I think the difference comes down to emotional maturity. Sex is very powerful, and for many physical maturity arrives well before emotional maturity. The lengths we go to in order to prolong adolescence into our 20's (sometimes late into our 20's), has lead to an overall decrease in the rate of emotional maturation of our youth.
Back when the average age at first child was closer to 20 than 30, your average 18 year old was far more emotionally mature than your modern 18 year old. The average 18 year old of yore was capable of leaving home, getting a job, paying their bills, and contributing to society. The modern 18 year old is largely incompetent and unskilled, unwilling to accept many of the jobs available to them, unable to balance a budget (along with their parents and government), and completely unprepared for parenthood, no matter how much sex they've had.
The fact is that culture changes. Our culture no longer values personal accountability and responsibility like it used to, so our children are not learning it until later in life. This is unfortunate, and not necessarily applicable to everyone, but still generally true. This lack of maturity makes many unprepared for the inevitable end result of sex, which is a pregnancy. My Brother-in-law is so infantilized that he has never held a job for more than 3 weeks and has 5 children that he does nothing to raise or provide for. If a 26 year old (my Bro-in-law's age) cannot be trusted to use a condom, and his girlfriends (all of similar age) cannot be trusted to use birth control, why should I expect better of the average 14, 15 or 16 year old. It has been shown that the part of the brain responsible for inhibition (AKA self control) is not fully developed until the early 20's, thus making those in their early teens More likely to mess up and end up pregnant. And as I've outlined above, they are woefully unprepared for that eventuality.
IMO, there should be no distinction made for those who are not legal adults. As "dependents" their parents are legally responsible for them. I can decide to risk getting caught breaking the law, because I will be the one dealing with the consequences. That does not hold completely true for those less than 18 (yes I know that sometimes teens are tried as adults, but that is the exception not the rule).
Until someone is completely and independently accountable for their own actions, legal wrong == ethically wrong. The exception being when the parent has explicitly stated that a specific legal transgression is acceptable to them, for example when parents say you can drink at home before being 21 as long as they are home. In that situation the legal adult has intentionally taken on the liability that goes along with knowingly allowing the child to break the law.
No offense taken. I was not trying to make it seem like we were a house of wild children, only illustrating a point. We were far better behaved than many of my peers, because unlike most of my peers I was more afraid of my parents than the law or school. As I pointed out, my brother and I were given adult responsibilities, and we did make it work.
Teenagers have been shown to have lower brain function in the region responsible for inhibition. Being responsible for the welfare of my younger siblings was an outside source of inhibition that complemented the internal inhibition that my parents instilled in me through the value system in my home. It is my opinion, that most parents are not doing a good enough job instilling that internal value system that is supposed to encourage good behavior. Couple that with a complete lack of real responsibility (keeping out of trouble for 2-3 hours after school is not real responsibility in my opinion) and you get teenagers that are physically mature, but emotionally ill prepared to take care of themselves.
As I indicated before, I agree that many kids can be responsible for themselves. But, many cannot and they need to be considered as well when coming up with policies related to them. Unfortunately, the good get lumped in with the bad.
Breaking the law is not delinquent? Where do you live?
And they don't really make worse decisions about partners and sex than most 30 year olds do.
I think you are giving teenagers too much credit, and being overly cynical with regards to adults, but that's just an opinion.
cultural norms don't evolve in a vacuum. Age of consent is higher in cultures in which adolescence is extended (ie the US), because the culture hinders the maturation of the child's emotions and social skills. In cultures where adolescence is very short, the children are emotionally mature at an earlier age because the culture imposes adult responsibility, and more importantly accountability, earlier in life. Physical maturity is not irrelevant, but can be much less important than emotional and psychological maturity.
In the US we prolong adolescence. Drive at 16, vote or enlist in the military at 18, but can't drink until 21. College until 22, but many don't pay their own way and only go because mom & dad are paying for them. The lack of pressure to force maturation results in physically mature individuals with the emotional maturity of a much younger person.
I'm sure there are 15 year old who are ready for the responsibility (biological and emotional) that comes with sex. However, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that most American children are not.
