It looks like a problem with the proof has been found. Fields Medalist Terry Tao comments on his blog:
It unfortunately seems that the decomposition claimed in equation (6.9) on page 20 of that paper is, in fact, impossible; it would endow the function h (which is holding the arithmetical information about the primes) with an extremely strong dilation symmetry which it does not actually obey. It seems that the author was relying on this symmetry to make the adelic Fourier transform far more powerful than it really ought to be for this problem.
It seems like those who are permitted to telecommute tend to be those who have shown they are responsible people who can contribute meaningfully without actually coming in. If you look at the remainings, it's no surprise that they are a grumpy lot about the overall state of affairs. It's not that everyone who telecommutes is a self-motivated creative genius, and that everyone who doesn't is a goofoff who needs constant supervision, but if there is some kind of connection, it would show up sharply in a study like this one.
If you've played games which emphasize short term memory (the card game Concentration, where you need to remember where cards are located while they are face down) against a little kid, you'll realize there are some interesting effects with kids' memory being excellent in this regard. Grown adults are definitely not as good as little kids at those kind of games- the only way I could beat my niece was by maximizing distraction. When the cards were laid out in a grid as she was accustomed to, she would reliably beat me if I couldn't distract her. The only times I was able to beat her were by scattering the cards haphazardly... It's somewhat humiliating to be trying your hardest and lose to someone who can just barely read...
So there may be some specialization that takes place, and adults/college students have probably lost some of their peak short-term memory ability as they have developed higher-level analysis skills. It kind of makes me slightly wish I'd taken psych in college (years ago) instead of econ... (Not really, econ was cake...)
Um, not like I want to defend cable companies and their pricing, but "93% in 10 years" is to my mind an inflammatory way of saying "an average of 6.7% per year over the last 10 years." Given that overall the consumer price index has averaged about a 3% increase per year over that period, cable prices are bad, but not as bad as the quote makes it sound. Then again, entire industries (credit cards, for example) owe their existence due to people's inability to compute compounded interest, so perhaps the wording should be no surprise.
The question of commuting the sentence vs. a straight pardon is explained very nicely by the following: if the sentence is commuted, Libby can still appeal and Bush and Cheney can continue to refuse to comment about the "ongoing investigation." After a pardon, Bush and Cheney have no remotely defensible reason to continue to refuse to answer questions.
This was called a couple of weeks ago by Jeff Lomonoco, see Brad Delong's analysis here for the full text of the analysis. Yet another depressing episode in this administration, blegh.
The Bush regime is no stranger to well-timed pardon/commutation. Remember that Bush the First pardoned Cap Weinberger on the Iran-Contra scandal, relieving any potential leverage for Cap to explain Bush I's essential role in that illegal process. That deftly put the Iran-Contra investigation at a standstill.
From TFA:
They were, you know -- Karl Rove, people think he's an evil genius, but that's only about half right. I mean, he's not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he and his guys were mistyping their email addresses, sent them to georgewbush.org, instead of dotcom, which is an email domain owned by friends of ours, who shot them right to us.
There are some obvious other bias possibilities in the study. The languages listed ("the most prevalent being Polish, Yiddish, German, Romanian and Hungarian") and the ages of the patients now (60-80 now, say) suggest to me that these are people who immigrated to Canada from eastern Europe in about 1930-1950. These are people who chose to immigrate, which means they had some initiative and at least a bit more resources than the average eastern European who did not immigrate. So that biases that population in one direction. In the US, particularly in NYC, the 1930 to post WWII Eastern European immigrant community was very strong, with many scientists, engineers, entepreneurs, and artists coming from that background.
That being said, it is not so easy to construct a study to measure the effects of bilingualism on dementia- how about having a control group just speak one language, and "prescribing" that another group speak a second language regularly in their home for 40 years or so. The reasons that a second language is spoken regular are widely varied, presumably, but probably those reasons have a greater correlation with delayed onset of dementia than with the act of speaking a second language.
