‘The data will almost certainly be biased’

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 5:32 PM - 23 Comments

New figures show a 69% response rate for the National Household Survey—higher than Statistics Canada expected, but still not sufficient to replace the long-form census.

“You simply can’t get reliable data from a voluntary survey,” said John Brewster, who teaches statistics at the University of Manitoba and is president of the Statistical Society of Canada. ”I mean, this is something we teach in every course in statistics, for example. The data will almost certainly be biased. And we don’t really know at this time the magnitude or direction of that bias.”

Liberation therapy: the ‘wave of complications’ breaks

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 101 Comments

A group of Calgary neurologists has published a report on foreseeable complications faced by locals who have returned from going abroad and receiving trendy “liberation therapy” for multiple sclerosis. It is not clear whether the casefiles include the woman who was inadvertently liberated from the world by the treatment, but their contents sound troubling enough. “These five cases,” the authors note in their abstract, “represent the beginning of a wave of complications for which standardized care guidelines do not exist.”

They sound somewhat nervous, don’t they? It is almost as if they had not heeded the repeated reassurances of journalists and “liberation” enthusiasts that venous angioplasty and stent installation in major neck veins are routine procedures, of about as much clinical concern as having one’s shoe size measured. That tricky little distinction between veins and arteries turns out to be fairly important to the discussion: as an April letter in Clinical Neuroradiology pointed out, “Balloon dilatation and stent implantation have not primarily been developed for the venous system and are associated with a substantial risk for complications…with possible fatal outcomes.” [Emphasis mine]

Since the butcher’s bill is beginning to be drawn up, and not just in Calgary, it may be worth examining how well the “chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency” theory has fared over a full year of research. In April, SUNY Buffalo researcher Robert Zivadinov, a close colleague of CCSVI theorist Paolo Zamboni, delivered a controlled study of 500 patients that offered, at best, feeble confirmation of Zamboni’s original results. Zivadinov’s findings, as Colleague Anne Kingston pointed out at the time, could conceivably provide some comfort to both sides of the debate. But the one thing one could not possibly do with Zivadinov’s figures was to reconcile them with Zamboni’s original study, which claimed a perfectly sensitive, perfectly specific link between indicia of CCSVI and the presence of MS.

In the meantime, other results from preliminary studies of CCSVI and MS have been trickling out, to less fanfare. There is a cruel unrelentingness to them—a lamentable finality even to the titles of the articles. From Italy alone we have “No evidence of chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency at multiple sclerosis onset” (January); “Proposed chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency criteria do not predict multiple sclerosis risk or severity” (July); “Progressive multiple sclerosis is not associated with chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency” (last week).

A German team attracted some attention in January with a finding that “Intracranial venous pressure is normal in patients with multiple sclerosis”. A similar study from a VA hospital in Texas, using Zamboni’s own detection criteria to define the presence of CCSVI, was published earlier this month. The title: “No Cerebral or Cervical Venous Insufficiency in US Veterans With Multiple Sclerosis”. Meanwhile, the journal Neurology has a preprint from Greece which confirms the objectivity of the proposed CCSVI criteria—but also confirms the absence of any apparent link with MS. And for what it’s worth, a June study of animal models provides a smidgen of evidence against Zamboni’s speculation that vascular problems create autoimmune difficulties by causing localized deposits of iron to be left in the brain.

There is also the new study you might have read about which establishes that most of the gene markers statistically linked with MS are known to influence the immune system. For my money, that is actually an overhyped blow to the Zamboni hypothesis, in comparison with the lengthening train of papers finding no simple empirical connection between veins and MS at all. Most researchers agree that the CCSVI hypothesis is still worth following up with randomized controlled trials of larger size and longer duration. But they advocate this, not because there is any doubt that MS is fundamentally immunological, but because some far less radical variant of Zamboni’s idea might conceivably be, well, sort of true-ish. (See, for example, this note from neurologists in Erlangen: “…it certainly seems awkward to think of the complex disease MS solely as result of a simple venous outflow obstruction. Yet, the investigation of new vascular concepts as one variable in the pathophysiology of the autoimmune attack seems very worthwhile…”.)

