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Hot Hand? Well, Maybe a Lukewarm Hand….

by XNYMelisajdeots Posted on February 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Decades ago, the “hot hand” theory of sports was debunked. Massive statistical analysis showed that players in most sports went on streaks about as often as you’d expect by random chance, and when they were on a streak, their odds of making the next shot/goal/hit/etc. were no higher than at any other time. You might feel hot when you sink three buckets in a row, but that’s just the endorphin rush of doing well. It doesn’t mean you’ll make your next basket.

But now, there are all-new mountains of data to crunch, and two teams of researchers have concluded that hot hands really do exist in at least two sports:

Baseball: Brett Green, at the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley, and Jeffrey Zwiebel, at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business…controlled for variables, like the abilities of the batter and the pitcher, the stadium in which the at-bats took place, and even matchups like lefty versus lefty. And their findings, laid out in a working paper, show that a baseball player on a hot streak is batting 15 to 20 points higher than a teammate who is cold.

Basketball: Ezekowitz and his coauthors…with the help of cameras that NBA teams had installed at 15 arenas…could see that players with recent success in shooting were more likely to be taking shots from further away, facing tighter defenses, and throwing up more difficult shots….So the researchers controlled for these variables—and found what players and fans have long believed: The hot hand does exist. At least a little. According to the new research, players enjoying the hot hand are 1.2 to 2.4 percentage points more likely to make the next shot.

Hmmm. So that’s about 1-2 percentage points in both cases. And even that tiny effect is visible only after introducing a whole bunch of statistical controls that strike me as being a wee bit subjective. I suspect that if you varied your assessment of how tight the defense was or how difficult the shot was, the effect might go away entirely.

But even if it’s all legit, I have to say that 1-2 percentage points is pretty damn close to zero. And frankly, that’s still surprising. The truth is that it’s always seemed pretty logical to me that players would have hot hands now and again. But they don’t. At best, they occasionally have lukewarm hands. All the rest is just chance.

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Hot Hand? Well, Maybe a Lukewarm Hand….

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Are Fitbit, Nike, and Garmin Planning to Sell Your Personal Fitness Data?

by bestpage Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Lately, fitness-minded Americans have started wearing sporty wrist-band devices that track tons of data: Weight, mile splits, steps taken per day, sleep quality, sexual activity, calories burned—sometimes, even GPS location. People use this data to keep track of their health, and are able send the information to various websites and apps. But this sensitive, personal data could end up in the hands of corporations looking to target these users with advertising, get credit ratings, or determine insurance rates. In other words, that device could start spying on you—and the Federal Trade Commission is worried.

“Health data from a woman’s connected device, may be collected and then sold to data brokers and other companies she does not know exist,” Jessica Rich, director of the Bureau for Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, said in a speech on Tuesday for Data Privacy Day. “These companies could use her information to market other products and services to her; make decisions about her eligibility for credit, employment, or insurance; and share with yet other companies. And many of these companies may not maintain reasonable safeguards to protect the data they maintain about her.”

Several major US-based fitness device companies contacted by Mother Jones—Fitbit, Garmin, and Nike—say they don’t sell personally identifiable information collected from fitness devices. But privacy advocates warn that the policies of these firms could allow them to sell data, if they ever choose to do so.

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Are Fitbit, Nike, and Garmin Planning to Sell Your Personal Fitness Data?

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No, the Decline of Cinderella Marriages Probably Hasn’t Played a Big Role in Rising Income Inequality

by arielbangkok Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen points me to a paper today about the rise in assortative mating. Basically, this means that we increasingly marry people who are similar to ourselves. High school grads tend to marry other high school grads, and college grads tend to marry other college grads. The authors of the paper conclude that this has implications for rising income inequality:

If matching in 2005 between husbands and wives had been random, instead of the pattern observed in the data, then the Gini coefficient would have fallen from the observed 0.43 to 0.34, so that income inequality would be smaller. Thus, assortative mating is important for income inequality. The high level of married female labor-force participation in 2005 is important for this result.