Microsoft rose to market dominance due to its preinstallation on machines that are sold. If they are worried about a bad user experience on preinstalled computers, they should refuse to sell their OS to OEMs and just sell their OS in a box, to be installed. That would level the playing field somewhat with Linux distributions, although it is a little late for OS/2 and BeOS to rejoice about that.
Presumably, Microsoft read the same New York Times Op-Edon bias as everyone else, that basically says that people claim to be uninfluenced by things like this but that they really are fooling themselves and are biased. Microsoft wouldn't have done this laptop giveaway if they didn't think it would work- that is, result in at least slightly better reviews than they would have gotten otherwise.
What exactly on your CV shows that you have experience and expertise appropriate for being the single expert used by the RIAA for testimony that the evidence presented in court that illegal filesharing took place is compelling?
What I see on the provided 26-page vita in the category of refereed publications are just 5 refereed journal publications between 1980 and 1990, in areas far removed from detection of filesharing activity. There is a smattering of NSF grants related to supporting students with scholarships, training of faculty, a planning grant for a center and later funding for that security center, which does not seem to have research experience on issues relevant to the issues likely to arise in a filesharing trial.
Do you know of anyone better qualified than yourself, possibly with experience developing and using filesharing tools, developing and using rootkits, spyware, and IP spoofing techiniques, who is willing to serve as the RIAA expert?
Autodesk was a market leader and a real Silicon Valley 80s-90s wonder. One of the great things that came out of it, indirectly, was the book "The Hacker and the Ants" by Rudy Rucker which had some obvious inspiration from the time Rucker spent at Autodesk. The CEO at that time John Walker is a remarkable guy. As a bunch of people have already pointed out, they are long past market relevance (except for legacy lockin issues) so this is sad, but they were at one time quite the acme of geekdom.
I seem to be a magnet for large-scale computer identity data leakage. I'm not sure my overall percentage, but I managed to be in a big New York Times subscriber theft a few years ago, the American Express Financial Advisors theft last year, a T-Mobile one, and as a UCLA alum I get this one also. It seemed like everyone who has my name is volunteering it to intruders, and until I looked at this very long list of data loss incidents I was thinking it might just be me. At least I missed out on the big Veteran's Affairs ones by not being a veteran... Nothing bad has come of it as far as I can tell but who knows what the future holds?
My spouse grew up in the 70s near Laguna Beach and the El Toro Marine Air Station in SoCal and there were regular instances of people's garage doors opening and closing as various military jets flew nearby. It was just a fact of life that people got used to from living nearby, and nobody was too bothered about it.
The data is sketchy enough as it is, and it would be much harder to collect data about time in cars than annual mileage travelled. At least cars come with built-in odometers!
Actually, Michael Bloomberg (billionaire from Bloomberg News etc.) is currently mayor of NYC and doing an excellent job in a number of ways. He would be far more suitable for president than Gates- what he lacks in name recognition he makes up for in actual political leadership, effective change in a place where change does not come easily, and not being found an anti-competetive monopolist.
Scott Adams's blog has this take on things:For my president I want a mixture of Mother Teresa, Carl Sagan, Warren Buffet, and Darth Vader. Bill has all of their good stuff. His foundation will save more lives than Mother Teresa ever did. He's got the Carl Sagan intelligence and rational mind. He's a hugely successful businessman. And I have every reason to believe he can choke people just by concentrating in their general direction. You can't tell me that wouldn't be useful at a summit.
I've always felt that you should pick a president the same way you'd pick an attorney to help you out of a dangerous legal problem. Do you want the attorney who dresses nicely and belongs to your church? Or do you want the attorney who can rip out your opponent's heart and put it on the hibachi before he dies? Maybe it's just me, but I want an attorney who is part demon. And I want a president who isn't afraid to make rational decisions.