Other researchers are frankly not so open to keeping up a chase that was, after all, set off by a study (Zamboni’s 100%-specific 100%-sensitive investigation) that almost certainly has to have been junk. The frustrations of a few scientists are discernible in the literature: one German group basically thumbed their noses at CCSVI by calling it the “perfect crime”—a supposed primary cause of MS that seems to leave no trace when sought in MS patients, using any means, by anyone but Zamboni or his very early supporters. Another comment in a senior journal asks whether CCSVI is “science fiction”. Either way, unfortunately, the premature enthusiasm for “liberation therapy” is cold inescapable fact.

(For those late to the party, some links to my previous discussions of CCSVI and “liberation”: I, II, III, IV. Bonus explanation of statistical specificity and sensitivity here.)

Raining on the Pride parade

By Claire Ward - Friday, July 15, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 16 Comments

MARK BLINCH/REUTERS

As far as estimates go, one million has a nice ring to it. Last week, a number of Toronto media outlets, including Macleans.ca, reported a dramatically inflated statistic: that one million people attended Toronto’s annual Pride parade on July 3. Maclean’s has since determined that this is both physically impossible, given the dimensions of the space, and highly improbable, given previous estimates of attendance. The number of attendees remains unconfirmed by Toronto police, the City of Toronto, and Pride Toronto organizers. So how did the media get it wrong? The erroneous news reports were a case of broken telephone that can be traced back to a 2009 estimate, which states that Pride week drew 1,120,000 visits. But visits, Maclean’s has learned, have little to do with attendance as we understand it.

Read the original online piece

“Attendance is a tricky word,” says Michael Harker, senior partner at Toronto-based Enigma Research Corporation, the research company behind the 2009 report. “There’s a big difference between visits and unique attendees. Visits is, a guy comes three times, we count him three times. Uniques is, he comes three times, we count him once.” That one million figure, then, accounts for total visits to the 2009 festival—multiple returns over the span of four days—and not for boots on the ground at the festival’s flagship parade. The total number of uniques was actually 411,450, which, again, does not represent just parade attendees but all visitors over the course of four days. Enigma did not provide an estimate for how many people were at the parade itself. In fact, no one did.

Const. Victor Kwong, media relations officer at the Toronto Police Service, explains that the police don’t give estimates anymore. “We used to do estimates, but we got a lot of complaints. People would say, ‘Oh, you’re lowballing so that the event gets less press,’ or, ‘You’re highballing so the event gets more support.’ ”

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Statistical sour grapes

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, December 28, 2010 at 11:57 AM - 68 Comments

When the U of T Cities Centre announced a couple weeks ago that middle-class neighbourhoods are disappearing in Toronto, the Globe and Mail latched onto the study and squeezed it for all it was worth. Or, rather, what little it is worth and then some. The Globe used the study to craft a news article with a horror-movie lede, to order up a nostalgic Margaret Wente column, and to conduct a live online chat debating the issues raised. In the chat a user named “Paul” brought up a technical question for the study’s lead author, David Hulchanski:

I note that the maps drive off AVERAGE income. Do we know what they would look like if they drove off MEDIAN income? The published maps tell us that there is a growing class of people with super-high incomes. I think maps based on the median would be more informative about the middle class.

Let’s raise a glass to Paul. Even if you don’t understand why his point is important, you can see in the chat that Hulchanski’s answer is unsatisfactory: he says both that his team didn’t have median-income numbers going back far enough to make them the focus of the study and that he’s confident it wouldn’t make any difference. I think a criminal lawyer would call this “presenting an alibi and a justification at the same time.”

Hulchanski’s study found that the proportion of middle-income neighbourhoods in Toronto was 66% in 1970; it is now just 29%. Low-income neighbourhoods made up 19% of the city in 1970; that figure’s now 53%. Paul’s problem is that these types of neighbourhoods are defined relative to the mean individual income for the whole city ($88,400 in 2005). A middle-income neighbourhood is one whose residents are within 20% of the mean either way, while a low-income neighbourhood is 20%-40% below it. But a mean or average, unlike a median (i.e., the income that half the city makes more than and half makes less than), is sensitive to scale changes in individual outliers at the top of the distribution.