Responsible kids will act responsibly. Whether that's because of good parental instruction, or personal moral fiber is irrelevant. Reasons are not really relevant to the discussion. Leaving these kids alone for long periods of time will not result in delinquent behavior. From your description, you were a "Responsible Kid".
Irresponsible kids will act irresponsibly. Whether it's because they are a developing sociopath (very rare), Daddy hit them too much (less rare), or Mommy infantilizes them and shields them from consequences is irrelevant (far too common in my experience). If there are adults around to supervise, then they are less likely to do anything major. If adults are absent, then they are more likely to do serious harm to themselves and others.
Most kids fall within a continuum of accountability and inherent responsibility. What the particular cause of the delinquent behavior differs by child, and type of behavior. However, that does not change that the correlation between unsupervised time and mischief. Not all of the kids will be a problem. I'd guess that it is a small percentage of kids that are responsible for the correlation in the first place. When a community is making a decision of this nature, they need to decide based on averages, not standout examples of good or poor behavior. You are correct that correlation != causation, but it does imply causation. The old saying "Idle hands are the devils playground" exists for a reason. Unsupervised children are more likely to get into trouble (generally speaking).
Being horny (the biological drive to procreate), and being emotionally capable of handling an adult sexual relationship are too different things. In my own case, I was horny 16hr/d from the age of 12 until about 25, but I did not believe myself ready for that kind of responsibility until I was in college. I saw and avoided opportunities for dating and sex (there weren't a lot, but some did happen) before college because I did not feel mature enough.
Horny can be handled (no pun intended) via masturbation, without all of the complex emotional entanglements that sex inevitably causes.
Yes I am, but it was responsibility for someone else, not myself. On the handful of occasions that my older brother and I were left to our own devices, we got into a lot more mischief. I would never have thought to steal a couple of beers from my friends dad, ride bikes down to the swamp, and get drunk when watching my 10 year old sister and 12 year old brother. However, that was my first experience with beer my 16th summer when my younger siblings were at a camp for the week and my parents were working. Same thing for my first time smoking weed.
As a former baystater, I can attest to the idiocy that the puritan legacy has played on that state. However, I don't see that this has anything to do with the puritans. AFAIK, the current schedule for schools was worked out based on what was cheapest for communities to pay for. Students start at approximately 9:30, 8:30 or 7:30 depending on their grade level (Elementary, Middle, or High School) so that older children will get out befor the younger, thus providing supervision until the parents get out of work, and so that the school only needs to buy enough busses for 1/3 of the total student population in the town.
I think a big part of the problems I've seen with the Massachusetts education system is the use of new "Progressive Education" techniques pioneered in the 60's, shown to be largely counter productive by the late 70's, but still en vogue in the late 90's (when I graduated HS). They care far too much about self esteem and student's feelings, and far to little for making the students perform. I believe that I did well in spite of many of my teachers instead of because of their efforts. Only a handful of my teachers actually challenged me, and that's because they didn't accept excuses or care too much about how a 'C' or a 'D' made me feel. Those rare grades made me feel bad, but they also motivated me to improve my performance (and not because I was getting paid for A's as many of my peers were).
IIRC, start times for school in my town were 9:30 AM for elementary school, 8:30 AM for Middle School, and 7:30 AM for High School. The reasoning being that the older kids would get out early enough to watch their younger sibilings until the parents got home. There is also the budget issue of need 1/3 as many busses, becuase each bus driver's route took less than an hour and they could thus serve all 3 schools starting with the HS and working down. Fortunatley for me, I lived just down the street from the Elementary and Middle schools I attended, so I didn't have to deal with the bus. OTOH, my parents opted to send me to HS in a different town so we had a 45min drive in the morning to get to school, but after my older brother got his lisence they didn't have to drive us anymore and we tended to get there only 15 min before first bell.
It's about teaching some responsibility to the kids, rather than saying "hell, turn up when you like, it'll be cool".