So perhaps the problem is basically that people vote for someone likeable, but it may be better to have someone, uh, effective. Perhaps evilly effective...
Obsoleting your latest purchase by switching CPUs for example...
Apple has handled CPU changes more gracefully than any other company, and they still get grief for it! Remarkable. Even the 6502 to 6809 CPU transition worked quite well, with only a few very odd instances where Apple ][ stuff didn't run on the Apple///. The 6502 to 68000 CPU switch was really the only total discontinuity, and that wasn't exactly just a few days ago, and they did try to accommodate that transition but really weren't able to. 680x0 to PPC went very smoothly, and PPC to Intel (although I haven't made that leap yet) has gone very well for my colleagues who have gotten new machines.
I guess one of the reasons that people are such whiners about Apple stuff is that the expectations are extremely high- stuff often lasts much longer, so there are more generations active at once and it's harder to simultaneously manage to accommodate three or four generations of products simultaneously, whereas if you are only worrying about this year and last year's stuff, it's much easier to manage.
My experience with tradition media is that almost always when there is an article on something that I actually know a great deal about, they get many facts/details wrong and those stick out to me. Even if the overall story is basically OK, it is always troubling when there are significant numbers of obviously wrong things. In general, of course, this erodes my confidence in coverage of things outside my areas of expertise because there is no reason to think that reporters make mistakes only when they are writing about something I know well. So this study could be coming from noticing the same effect- even if the gist of the article is OK, experts notice problems and then become suspect overall.
Not having your mail get screwed up if you travel for an extended trip would be great. In the US, the USPS will only hold your mail for a month and if they decide to send it back at the end of the month, you will have a great deal of trouble sorting things out upon return. I thought it used to be longer, but perhaps I just had a nicer post office where I used to live. You can forward USPS mail someplace for a longer period, but if you are out of the country that isn't an option. I arrange almost everything important on-line, so having my neighbors pick up mail and dump it into a large receptable (on my last six-month trip, I had them put it into a new 50-gallon garbage can) has worked well for me, but there were a few things in there when I got home to sort through it that would have been nice to know about earlier.
There were some excellent suggestions for cell phone features that actually would be useful in response to a David Pogue blog entry a few weeks ago. It doesn't look like this phone has any of those, but it seems like it wouldn't be that hard to add many things that I think would be quite useful to people who use their cell phone as an actual phone, not as a Swiss army gadget
An "expire in two hours" vibrate mode when you turn your phone to vibrate and then forget to set it back to ring.
A "ring permitted list" to only allow preferred people to ring, everyone else goes to voicemail.
An article in Slate yesterday argued that TV watching causes autism. The Slate article is based on research done by Cornell economists Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson, and Nodir Adilov. You can download the academic working paper here.
The paper gives some theories why TV and autism might be linked, but the more interesting part of the paper is the data analysis. The researchers are trying to find a "natural experiment" that shifts around TV watching, but otherwise has no impact on whether a child is diagnosed as autistic. Rainfall is one of the things they use. In places where it rains a lot, kids watch more TV. Maybe rainfall doesn't affect autism in any other way. This is a creative approach, although it suffers from the weakness (which they acknowledge in the paper), that rainfall changes other things, like how much time you spend indoors doing other things besides watching TV. They also use the arrival of cable TV in an area. This approach is potentially stronger, although it would be better if they used availability of cable TV, rather than the number of people who actually subscribe.
These are intriguing approaches, but personally I did not find the empirical evidence in the paper very compelling.
The rainfall evidence is based off of three states: Washington, Oregon, and California. It rains a lot in some parts of these states, but not others. There is more autism in the parts of the states where it rains more. The problem is that it rains on the coast of Oregon and Washington, and in Northern California. But there are a million other differences between the coast of Washington and the Eastern part of the state, and between Northern and Southern California. The researchers also look at how much rain there was when you were between the ages of 0-2, controlling for your county. This is more promising. The impact of rain gets smaller, but it is the most convincing evidence in the paper.