We can see the problem if we perform a thought experiment and imagine another city; we’ll call it Otnorot. In 1970, Otnorot had an unusual economic structure: it was divided into 100 equal-sized neighbourhoods numbered 1 to 100, each with an average real income corresponding (by total coincidence) to its number. In miserable Neighbourhood 1, the residents scrape by on 1 credit per year per person. In Neighbourhood 47, they make 47 credits on average. In Neighbourhood 100, they make 100 credits apiece, the filthy plutocratic bastards.

What would the Prof. Hulchanski of imaginary Otnorot report back to us about the economic structure of his city? The average income of the neighbourhoods (and the people in them) is, as the young Carl Friedrich Gauss could tell us instantly, the sum of the numbers 1 to 100 divided by 100: 50½ credits. Neighbourhoods 41 to 60, or 20 in all, are “middle-income” neighbourhoods within 20% of that mean. The “low-income” neighbourhoods are numbers 31 to 40; there are 10 low-income neighbourhoods.

By 2005, the vast majority of Otnorotians are living just as they and their forefathers always did. In Neighbourhoods 1-99, real incomes have not changed at all, nor have the relative population sizes changed. Neighbourhood 1 still earns 1 real credit per person, which buys exactly what it did in 1970. Neighbourhood 99 still earns 99. Only in Neighbourhood 100 has there been a change. Perhaps the residents held shares in the wildly successful Otnorotian version of Trivial Pursuit; perhaps they put their heads together and invented smell-o-vision. For whatever reason, they have gone from wealthy to superwealthy (at nobody else’s particular expense, or at least nobody’s in Otnorot), and they now earn a fantastic 8,000 credits per citizen every year.

For most Otnorotians, life hasn’t changed. The presence of the one new hyperrich neighbourhood would certainly have social effects, probably a mix of good and bad; you could, for example, almost certainly expect the Royal Otnorot Museum to acquire a hideous new glass mega-extrusion. But you wouldn’t say that the Otnorotian middle class had disappeared.

And yet—Shock! Concern!—that is exactly what Otnorot’s version of Prof. Hulchanski finds, unwisely using average incomes as his baseline. The overall average income for Otnorot is now a whopping 129½ credits a year, so no group at all outside lucky Neighbourhood 100 reaches the lower middle-income cutoff (103.6). The lower bound for a “low-income” neighbourhood, however, is now 77.7 credits. Where we once had just 10 low-income neighbourhoods out of 100, now everybody from 78 to 99 is defined as low-income, so we have 22.

It so happens that in Otnorot, lukewarm social science performed at public expense and promoted by newspaper editors is punished by means too horrendous to translate into English. Things are done differently in the real Toronto, a mercifully liberal-minded place. But the processes that so confused our alterna-Hulchanski are surely, in an oversimplified way, the same processes that have confused the real scholar. Observers of inequality have observed a genuine, dramatic numerical increase in it over the past two or three decades; one only need have been looking at business-magazine “rich lists” for a while to see that billionaires, all but unknown in the early 1980s, are now as common as seagulls.

There are real social and political dangers from this, to the degree that we allow economic power to translate into social and political power. But it does not mean that the “middle class” has really disappeared or dwindled. It only means that the logarithmic scale of possible incomes has stretched out at the top in a new Gilded Age, a realm of pervasively low marginal taxes and new deregulated industries.

Toronto might really, in some sense, have become bifurcated more arrestingly between rich and poor. But the Cities Centre’s measurement procedure cannot prove that this has really happened. Would it be a good thing for social conditions in Toronto if the Bridle Path were annihilated by a meteor? If that happened, Prof. Hulchanski (and the Globe) would probably be able to report several “low-income” neighbourhoods magically re-entering the “middle class”.

