Back To Blogging With Some News

So first I was busy with life and didn’t blog, then I was without internet for a week (when you poach internet from an open wireless signal you have to wait a while for someone not smart enough to protect their signal to fix their internet) and when I did use the internet at work or elsewhere I didn’t have time to blog.  Now I have internet back at home and some time to blog.  You lucky reader, you!

The news to which the title of this post alludes is that I finally got a new job!  In approximately one week I will be employed as a Household Interviewer for the National Children’s Study.  What is that, you ask?  It is merely the largest longitudinal study of children’s health and development ever conducted.  The study aims to recruit 100,000 children from around the US and observe their health and developmental environment from fetus to age 21.  They’ll be observing things like the mother’s diet during pregnancy, the quality of the dirt in their backyards, the quality of the air they breathe in their neighborhood, the kind of social interactions they have as teens and so on.  They’ll be looking at the whole gamut of developmental factors.  It has the potential to help us understand things like why asthma and allergies are becoming so prevalent these days, among many other things.  The whole thing looks pretty impressive and I’m kind of excited about it.

My job will be to recruit expectant mothers to participate in the study.  The study is still in the early stages and they are evaluating the effectiveness of different recruitment strategies.  The strategy I will be employing, to my understanding, is door to door contacting and interviewing people in their homes, hence, household interviewer.  So I’m pretty much the ideal candidate: lots of door to door experience, very interested in research and in this project, Spanish speaker, and so on (I’m awesome. *wink*).  I’m excited to see what the job will be like.  I’m sure to blog about it more in the future.

In the meantime, you are allowed to be happy for me for getting a job where I get to use my degree a little bit.  And if you are expecting or soon-to-be expecting, consider participating in the National Children’s Study.  Check out www.nationalchildrensstudy.gov to see if you live in an area where they are recruiting.

Happiness, Wealth and Charity – Correlation, NOT causation

You may have heard of the study that came out recently that showed a relationship between charitable giving and happiness.  The results, in a nutshell, showed a stronger correlation between happiness and charitable giving than between wealth and charitable giving.

The reason I bring this up is because I want to make sure we all have our critical thinking caps on when we’re reading about studies like this.  When the media report on such studies as this one, media consumers commonly assume that the results illustrate a causal relationship when it is really only correlational in nature.  If that is Greek to you, there’s an explanation just ahead.

I first heard about this study on the radio and later read about it online.  Here is the article (for the record, I don’t usually read the Christian Science Monitor, I just followed a link to the article).  The first correlation/causation issue arises in the title of the article, “Degree of charity depends on happiness more than wealth,” which implies that happiness causes charitable giving (ie. charity depends on happiness, ergo happiness happens then charity follows).  Then the first line of the article, “So it’s true. Money doesn’t buy happiness. Giving does.” implies the opposite, that charitable giving causes happiness.  It may seem like a trivial thing to bring up and maybe in this case it is.  It probably doesn’t matter much in which direction causation flows when it comes to giving and happiness.  But the fact is that confusing correlation and causation can cause people to arrive at incorrect and possibly harmful conclusions.

In any research methods course they will pound into you that “correlation does not equal causation!”  The example that I remember most vividly from my college days is that there is a correlation between ice cream sales and crime.  When ice cream sales increase, crime also increases.  This is true.  What is not true is that which is tempting (and sensational) to believe, that one causes the other.

It would be very interesting if people responded to crime by drowning their sorrows in more and more ice cream.  Or if the elevated blood sugar resulting from increased consumption of ice cream caused some people to go a little nuts and commit crimes.  That would make for great news.  But all we can accurately say is that when one increases, we see an increase in the other.  One possible explanation of the ice cream/crime phenomenon is that ice cream sales increase during warm weather and warm weather is also a more likely time for criminals to be engaged in illegal activity.  But that is also just a guess.  That’s the nature of correlation, we can see a relationship but we can’t draw conclusions about which causes which.

The whole point is that this study on charitable giving, like so many other studies that show up in the media, measures correlation only.  It is interesting to see that these things are related, but that’s all we can know from a correlational study.  So I exhort my readers to be good critical thinkers and be wary of drawing erroneous conclusions from correlational studies based on the assumption of causation.

8 Awesome Geniuses

The following people, in my mind, exemplify the adjective genius.  I got thinking on the topic after seeing several of them in the media recently.  Notably, Stephen Hawking’s statements concerning intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the possibility of time travel.  There are many people I could have included on a list such as this, these were just some of the first to pop into my mind.  Please comment if you think of some noteworthy geniuses I’ve left out.  The following are people that inspire me with their dedication to science and humankind and I am amazed at the sheer scope of their accomplishments.

Dean Kamen

• No degree.
• Invented the Segway.
• He and his company, DEKA, have also invented a water purification device for developing countries, a dialysis machine, the iBot electric wheelchair, and a brain-controlled prosthetic arm, among other things.
• Member of National Inventor’s Hall of Fame
• (It seems like he only owns one outfit, a denim shirt and jeans.  Maybe he has a closet full of them like Ernest P. Worrell)

Ray Kurzweil

• BS in Computer Science and Literature at MIT and Honorary Degrees from 16 schools.
• By age 20, he sold his first company for $100,000.
• He developed new speech recognition technology for the disabled and music synthesizers, among other things.
• He has written books on artificial intelligence, futurism and nutrition.
• Is the recipient of many technology awards and is a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
• An Arizona band named themselves after his book The Singularity Is Near and later changed their name to Ray Kurzweil’s Face.
• Canadian band (and my favorite band) Our Lady Peace named one of their albums after his book The Age of Spiritual Machines and the album contains excerpts from the book.
• In 1990, he predicted that a computer would beat a human at chess in 1998.  IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in May 1997.