The data analysis of cable TV is limited to California and Pennsylvania and also finds positive results. The difficulty with the cable TV analsyis is that there is an incredibly strong positive trend in autism. The cable TV data are basically on an upward trend. The regression analysis is going to have a very hard time sorting out between a steady rise in cable TV penetration and the time trend. In the current version they only include a linear time trend, which is an extrememly powerful predictor. My guess is that if they generalize their specification to allow for non-linear time trends, the cable TV result will disappear.
The authors have done some interesting work, but the nature of the problem makes it a really hard one to answer convincingly. For instance, you might think that Oregon and California should have similar autism rates. Nope, Oregon's rate is four times higher. That sort of gap is almost certainly due to differences in what is called autism in the official data in one state versus the other. The increasing time trend is also heavily influenced by what is labeled autism. When the outcome of interest is measured so poorly, it is hard to know what the analysis is really picking up--differences in the underlying symptoms or just in the reporting of them.
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that there might be a causal link between rainfall, TV, and autism, but not the one suggested by the paper.
My theory: when it rains a lot, parents watch more TV, see more shows about autism, and this leads them to seek out a diagnosis of autism for their kids. They have the same kids, it is just that TV makes them believe that their kids are autistic.
I don't mean to sound overly negative on this research. I applaud the authors for asking a daring hypothesis and gathering data to try to test it. My gut, though, tells me that this is a result which will not stand up to scrutiny.
There is an interesting entry on the blog of Steven Levitt (author of Freakonomics and expert in teasing interesting things from data in subtle ways) analyzing this. His point is that autism DIAGNOSIS (and awareness) is on the rise, as is cable TV penetration, so it will be hard to detect a possible signal amidst those general trends. I like his possible alternate explanation: (the study also analyzes rainfall amounts which correlate well with TV watching for kids)
My theory: when it rains a lot, parents watch more TV, see more shows about autism, and this leads them to seek out a diagnosis of autism for their kids. They have the same kids, it is just that TV makes them believe that their kids are autistic.
I don't have an iPod but I do effectively exactly what is described there with a small external Firewire drive I got a few years ago. I use Firewire target mode and boot whatever machine I'm at off of my drive and then it's just like all my other computers. It started as a way to make it easier to bike to work (carry the small drive instead of a laptop) but soon I realized this would work with any of my machines and just about anyone else's reasonably modern MacOS machine and it works great. I use rsync to make backups, and somehow everything Just Works fine. I have offices in several locations and no matter where I am, I've got the latest versions of everything and all my apps. I don't think any of the "portable account" solutions address the issue of making sure all your apps are intact, though; that seems much more difficult to handle simply.
I don't know how well this will continue to work with the new Intel Macs- my stable of machines ranges from an old Powerbook G3 to aluminum PB G4s to old AGP G4 PowerMacs to a couple of G5 PowerMac setups.
(The secret, of course, is that the things made in year X that only last a few years are long since discarded, and we only remember the things that last any decent length of time)
This is the standard statistical fallacy of unenumerated failures, a common mistake in trying to draw inferences from anecdotal evidence. The idea is that to be fair, you have to count all of the events, not just the successes, when inspecting data. If you have something that from 1960 that is working in 1980, that is great, but you need to also consider all of those things from 1960 which were not working in 1980. The sample is biased by considering only stuff that is still working. If something has been going strong for 20 years, there is a good chance it is well-made or random sample-to-sample variation didn't introduce any flaws that would lead to a short lifespan, so there is a good chance it will carry on for a while. That is, there is a huge difference between saying "a car from 1960 which is in good shape and being driven regularly in 1980 has a good chance of working well for another five years" and "a car from 1960 has a good chance of working well for 25 years" because the second statement, if made in 1980, may well be ignoring all those cars from 1960 that rusted out, weren't so great to begin with, etc-- unenumarated failures.