Respectable social science of this sort will ordinarily work with medians or with log-income (as the UN Human Development Index does), or it will approach inequality questions with the aid of the Gini coefficient—a metric totally absent from the Hulchanski study. No doubt Prof. Hulchanski would give the same sour-grapes defence he gave to our friend Paul: don’t have the numbers, don’t need the numbers. But there’s a further question. Why should we necessarily be concerned with between-neighbourhood inequality at all? The Cities Centre would use the same “average income” figure to describe and classify both Neighbourhood X, where everybody makes a healthy $100,000 a year, and Neighbourhood Y, where half the residents make $200,000 and half make nothing, bartering and stealing for their living. Funny sort of egalitarianism, if you ask me.

When ministers of the crown tweet

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 10:06 AM - 127 Comments

Tony Clement takes on the worldwide statistical conspiracy.

dgardner So what might a professional, independent, disinterested observer think of the Harper government’s #census decision? http://bit.ly/hnzoFU

TonyClement_MP @dgardner Statisticians sticking up for fellow statisticians is your idea of “disinterested”?? You’re kidding, right?

dgardner @TonyClement_MP : No. You think professionals from another continent are biased because they share the profession? You’re kidding, right?

TonyClement_MP @dgardner If they’re from another continent, why are they sticking their noses in Canada’s business? Spare me the righteousness.

dgardner @TonyClement_MP : Oh, lord. Really? Faux populism? Rush Limbaugh territory. Don’t go there.

Perspective alert

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 9:06 AM - 25 Comments

Chris Selley runs the numbers on homicide.

Statistics Canada data show that in 2009, just 18.1% of “solved” homicides — meaning those in which a suspect was identified — were committed by someone unknown to the victim. That’s 82 murders, total. (If the same rate held true among unsolved homicides as well, the total number would be 110.) … There were 515 homicides in Canada in 2007. More likely ways to die included not just the traditional heart disease (50,499 deaths), suicide (3,611) and motor vehicle accidents (2,882) but such un-newsworthy occurrences as pneumonia (5,272), renal failure (3,664) falling down (2,677), poisoning (1,347) and skin cancer (875).

Who am I?

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

PHOTOGRAPH BY KC ARMSTRONG

You’re not like your parents, but you confide in them. You’ve been stamped the iPod generation, but you believe in the power of print and that some technologies are evil. Recent polls provide a portrait of the class of 2011.

OPTIMISTIC
Seventy-nine per cent believe it’s possible to create your destiny, and 52 per cent feel you will fulfill every one of your dreams. Almost all of you feel you will make it to graduation, and nearly two-thirds say you’re engaged and enthusiastic about school.

GODLESS
Is there a god? Not likely. You live in the moment, and probably do not participate in religion. In fact, your belief in science may trump your belief in god.

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Why children are horrifically good soldiers

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 8, 2010 at 10:30 AM - 3 Comments

Tim A Hetherington/Panos Pictures

THEY FIGHT LIKE SOLDIERS, THEY DIE LIKE CHILDREN
Roméo Dallaire

The former Canadian general and head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, Dallaire has always been brutally open about the horrors he saw there and their effects upon him. Only “constant therapy and an unrelenting regimen of drugs” keep the memories at bay, he writes in his new book. But nothing has managed to soothe the shock Dallaire experienced when he saw preteen killers, armed to the teeth with machetes and rifles, advancing upon him.

In some 30 wars across the world, he notes, hundreds of thousands of child fighters—their ranks endlessly renewed by kidnapping or by scooping up kids orphaned by AIDS, famine or violent conflicts—have become “the ultimate, cheap, expendable, yet sophisticated human weapon.” Children are, in fact, horrifically perfect for the job. They’re small enough to transport easily in large numbers, yet big enough to handle modern lightweight arms, and heavy enough also to set off land mines so adults can safely follow. They have no real sense of fear and, when indoctrinated young enough, their capacity for loyalty and for barbarism exceeds that of adults. The girls—40 per cent of child soldiers—double as sex slaves and, in long-lasting wars, as mothers of the next generation of fighters.