And how, exactly, does moving the school day from 9-3 to 10-4 teach kids to show up when ever they feel like it? They still have to put in 6 hours/d x 5d/wk. They don't get to choose the hours. The kids at this school just get a 6 hour block that is more convenient from a biological perspective. Besides, the best way to teach your kids about punctuality is not school. It is far to easy for perpetually tardy kids to learn how to game the system by kissing up to certain teachers. What they need to do is get a part time job. If they are late or absent too often they will get fired. The loss of money this causes will be far more motivating than detention or being sent to the office where a completely impotent administrator will give them a stern lecture and then send them off to class at worst, and just make them sit in a chair in the waiting room for the rest of the period more often then not (my wife is a middle school/HS teacher).
I agree that the OP is guilty of a broad generalization. Plenty of kids developed the ability to supervise themselves before they turn 18. However, unsupervised time is directly correlated with delinquent behavior. You sound like someone who developed a strong ethic early on, but many children at 14, 15 or even 16 are still highly impressionable by peer pressure, gang culture, etc. It's not that an increase in unsupervised time will always result in increased deliquent behavior in every child, but that it increases the proportion of children that will engage in such behavior, and increase the amount of deliquent behavior in others.
Four of the 5 kids in my house participated in delinquent behaviors to some extent (my youngest sister is damn near a saint) with similiar exposure to unstructured/unsupervised time. When that time increased my youngest brother increased the amount of delinquent behavior, but it stayed below the level of police invovlement. The same cannot be said of my other sister. My older brother and I managed to keep our delinquent behavior relatively unchanged, in part becase we were responsible for watching our younger siblings during that time.
With all of that being said... I don't believe that starting HS an hour later will be the problem they invision. The added hour of unsupervised time in the morning is most likely going to be taken up by sleep or time in front of the TV. Besides, starting an hour later in the AM means getting out an hour later in the PM. That means there will be 1 less hour between release from school and when the parents get home. I almost never got into trouble before noon on the weekends, and never during the school week. If anything I believe that this will lead to decreased delinquent behavior in the hours after school.
There is a difference between an 18 year old HS student deciding to have sex and a 14 year old HS student deciding to have sex. Only one of them is of the legal age of consent in most western countries. If a child is bound and determined to have sex they will. There is little to be done to prevent it when the child is actively trying to make it happen. However, there are a lot of children (and a 14-16 year old is still a child no matter how much they protest) whom are willing to accept prolonged virginity if the opportunity does not present itself. One of my sisters sought out opportunities to have sex, while my other sister, myself and 2 brothers were willing to wait. Nothing my parents did could prevent her (she ended up nocked up by 19), but their involvement in our lives, and perpetual presence in our home probably kept some of us from having sex earlier than we did.
/.ers were smarter than that. Cultural norms with regards to age of consent, and age appropriate behavior evolved over time for a reason. They many not be the best, but their is usually a good reason for the norms being what they are/were.
Furthermore, my wife lost her virginity at 14 and said she felt it was a huge mistake. In fact, most of the women I know who lost their virginity before 18 have told me they wished they hadn't. That's not my perception as a new father, but what women have been telling me for over a decade and I have no reason to believe they lied to me. Many of them did so out of a perception that "everyone is doing it", but felt totally unprepared before, during and after the event. Many of them didn't have sex again for several years after breaking up with their first partner because they didn't feel they could handle it yet (my wife incuded). I realize that the Baby Boomers here in the US believe that they are the first generation to have ever had a good idea, but I though that most
Now, with all of that being said... I don't believe that pushing back the start of classes at the HS by an hour will result in increased teenage sex. The vast majority of students will use the extra hour in the morning to get more sleep. I could see a little more recreational drug use (had a friend who used to get high before school), but it's not like it's going to make kids use drugs that wouldn't have anyway. I've been wanting schools to move start times back for years. I was a morning person in HS, but my older brother was not. I had to get up an extra half an hour early just to get my brother out the door on time. Even as a morning person, I would have appreciated the extra hour of sleep.
That people are trying to use peer-review as a method to detect fraud, does not make it a good method for doing so. I've mentioned this before on /., although not in this thread, but I have no way of telling if the numbers in a table were generated by the experiment described, some other experiment, a random number generator, or the PR department at the company who's product is being evaluated. As long as the numbers are internally consistent, I have to "trust" that what they describe, happened. I can catch obvious errors, such as the SEM not supporting claims of statistical significance made by the authors. However, if during the review process, they claim that the SEM was a typo (numbers were actually SD and not SEM for example) and change it, I have no way of verifying that their explanation was true.