Unenumerated failures are important to remember in many settings, and not being aware of the possibility of being misled can lead to what emotionally compelling but fallacious arguments. Carl Sagan used a great example about "psychic" dreams to illustrate that. If someone wakes up in the middle of the night with a strong irrational feeling that his father died, and it turns out the next morning that his father is fine, he feels some relief, doesn't tell anyone, just feels a little silly ("unenumerated failure".) But if by chance his father was hit by a bus that day, he will not only tell everyone about his prescient dream but feel deeply disturbed what is sure to be an emotionally compelling way. If you only hear about the far-more-newsworthy unexpected sucesses (dreams that came to fruition, good or bad), you may be seeing something that isn't there. If we knew the rate at which people have terrible vague dreams about their fathers and the rate of fathers dying, we could estimate the number of people who would be subject to such a jolting coincidence, I would think.
Indeed, I think counting on people to be inobservant is an excellent business model. There are two stations near me that I will never visit again, after unexpectedly getting 11.3 gallons and 11.1 gallons into a tank that otherwise I have never gotten more than 10.8 gallons into, over 15 years of driving. (Yes, I keep records; no, they are not done in a spreadsheet. I grew up with parents who kept every car expense written down on a paper pad in a glovebox and can't imagine not keeping track myself. (And I married someone who is the same...) For gas: date, amount, price, total, MPG, location + notes (towing or not, etc.) OK, I am a geek.) I complained to our county Weights and Measures bureau, but I have no idea if they follow up such complaints. To be cynical, since the taxes are per gallon and not a percentage, they have a counter incentive to investigate effectively. My guess is that they investigate places that get repeated complaints but don't worry about places with sporadic ones and dismiss them as having to do with the temperature, etc.
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It seems like those who are permitted to telecommute tend to be those who have shown they are responsible people who can contribute meaningfully without actually coming in. If you look at the remainings, it's no surprise that they are a grumpy lot about the overall state of affairs. It's not that everyone who telecommutes is a self-motivated creative genius, and that everyone who doesn't is a goofoff who needs constant supervision, but if there is some kind of connection, it would show up sharply in a study like this one.
If you've played games which emphasize short term memory (the card game Concentration, where you need to remember where cards are located while they are face down) against a little kid, you'll realize there are some interesting effects with kids' memory being excellent in this regard. Grown adults are definitely not as good as little kids at those kind of games- the only way I could beat my niece was by maximizing distraction. When the cards were laid out in a grid as she was accustomed to, she would reliably beat me if I couldn't distract her. The only times I was able to beat her were by scattering the cards haphazardly... It's somewhat humiliating to be trying your hardest and lose to someone who can just barely read... So there may be some specialization that takes place, and adults/college students have probably lost some of their peak short-term memory ability as they have developed higher-level analysis skills. It kind of makes me slightly wish I'd taken psych in college (years ago) instead of econ... (Not really, econ was cake...)
Um, not like I want to defend cable companies and their pricing, but "93% in 10 years" is to my mind an inflammatory way of saying "an average of 6.7% per year over the last 10 years." Given that overall the consumer price index has averaged about a 3% increase per year over that period, cable prices are bad, but not as bad as the quote makes it sound. Then again, entire industries (credit cards, for example) owe their existence due to people's inability to compute compounded interest, so perhaps the wording should be no surprise.
This was called a couple of weeks ago by Jeff Lomonoco, see Brad Delong's analysis here for the full text of the analysis. Yet another depressing episode in this administration, blegh.
The Bush regime is no stranger to well-timed pardon/commutation. Remember that Bush the First pardoned Cap Weinberger on the Iran-Contra scandal, relieving any potential leverage for Cap to explain Bush I's essential role in that illegal process. That deftly put the Iran-Contra investigation at a standstill.