Bill Gates

• Founder and chairman of Microsoft.
• Began writing computer programs as a teenager; was banned from computer use at his school for exploiting bugs in the operating system.
• Scored 1590 on the SAT; went to Harvard.
• Wealthiest man in the world from 1995-2009.
• Founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; has given more than $28 billion to charity.
• Has been recognized several times as one of the most influential people of the 20th century.

Steve Jobs

• Co-founder of Apple.
• As a teenager, he attended after school lectures at Hewlett-Packard.
• Dropped out of college, but continued auditing courses.
• In his early career, developed a circuit board for Atari that was too compact to reproduce on an assembly line.
• Received the first ever National Medal of Technology along with Steve Wozniak.
• One of Forbes’ World’s Most Powerful People.

Albert Einstein

• Father of modern physics.
• Received Nobel Prize in physics in 1921.
• Time Magazine’s Person of the Century in 1999.
• One biographer said, “to the scientifically literate and the public at large, Einstein is synonymous with genius.”

Thomas Alva Edison

• One of the most prolific inventors in history with 1093 U.S. patents and more patents in the UK, France and Germany.
• Invented the phonograph, the motion-picture camera, a practical electric light bulb, and much more.
• Once said something along the lines of, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”
• Has a town in New Jersey named after him.

Stephen Hawking

• Responsible for various theories in theoretical physics, many of which build on Einstein’s own work.
• Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and many other awards.
• Honorary fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts
• Best-selling author of several books.
• Most of his work has been done while confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak.
• The sheer volume of words I don’t understand on his Wikipedia page serves as pretty convincing evidence to me of his genius.

Noam Chomsky

• Considered one of the fathers of modern linguistics.
• From 1980-1992 he was the most cited living scholar in the world and 8th most cited overall.
• Taught at MIT for over 50 years.
• Has made major contributions to the fields of linguistics, psychology, politics, computer science and philosophy
• One of the Unabomber’s planned targets because of his political views.
• Has honorary degrees from more than 30 schools.

My New Obsession

Some of you might know this about me: I love trivia and I love memorizing things.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Ken Jennings, but I certainly enjoy the feeling of just knowing things.  When I was about eleven years old and had dreams of becoming a world famous chemist I came across the periodic table of the elements in my parents set of encyclopedia that I just happened to be browsing through and I thought to myself, “How great would it be if I could memorize all these elements?”  So by age twelve I could name all the elements by symbol.  And speaking of trivia, the only magazine that I’ve ever read every article, cover to cover, is Mental Floss, a magazine of pure trivia.  It’s such a fascinating publication.  I would recommend it to everyone.

Now that you know this about me, I’m ready for you to know what I’m obsessed with these days: Sporcle.com.  I think I might have mentioned it briefly earlier in my blog.  But if you haven’t heard of this website please go ahead and check it out.  It’s a website full of little quizzes.  Everything from naming all the presidents of the US to naming VH1′s top 100 songs of the 90s.  Even if you’re not a trivia buff and even if you don’t fancy yourself very good at remembering things it’s a great pastime and a great way to hone your geography or history skills and so much more.  Maren and I will often do quizzes together.  We compete on some and cooperate on others.  Since I’ve started my Sporcle habit I can now name all the US states and their capitals, I can name all the countries of the world (with a blank map in front of me) and all the flags of Europe.

So go check it out.  In addition to the ones I’ve already linked to above here are some quizzes that you might enjoy:

Car Logos. 90s Video Games. Guess The Language.   The “A” Game. Time’s Top 100 Novels.

The Mprize

In my latest issue of TIME magazine they have a special series of articles entitled, “10 Ideas That Are Changing The World.”  One of those articles coins the term “amortality” referring to the increased desire and ability to prolong life and the appearance of life (ie. plastic surgery).  Overall, the article didn’t interest me that much but it made mention of something that caught my interest.  The Methuselah Foundation and the Mprize.

 

The Methuselah Foundation is dedicated to “extending healthy human life” and one way it stimulates research in that area is through the Mprize (aka the Methuselah Mouse Prize).  The Mprize is given to the researcher who can produce the oldest-ever laboratory mouse.  Read all about the Mprize here.  I found the concept utterly fascinating.  The latest winner was Andrzej Bartke, who produced a mouse that lived to 1819 days.

The research is fascinating and the possibility of extending human life is tantalizing, but I would like to be able ask that mouse how pleasant his extra time was.  How much longer do we really want to live?  Hmmm… interesting philosophical ramifications behind that question.  

If you could live indefinitely, would you?  I’m sure it would depend on whether everyone else could also live indefinitely with you or not.  And on what you’d be able to do with yourself.  And would we be willing to make the sacrifices connected with the increase in population due to decreased mortality rate?  Interesting questions, but I’m sure it’ll become a moot point before we attain the technology to make it an issue.