Also, in your quote you highlighted 2 different lines. The first has to do with the soundness of the conclusions. This is most definitely a role of peer review, but not related to accuracy. It doesn't mean that they verify that your conclusions are correct. Conclusions are not objective. The data gives you objective facts from which to draw subjective conclusions. This line indicates that your discussion will be evaluated for how well the data (yours and previous literature) supports your conclusions. If you extrapolate, or ignore important results then your paper will be rejected.
The second bolded section just indicates that if serious errors are found (using insufficiently large sample size, extrapolating results, etc.) then the paper will be rejected. That's totally understandable to reject, but obviously serious errors of this sort are uncommon. Most errors are much harder to detect, and are not picked up by the peer review process in my experience.
Any introductory statistics text should cover the issues of multiple comparisons. Basically, if you have 6 treatments, that gives you 5 degrees of freedom to perform contrasts. That 5 specific comparisons, one for each degree of freedom. However, with 6 treatments, there are 6 x 6 or 36 possible comparisons. If you want to have a 5% probability that differences are based on random chance, then you use a P-value 0.05 as your cut off for statistical significance. However, if you want to do all 36 comparisons, that is 36 * 0.05 or 180% chance that one of your comparisons is a false positive. In order to keep the overall chance of false-positives below 0.05, you use an adjusted P-value for any individual comparison (0.05/36) or 0.00139, so that the cumulative chance of a false-positive is 0.05. (there are other methods for adjusting, but they are all based on adjusting the P-value for individual comparisons to achieve the desired overall P-value.
The problem comes from the fact that none of the procedures for correcting the overall P-value include a method for accounting for contrasts (linear effect, quadratic effect, etc.) run on the same dataset, so using both ends up giving 2 P-values for comparisons of the same data without any of the necessary adjustment for the extra comparisons.
I have to say I agree with the OP. I got my Ph.D. in Animal Sciences from a University with a Vet School. Several of the courses I took were taught over in the Vet School and later I taught in a couple of classes attended by Vet Students. MS and Ph.D. students (ie scientists) are expected (and in turn expect) to learn concepts, apply critical thinking skills, and reason out problems from day one. Vet Students (the AnSci equivalent to Med Students) are expected to memorize facts for 2 to 2.5 years. There is no expectation of critical thinking, no reasoning out complex problems, no application of previously learned concepts to novel situations until year 3 in Vet School.
They are very highly trained, but the training they recieve is very different from the training I recieved. I very quickly started thinking of MD's and DVM's as biological mechanics by default. Nothing I've seen in my interactions with them has led me to believe that I am mistaken to think of the individuals that way until they proove otherwise on a case by case basis.
this is why people now consider master's degrees to be the equivalent of a high school diploma.
Who are these "people"? I am a research scientist and I don't know anyone who thinks of a MS as an equivalent to a HS diploma. Hell, as biased as I am (and I know I am), I don't even consider a humanities MA as an equivalent to a BS.
As I stated in response to FrozenGeek (the OP), the ability to add fractions and the skills acquired in the pursuit of a research MS degree are not connected. My step father is a carpenter and he can add fractions without even thinking about it. He deals with them every day. I OTOH, need to write out any remotely complicated math that I do if I want it done quickly and acurately. He would be the first to tell you that he doesn't know shit about higher math, while I am considered by my peers to be above par in my statistical knowledge and understanding (as indicated by their frequent visits to my desk for help with their statistical work).
The ability to math in your head (rapidly), and the ability to perform statstical analysis that is appropriate and interpret it in a way consistent with the limiations of the model/design used are not even remotely related. I cannot do math in my head quickly. I tend to drop a digit somewhere and come out with the wrong answer. However, I have extensive training in statistical design and interpretation, and can spot errors in both much easier than my peers. The skills involved, while both mathematical, are not necessarily connected.
There is no real life experimental data can 100% fit the assumptions of commonly used statistical models. Real life data is messy.