For Dallaire, almost as bad as the war situation he describes with such cold eloquence is the fact that the world seems to be doing little about it. The better to bring home the emotional truth of his subject, he crafted three fictional chapters on the abduction, indoctrination and killing (by a UN peacekeeper) of a child soldier. Dallaire pulls off fiction with considerable skill, but readers who are more interested in solutions will be relieved when he turns to practical suggestions. One in particular would make children far less useful to their adult controllers: a serious effort to stamp out the trade in lightweight weapons.
- BRIAN BETHUNE

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The stats behind date-rape drug detectors

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 10:32 AM - 0 Comments

A detection kit for the most common date rape drugs is going on sale throughout Canada shortly, according to the Montreal Gazette. The Gazette did not have to look far to find someone to denounce the ethical premise of such apparatuses: a spokesman for a Vancouver women’s shelter said “This is a cynical attempt to make some money and shame on the company for feeding off the fear that women, reasonably, have of being raped.”

I suppose most of us would respond with something very like Adam Smith’s classic formulation: we are not to look to a “lack of cynicism” for the answers to our social problems, any more than we look to the fellow-feeling of the butcher and the baker to provide us with sustenance. If something like the Drink Detective—which consists of a pipette and three pieces of treated paper—enabled us to end drug-facilitated rape tomorrow, that would be a very good thing indeed.

Unfortunately, almost 100% of barroom beverages contain a highly effective substance that diminishes inhibitions and impairs memory. More to the point, it is odd that a test for “date rape drugs” other than ethanol should be criticized on the premise of its effectiveness without any attempt at an inquiry into that effectiveness. The Drink Detective website, by itself, doesn’t encourage confidence. It features a supposedly independent, but thinly sourced, “technical report” into the accuracy of the kit. One press release on the site, perhaps in a ham-handed attempt to double the market for the product, recycles the urban legend that “In some countries, it is even possible to be drugged and incapacitated so that organs, such as kidneys, can be surgically removed and sold.”

You are probably wondering whether there have been any peer-reviewed studies of the Drink Detective, and why, if there are, they aren’t mentioned on the “Science” page of the product’s website. The answer to your first question is “Yes”. And you probably already have a potential answer to the second if you’ve studied statistics.

An team of public health researchers in Liverpool published a study of the Drink Detective in the journal Addiction in 2006. They found that the Drink Detective was significantly superior to a rival product, and as a technical feat of fast, cheap detection of complex molecules, the kit deserves not just praise but wonder. But is it really of much use? The authors found that the overall sensitivity of the kit was about 69.0% and its specificity was 87.9%. In plainer English, this means that for every 100 samples of adulterated booze, the test will, on average, miss (100-69), or 31; and for 100 non-drugged drinks, the test will give (100-87.9), call it 12, false positives.

Women who are hyper-conscious of the possibility of drug-assisted rape will not be happy to hear that the Drink Detective gives a clean bill of health to almost one-third of drink-tampering sociopaths. But the false positives are a concern too: it would be easy to design a test that “caught” every single spiked drink if you didn’t care about specificity as well as sensitivity. (A heuristic of “Run straight home if a napkin becomes moistened when you dip it in your glass” would have 100% sensitivity.) In situations where the real odds of getting a spiked drink were as high as 1 in 100, a test with 88% specificity would still finger 12 innocents as toxic creeps for every 1 guilty man it identified. Even at a reasonable-sounding price per kit of $5.99, test fatigue seems likely under realistic circumstances.

The Drink Detective’s manufacturers had some specific gripes about the Liverpool test—complaining, for instance, that the testers’ use of pharmaceutical-grade GHB was inappropriate—but they had received the benefit of the doubt in at least one large, obvious way: the kit was put through its paces, not in a dimly-lit pub toilet by experimenters half-wrecked on Cosmos, but by sober scientists working in a laboratory. It is hard to disagree with the conclusion that “Use of drug detector kits by the public in the night-time environment…may create a false sense of security (false negatives) and undue concern (false positives) among kit users.” And the same could be said—to her credit, Daisy Kler of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter does say it—about the overall focus on drug-facilitated sexual assault by strangers. No one is certain how often this really happens, and the best guess is “not very”.

That census debate, late Victorian edition

By Colby Cosh - Friday, July 16, 2010 at 3:28 PM - 0 Comments

The objections to the census on Biblical grounds are now a thing of the past; the objections on the ground that the census is inquisitorial have also, there is good reason to believe, gradually lost their force… it is now agreed among all civilized nations that a census is a useful and desirable thing.