There are some obvious other bias possibilities in the study. The languages listed ("the most prevalent being Polish, Yiddish, German, Romanian and Hungarian") and the ages of the patients now (60-80 now, say) suggest to me that these are people who immigrated to Canada from eastern Europe in about 1930-1950. These are people who chose to immigrate, which means they had some initiative and at least a bit more resources than the average eastern European who did not immigrate. So that biases that population in one direction. In the US, particularly in NYC, the 1930 to post WWII Eastern European immigrant community was very strong, with many scientists, engineers, entepreneurs, and artists coming from that background. That being said, it is not so easy to construct a study to measure the effects of bilingualism on dementia- how about having a control group just speak one language, and "prescribing" that another group speak a second language regularly in their home for 40 years or so. The reasons that a second language is spoken regular are widely varied, presumably, but probably those reasons have a greater correlation with delayed onset of dementia than with the act of speaking a second language.
Microsoft rose to market dominance due to its preinstallation on machines that are sold. If they are worried about a bad user experience on preinstalled computers, they should refuse to sell their OS to OEMs and just sell their OS in a box, to be installed. That would level the playing field somewhat with Linux distributions, although it is a little late for OS/2 and BeOS to rejoice about that.
Presumably, Microsoft read the same New York Times Op-Edon bias as everyone else, that basically says that people claim to be uninfluenced by things like this but that they really are fooling themselves and are biased. Microsoft wouldn't have done this laptop giveaway if they didn't think it would work- that is, result in at least slightly better reviews than they would have gotten otherwise.
What I see on the provided 26-page vita in the category of refereed publications are just 5 refereed journal publications between 1980 and 1990, in areas far removed from detection of filesharing activity. There is a smattering of NSF grants related to supporting students with scholarships, training of faculty, a planning grant for a center and later funding for that security center, which does not seem to have research experience on issues relevant to the issues likely to arise in a filesharing trial.
Do you know of anyone better qualified than yourself, possibly with experience developing and using filesharing tools, developing and using rootkits, spyware, and IP spoofing techiniques, who is willing to serve as the RIAA expert?
Autodesk was a market leader and a real Silicon Valley 80s-90s wonder. One of the great things that came out of it, indirectly, was the book "The Hacker and the Ants" by Rudy Rucker which had some obvious inspiration from the time Rucker spent at Autodesk. The CEO at that time John Walker is a remarkable guy. As a bunch of people have already pointed out, they are long past market relevance (except for legacy lockin issues) so this is sad, but they were at one time quite the acme of geekdom.
I seem to be a magnet for large-scale computer identity data leakage. I'm not sure my overall percentage, but I managed to be in a big New York Times subscriber theft a few years ago, the American Express Financial Advisors theft last year, a T-Mobile one, and as a UCLA alum I get this one also. It seemed like everyone who has my name is volunteering it to intruders, and until I looked at this very long list of data loss incidents I was thinking it might just be me. At least I missed out on the big Veteran's Affairs ones by not being a veteran... Nothing bad has come of it as far as I can tell but who knows what the future holds?
My spouse grew up in the 70s near Laguna Beach and the El Toro Marine Air Station in SoCal and there were regular instances of people's garage doors opening and closing as various military jets flew nearby. It was just a fact of life that people got used to from living nearby, and nobody was too bothered about it.
The data is sketchy enough as it is, and it would be much harder to collect data about time in cars than annual mileage travelled. At least cars come with built-in odometers!
Actually, Michael Bloomberg (billionaire from Bloomberg News etc.) is currently mayor of NYC and doing an excellent job in a number of ways. He would be far more suitable for president than Gates- what he lacks in name recognition he makes up for in actual political leadership, effective change in a place where change does not come easily, and not being found an anti-competetive monopolist.
I've always felt that you should pick a president the same way you'd pick an attorney to help you out of a dangerous legal problem. Do you want the attorney who dresses nicely and belongs to your church? Or do you want the attorney who can rip out your opponent's heart and put it on the hibachi before he dies? Maybe it's just me, but I want an attorney who is part demon. And I want a president who isn't afraid to make rational decisions.