Hence, "All models are wrong, but some models are useful" that every stat's professor has on at least one slide the first day of any experimental design class. I gave a presentation a couple of days ago at a scientific meeting in which I harped on the practice of blindly accepting a model as being appropriate in the face of evidence to the contrary simply becuase "We've always done it that way" and "It'd be inconvenient to use any other model". Anyone with any statistical training should be aware of this issue when performing their own statistical analysis, reviewing a manuscript, or reading a journal article. If not, then they are not doing their job.
In addition, many many medical scientists use statistics as a tool to filter things (e.g. candidate genes, target enzymes, treatments, etc). In this case, 100% accuracy is not really important. Once the scientists narrow down the genes, they can test the validity directly in either test animals or real people.
This is why microarrays are waining in popularity in research. Less than 10 years ago they were being touted as the "Big Thing" that was going to revolutionize investigative genetic research. However, I was sitting at a table with 3 geneticists last night and they were talking about how everyone was moving away from microarrays toward hyperfast sequencing. Their explanation was that microarrays gave soo much information (and consequently so many chances for false positives/negatives) that the reproducibility was very poor. Sequencing on the other hand has excellent reproducibility. That improved accuracy is worth the much higher price tag.
I am in the life sciences (ie not a computer programmer).
If MD's are reading medical journals and interpreting their results, which they all are expected to do (especially those with a Board Certified Specialty like Endocrinology) then there is no excuse for them to have forgotten what what the standard deviation is a measure of. They should be using the variance estimates provided in a data table to interpret the results it contains every time they read an article. If not, then they aren't worth the exorbinant fee's they are charging, because critical thinking is part of a physicians job description, and accepting whatever gets publish in the New England Journal of Medicine at face value is not.
I can accept forgetting the equation, but there is NO EXCUSE for forgetting that SD is a measure of varition (along with SEM, SED, and CV) as opposed to a measure of central tendancy (mean, mode, median). That is something they teach you in the first week of a statistics course, and is used every subsequent class because it is so fundamental to the interpretation of statistics. If I were cytoman, I'd be looking for a new Endocrinologist.
We are talking the most basic stuff that anyone with a degree in the sciences should know.
I'm sure this is going to come across as snarky, or as an attempt at being Jaded and thus cool, but I'm of the opinion that MD's and DVM's are not scientists as a general rule. I view them as biological mechanics. Their education in the nuts and bolts of the scientific method is practically non-existant in my experience as a Ph.D. student at a univeristy with a vet school, where I took more than a couple of classes. If the MD or DVM also has a Ph.D. or even an MS, then the story is usually different.
If you chose a random set of conference proceedings, it is almost certain you will find at least one paper (and I suspect usually a dozen or more) that have statistical mistakes in them.
As someone who is sitting in a hotel room after the Midwest ASAS meeting in Des Moines, IA, I can personally attest to seeing improper statistics in the majority of the presentations I saw between 9 and 11am. There were at least 7 presentations in which they "Double Dipped" by running orthogonal contrasts (linear & quadratic) and mulitple comparison of simple effects (Tukey's HSD) on the same dataset with alpha = 0.05 for each type of test.
Peer review is not about catching mistakes, although it can on occation. Peer review is about clear communication, such that the experiment can be repeated as identically as possible and that the readers can understand the authors justification for their conclusions. At least that's what every journal article I've read on the topic indicateded was the reason for the peer review processes creation. One of my advisors asked me about it on my written preliminary exam and I needed to do a lot of reading to be prepared for the oral exam. There were several different societies that claimed to have originated the idea, but no one claimed that the purpose was to catch mistakes, fabrications, or data manipulations.
That particular oversight drives me nuts. An extension of that is when someone uses orthogonal polynomial contrasts and multiple comparison tests on the same data without adjusting their alpha level. If Tukey's HSD accounts for all tests and gives you an overall alpha of 0.05, and you then proceed to run linear and quadratic contrasts, the combined alpha level is actually 0.10, not 0.05 because Tukey's doesn't adjust for contrasts and contrasts don't contain adjustments for multiple comparisons.
I'm actually at a scientific meeting and saw 7 presentations in which they "double dipped" on their statisitics before we broke for lunch.