Thus spake the scientist and administrator G.B. Longstaff (1849-1921) in an address to the Royal Statistical Society on June 25, 1889. Longstaff’s discussion of the imperial census activity scheduled for 1891 sheds fascinating light on today’s Canadian debate: I’m not sure anyone has yet pointed out, as Longstaff did that night, that New France, Acadia, and Newfoundland are where the first censuses of any kind since antiquity were taken, and that only then did the idea return to find acceptance in Old Europe.

It took about fifty years, mind you, to convince the restless, suspicious people of Britain to accept even the most rudimentary nose-count; among the new factors which predisposed them to accept it was Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). (As time goes by I become more convinced that Malthus, for his approach rather than his conclusions, belongs to the rank of Hume and Adam Smith in the history of ideas, and may even approach that of Newton and Darwin.) Readers will find matter of particular interest in Part II of the body of Longstaff’s address, wherein he discusses what questions it is appropriate to ask in a census. He commences, perhaps revealing his training as a lepidopterist, with a taxonomic observation:

Statisticians may be divided into two classes, (a) those who clamour for much information on many subjects, even though such information be confessedly very imperfect; and (b) those who, being of a more sceptical turn of mind, prefer to ask for very little, and to concentrate their efforts on getting that little with the greatest attainable accuracy.

Don't mind me; I'm on a math bender

By Colby Cosh - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 3:11 AM - 19 Comments

As the paid-up holder of a Mainstream Media club card, can I warn the sportswriters away from making too much of the statistical fluke of all eight first-round NHL playoff series starting out tied through two games? The warning will arrive too late for some, but others may yet be saved.

As a landmark of NHL parity, the large number of 1-1 results in 2010 is not going to prove very useful. Imagine that game outcomes are statistically independent of each other and that the better team has a p chance of winning each individual game in the home team’s rink. If that’s the case, then the chance of a given series standing level after two games is 2(p)(1-p).

The 1-1 tie is always, for realistic values of p, the most common outcome. In a world of perfect parity—all teams are equal, no home-ice advantage, p = 0.5—half the series will be tied 1-1 after two games. And because the chance of the better team going up 2-0 is counterbalanced by a decreased chance of the other team going up 2-0, the overall chance of a tied series doesn’t drop off very fast as you depart from the parity condition, p = 0.5. For p = 0.6, about 48% of the series are still tied 1-1 after two games. (The better team is ahead in 36%, or 0.6²; the worse team is up 2-0 in 16%, about 0.4².)

But you can see that having eight series tied 1-1 will be incredibly rare even in the world of perfect parity. The probability of that happening in a given year will be the total product of the chances of a 1-1 tie in each of the series. Given an average overall value of p, the odds of all eight series starting out equal works out to, at most, (2(p)(1-p))⁸—a pretty small number, demonstrating the great flukiness of the “eight ties” outcome. Even in the perfect-parity world the expected frequency works out to 1 time in every 2⁸, or 256, years. In the real world, the right average figure for p is probably around .54, giving us an “eight ties” year about 1 time in 269. In a fairly extreme non-parity world where the 1-4 seeds had an average 60-40 edge—that is to say, p = 0.6—the “eight ties” outcome would happen once every 355 years.

In other words, using this fluke as any kind of sign, indicator, or test for parity is about like insisting on reading a book only by the light of Halley’s Comet. You’d better have a comfortable chair. And plenty of kids, so they and their progeny can continue the observations (over several millennia) after you die in it…

The secret weapon

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 4 Comments

Photograph by Fred Thornhill/ Reuters

Everybody who takes an introductory stats course at university learns about Student’s t-test, a technique useful with small-sample experiments. “Student,” in this case, has nothing to do with the classroom. It was the pen name of William Sealy Gosset (1876-1937), one of the most important figures in the development of modern statistics. Gosset had a celebrated scientific career, but his alter ego got the immortality. His discoveries arose from his work as a brewer and agriculturist for Guinness, which had a strict policy against the publication of trade secrets; hence the pseudonym.