So perhaps the problem is basically that people vote for someone likeable, but it may be better to have someone, uh, effective. Perhaps evilly effective...Apple has handled CPU changes more gracefully than any other company, and they still get grief for it! Remarkable. Even the 6502 to 6809 CPU transition worked quite well, with only a few very odd instances where Apple ][ stuff didn't run on the Apple ///. The 6502 to 68000 CPU switch was really the only total discontinuity, and that wasn't exactly just a few days ago, and they did try to accommodate that transition but really weren't able to. 680x0 to PPC went very smoothly, and PPC to Intel (although I haven't made that leap yet) has gone very well for my colleagues who have gotten new machines.
I guess one of the reasons that people are such whiners about Apple stuff is that the expectations are extremely high- stuff often lasts much longer, so there are more generations active at once and it's harder to simultaneously manage to accommodate three or four generations of products simultaneously, whereas if you are only worrying about this year and last year's stuff, it's much easier to manage.
My experience with tradition media is that almost always when there is an article on something that I actually know a great deal about, they get many facts/details wrong and those stick out to me. Even if the overall story is basically OK, it is always troubling when there are significant numbers of obviously wrong things. In general, of course, this erodes my confidence in coverage of things outside my areas of expertise because there is no reason to think that reporters make mistakes only when they are writing about something I know well. So this study could be coming from noticing the same effect- even if the gist of the article is OK, experts notice problems and then become suspect overall.
Not having your mail get screwed up if you travel for an extended trip would be great. In the US, the USPS will only hold your mail for a month and if they decide to send it back at the end of the month, you will have a great deal of trouble sorting things out upon return. I thought it used to be longer, but perhaps I just had a nicer post office where I used to live. You can forward USPS mail someplace for a longer period, but if you are out of the country that isn't an option. I arrange almost everything important on-line, so having my neighbors pick up mail and dump it into a large receptable (on my last six-month trip, I had them put it into a new 50-gallon garbage can) has worked well for me, but there were a few things in there when I got home to sort through it that would have been nice to know about earlier.
TV causes autism? I doubt it.
An article in Slate yesterday argued that TV watching causes autism. The Slate article is based on research done by Cornell economists Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson, and Nodir Adilov. You can download the academic working paper here.
The paper gives some theories why TV and autism might be linked, but the more interesting part of the paper is the data analysis. The researchers are trying to find a "natural experiment" that shifts around TV watching, but otherwise has no impact on whether a child is diagnosed as autistic. Rainfall is one of the things they use. In places where it rains a lot, kids watch more TV. Maybe rainfall doesn't affect autism in any other way. This is a creative approach, although it suffers from the weakness (which they acknowledge in the paper), that rainfall changes other things, like how much time you spend indoors doing other things besides watching TV. They also use the arrival of cable TV in an area. This approach is potentially stronger, although it would be better if they used availability of cable TV, rather than the number of people who actually subscribe.
These are intriguing approaches, but personally I did not find the empirical evidence in the paper very compelling.
The rainfall evidence is based off of three states: Washington, Oregon, and California. It rains a lot in some parts of these states, but not others. There is more autism in the parts of the states where it rains more. The problem is that it rains on the coast of Oregon and Washington, and in Northern California. But there are a million other differences between the coast of Washington and the Eastern part of the state, and between Northern and Southern California. The researchers also look at how much rain there was when you were between the ages of 0-2, controlling for your county. This is more promising. The impact of rain gets smaller, but it is the most convincing evidence in the paper.
The data analysis of cable TV is limited to California and Pennsylvania and also finds positive results. The difficulty with the cable TV analsyis is that there is an incredibly strong positive trend in autism. The cable TV data are basically on an upward trend. The regression analysis is going to have a very hard time sorting out between a steady rise in cable TV penetration and the time trend. In the current version they only include a linear time trend, which is an extrememly powerful predictor. My guess is that if they generalize their specification to allow for non-linear time trends, the cable TV result will disappear.