The table on the right is a standardized contingency table that compares 1960 to 2005. The diagonal numbers show the percentage of each educational class who are married to others of the same educational class, and in every case the numbers are higher in 2005. This does indeed suggest that assortative mating has contributed to increasing income inequality. However, I’d offer a few caveats:

Comparing observed GINI with a hypothetical world in which marriage patterns are completely random is a bit misleading. Marriage patterns weren’t random in 1960 either, and the past popularity of “Cinderella marriages” is more myth than reality. In fact, if you look at the red diagonals, you’ll notice that assortative mating has actually increased only modestly since 1960.
So why bother with a comparison to a random counterfactual? That’s a little complicated, but the authors mainly use it to figure out why 1960 is so different from 2005. As it turns out, they conclude that rising income inequality isn’t really due to a rise in assortative mating per se. It’s mostly due to the simple fact that more women work outside the home today. After all, who a man marries doesn’t affect his household income much if his wife doesn’t have an outside job. But when women with college degrees all start working, it causes a big increase in upper class household incomes regardless of whether assortative mating has increased.
This can get to sound like a broken record, but whenever you think about rising income inequality, you always need to keep in mind that over the past three decades it’s mostly been a phenomenon of the top one percent. It’s unlikely that either assortative mating or the rise of working women has had a huge impact at those income levels, and therefore it probably hasn’t had a huge impact on increasing income inequality either. (However, that’s an empirical question. I might be wrong about it.)

This is interesting data, which is why I’m presenting it here. And it almost certainly has an impact on changes of income distribution between, say, the top fifth and the middle fifth. But the real drivers of rising income inequality, which have driven up the incomes of the top one percent so stratospherically, almost certainly lie elsewhere.

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No, the Decline of Cinderella Marriages Probably Hasn’t Played a Big Role in Rising Income Inequality

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Chart of the Day: Obamacare Enrollment Up Sharply on Federal Exchange

by JeroldNRPB Posted on December 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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The latest HHS report on Obamacare is out, and by interpolating the data on page 3 we can figure out how many people who have successfully selected a health care plan via the federal website since it opened in October. Here are the approximate numbers for signups per week:

Not bad. There was a big jump at the end of November, and continued growth in the Thanksgiving/Black Friday week after that. That said, these numbers still need to grow substantially. At this point in the game, the enrollment rate needs to start pushing 200,000 per week or so on the federal exchange in order to meet the overall enrollment goals set for March of next year. There’s still lots of work ahead.

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Chart of the Day: Obamacare Enrollment Up Sharply on Federal Exchange

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Chicken vs. Turkey, Round 2

by kx93z6g Posted on November 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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In the great chicken vs. turkey debate, a friend writes in with further data to support turkey lovers:

Consider how we deal with other fowl.

Duck certainly has a lot more flavor than either chicken or turkey, but it is far less available, more perishable (hence sold frozen) and substantially more expensive (4-8x more expensive than chicken). Similarly, other domesticated or farmed fowl is both more expensive and less available, regardless of taste. An average goose is roughly the size of a medium turkey, but offers less meat and more bone per pound of live weight. But the ultimate determining factor is that it is simply more expensive.

Game birds, such as guinea fowl, partridge, pheasant, quail, squab, cornish hens and a variety of ducks (as opposed to the standard Muscovite) are harder to raise, are inefficient meat sources and are supremely more expensive than both chicken and turkey, which is why we tend to save them for holidays and other special meals, if we eat them at all. No one in his right mind would argue that they are flavorless, and few would worry about their relative taste value compared to chicken, despite frequent personal dislikes of the particular flavors.

In other words, chicken isn’t objectively tastier, it’s just cheaper and easier to farm, in addition to being more convenient for consumers. So ignore the turkey haters and enjoy your leftovers today.

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Chicken vs. Turkey, Round 2

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America is the Stingiest Rich Country in the World

by JosephFinsch Posted on November 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Over at the Economist, Steven Mazie directs me to a recent New Yorker piece on income inequality by John Cassidy. Its most revealing chart, Mazie says, is one that compares raw income inequality in various rich countries (as calculated by GINI scores) to income inequality after taxes and government transfers. In other words, it helps us see which countries do the most to fight the relentless rise in income inequality over the past three decades.

But I wanted to see that more directly, so I re-charted the data. All I did was calculate how much taxes and transfers reduced inequality in every country that had high inequality to begin with. Unsurprisingly, whether you use raw number or percentages, the United States is #1:

The United States is one of the richest countries in the world, with a top 1 percent that’s seen its income triple or more in the past three decades. And yet, we also do the least to fight the rising tide of income inequality. Government programs in America reduce the level of inequality by only 26 percent. Nobody else is so stingy.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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America is the Stingiest Rich Country in the World

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Just 90 Companies Caused Two-Thirds of Man-Made Global Warming Emissions

by Charlie Smith Posted on November 20, 2013

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the Guardian website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions generated since the dawning of the industrial age, new research suggests.