Last week, the Toronto Blue Jays announced the hiring of baseball’s modern-day answer to “Student”—the New Jersey-based, Montreal-born author, programmer and analyst known to the world as “Tom Tango.” Tango is among the most respected figures in the field of “sabermetrics,” the application of scientific and quantitative methods to baseball, which is perhaps best known as the subject of Michael Lewis’s non-fiction bestseller Moneyball. A wide-ranging baseball philosopher whose topics of study range anywhere from millimetric variances in the strike zone to multi-million-dollar team payrolls, Tango is the lead author of 2006’s The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, perhaps the most important sabermetric manual of the past two decades. When the Kansas City Royals’ Zack Greinke won the American League Cy Young Award last year, the right-hander said that he was especially fond of a statistic called “FIP” and pitched with it constantly in mind. FIP stands for Fielding-Independent Pitching (a method of factoring the defence out of a pitcher’s earned run average and crediting him only for events over which he has sole control). Its inventor: Tom Tango.

But while he is admired, prolific and an active correspondent with other scholars, Tango remains an enigma. He keeps his real name a closely guarded secret. Long known in the online sabermetrics world as “Tango­tiger,” he tacked on the “Tom” and dropped the “Tiger” solely to have something semi-respectable-looking to put on the cover of The Book. “There are a lot of old-timers who think that I should sign my Christian name,” he blogged in 2008. “I don’t see why it’s anyone’s business other than mine.”

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Objectionable reality

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 7:48 PM - 41 Comments

Having said the same thing this time last year, the Justice Minister restates his thesis on crime.

“We don’t govern on the latest statistics,” the minister told The Canadian Press in a telephone interview. ”What level it’s at right now, it’s unacceptable, and we are committed to disrupting … criminal activity.”

It was a year and a half ago, having heard the Prime Minister say something similar, that Dan Gardner was inspired to pen the phrase “an epistemological claim of staggering primitiveness.”

Summers Gone, Yet Again

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 11:23 PM - 0 Comments

I can’t believe this is back on the table: Politico is reporting that Larry Summers’ potential candidacy for Treasury secretary may have been kiboshed because of “an intense backlash from women’s groups.” Summers, you will recall, was forced to step down as head of Harvard three years ago because of a similar backlash from women’s groups, over a speech he gave in which he speculated as to the reasons why women continue to be vastly unrepresented as professors at the highest levels in the sciences and engineering. 

In the speech, Summers suggested that there were three possible (and non-exclusive) explanations. The first was that men have traditionally been more willing than women to work the 80 or so hours a week it takes to succeed at the highest levels in these fields. Second, he proposed that, as with many other features that differ between the sexes, male intelligence might be more variable than female intelligence. That is, even supposing that on average women are just as smart as men, there might be more highly intelligent, and more highly stupid, men than women. Finally, he conceded that some degree of socialisation and discrimination is probably in play. He also said that as far as he could tell, this was also the order of importance, from most to least. 

Some things to note here.

First, at no point did Summers say that males are inherently more intelligent than women, despite what continues to get reported in the media. Here is the offending passage:

“It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability – there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means – which can be debated – there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population.” 

 Second, part of the point of the speech he gave was to challenge his audience. Here’s his opening sentence:

I asked Richard, when he invited me to come here and speak, whether he wanted an institutional talk about Harvard’s policies toward diversity or whether he wanted some questions asked and some attempts at provocation, because I was willing to do the second and didn’t feel like doing the first.

Third, throughout the speech Summers bends over backwards to avoid saying anything that could be interpreted as endorsing the status quo. He repeatedly stresses that he wants to separate positive statements (that is, empirical claims) from normative judgments. He makes it clear that the point of understanding the causes of the imbalance is to figure out ways of minimizing it. And he repeatedly concedes that he could be wrong on a great many points and invites argument and debate. 

In short, there is nothing in this speech that indicates a “record of derogatory comments aimed at women”, as The New Agenda, a women rights’ group founded by former supporters of Hillary Clinton, accused him the other day.  Three years on, and Larry Summers continues to pay the price for something he never said. 

Meanwhile, nobody at The New Agenda — or anywhere else for that matter — seems to have had any problem with the current president of Harvard, Ms. Drew Gilpin Faust, believing in innate differences between the sexes.