The authors have done some interesting work, but the nature of the problem makes it a really hard one to answer convincingly. For instance, you might think that Oregon and California should have similar autism rates. Nope, Oregon's rate is four times higher. That sort of gap is almost certainly due to differences in what is called autism in the official data in one state versus the other. The increasing time trend is also heavily influenced by what is labeled autism. When the outcome of interest is measured so poorly, it is hard to know what the analysis is really picking up--differences in the underlying symptoms or just in the reporting of them.
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that there might be a causal link between rainfall, TV, and autism, but not the one suggested by the paper.
My theory: when it rains a lot, parents watch more TV, see more shows about autism, and this leads them to seek out a diagnosis of autism for their kids. They have the same kids, it is just that TV makes them believe that their kids are autistic.
I don't mean to sound overly negative on this research. I applaud the authors for asking a daring hypothesis and gathering data to try to test it. My gut, though, tells me that this is a result which will not stand up to scrutiny.
from http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/
I don't know how well this will continue to work with the new Intel Macs- my stable of machines ranges from an old Powerbook G3 to aluminum PB G4s to old AGP G4 PowerMacs to a couple of G5 PowerMac setups.
This is the standard statistical fallacy of unenumerated failures, a common mistake in trying to draw inferences from anecdotal evidence. The idea is that to be fair, you have to count all of the events, not just the successes, when inspecting data. If you have something that from 1960 that is working in 1980, that is great, but you need to also consider all of those things from 1960 which were not working in 1980. The sample is biased by considering only stuff that is still working. If something has been going strong for 20 years, there is a good chance it is well-made or random sample-to-sample variation didn't introduce any flaws that would lead to a short lifespan, so there is a good chance it will carry on for a while. That is, there is a huge difference between saying "a car from 1960 which is in good shape and being driven regularly in 1980 has a good chance of working well for another five years" and "a car from 1960 has a good chance of working well for 25 years" because the second statement, if made in 1980, may well be ignoring all those cars from 1960 that rusted out, weren't so great to begin with, etc-- unenumarated failures.
Unenumerated failures are important to remember in many settings, and not being aware of the possibility of being misled can lead to what emotionally compelling but fallacious arguments. Carl Sagan used a great example about "psychic" dreams to illustrate that. If someone wakes up in the middle of the night with a strong irrational feeling that his father died, and it turns out the next morning that his father is fine, he feels some relief, doesn't tell anyone, just feels a little silly ("unenumerated failure".) But if by chance his father was hit by a bus that day, he will not only tell everyone about his prescient dream but feel deeply disturbed what is sure to be an emotionally compelling way. If you only hear about the far-more-newsworthy unexpected sucesses (dreams that came to fruition, good or bad), you may be seeing something that isn't there. If we knew the rate at which people have terrible vague dreams about their fathers and the rate of fathers dying, we could estimate the number of people who would be subject to such a jolting coincidence, I would think.
Indeed, I think counting on people to be inobservant is an excellent business model. There are two stations near me that I will never visit again, after unexpectedly getting 11.3 gallons and 11.1 gallons into a tank that otherwise I have never gotten more than 10.8 gallons into, over 15 years of driving. (Yes, I keep records; no, they are not done in a spreadsheet. I grew up with parents who kept every car expense written down on a paper pad in a glovebox and can't imagine not keeping track myself. (And I married someone who is the same...) For gas: date, amount, price, total, MPG, location + notes (towing or not, etc.) OK, I am a geek.) I complained to our county Weights and Measures bureau, but I have no idea if they follow up such complaints. To be cynical, since the taxes are per gallon and not a percentage, they have a counter incentive to investigate effectively. My guess is that they investigate places that get repeated complaints but don't worry about places with sporadic ones and dismiss them as having to do with the temperature, etc.