The companies range from investor-owned firms—household names such as Chevron, Exxon, and BP—to state-owned and government-run firms.

The analysis, which was welcomed by the former Vice President Al Gore as a “crucial step forward” found that the vast majority of the firms were in the business of producing oil, gas, or coal, found the analysis, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Climactic Change.

“There are thousands of oil, gas, and coal producers in the world,” climate researcher and author Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in Colorado said. “But the decision makers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two.”

Click here to explore the Guardian‘s interactive roster of the companies behind climate change. via The Guardian

Half of the estimated emissions were produced just in the past 25 years—well past the date when governments and corporations became aware that rising greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal and oil were causing dangerous climate change.

Many of the same companies are also sitting on substantial reserves of fossil fuel, which—if they are burned—put the world at even greater risk of dangerous climate change.

Climate change experts said the data set was the most ambitious effort so far to hold individual carbon producers, rather than governments, to account.

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Just 90 Companies Caused Two-Thirds of Man-Made Global Warming Emissions

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The Quality of American Teachers Seems to be Getting Better

by Bart Jameson Posted on November 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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In the current issue of Education Next, Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch report that the quality of new teachers has improved over the past decade:

We find that more academically competent individuals are being drawn into the teaching profession….driven mainly by the proportion of teachers with SAT scores that fall in the top quartile of the distribution. This finding of increasing academic competence for newer entrants to the teacher labor market also shows up when we use undergraduate GPA as our indicator of academic competency, though research by Cory Koedel indicates that inconsistent grading standards across academic majors may render this measure less meaningful.

G&W’s research suggests that schools are drawing fewer teachers from the bottom quartile of SAT scores and more teachers from the top quartile. You can see this in the thick red line in the chart on the right (taken from the original paper), which shows the number of teachers from the class of 2008 with different SAT scores: compared to 1993 and 2000, there are fewer from the lower ranks, about the same number from the middle ranks, and more from the higher ranks. Megan McArdle suggests this is mainly due to the Great Recession:

As insecurity in the private-sector labor market increases, the value of public-sector job protections effectively increases, meaning that candidates will be willing to accept lower pay in exchange for the guarantee that it will be nearly impossible to fire them….It’s also possible that a lot of college students suddenly and for no apparent reason decided they wanted to be teachers around the same time that the job market became massively more insecure. But I’m betting it’s no coincidence. Bad news for the graduating seniors, but good news for the nation’s schools.

This is reasonable sounding. However, the most recent data is for teachers hired in 2008, which predates the big spike in unemployment starting in 2009. So I’m not quite convinced. I’d like to see data through 2013 to confirm what’s going on. Given the steep rise in private-sector unemployment and the preciptous decline in private-sector job security over the past five years, we should expect to see schools becoming even more selective about who they’re willing to hire. If the recession story is true, the data should show at least another 5 percentile point increase in the SAT scores of new teachers.

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The Quality of American Teachers Seems to be Getting Better

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Maps: The Mysterious Link Between Antibiotics and Obesity

by h0di80ju Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Lately, I’ve been fascinated by a study on antibiotic prescription rates across the United States that was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers found a surprisingly wide variation among the states, and the rates—expressed in terms of prescriptions per 1,000 people—seemed to follow a geographical pattern: The Southeast had the highest rates, while the West’s were lower. West Virginia had the most prescriptions, and Alaska had the fewest. The rest of the country fell somewhere in between. Here’s a map of the findings:

As I thought more about the map, I wondered whether the prescription rates followed any demographic patterns. Lauri Hicks, a lead author of the study and a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me that her team had initially expected to find certain correlations—for example, higher prescription rates in states with large elderly populations. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. Take Florida, which has a sizeable elderly population, but only an average antibiotic prescription rate.

Yet Hicks’ team did find one very strong correlation: The states with higher rates of antibiotic use also tended to have higher obesity rates. Take a look at this map of obesity rates by state and see how it reflects the antibiotics map above:

When we mashed up the data behind these maps, we confirmed the strong correlation between obesity and antibiotic prescription rates (we got an r of 0.74, for the statistically inclined). We also found a correlation between the states’ median household incomes and antibiotic prescription rates: States with below-average median incomes tend to have higher antibiotic prescription rates. This makes sense, considering that high obesity rates correlate with low income levels. (You can see the data sets for antibiotic prescription rate, obesity, and median household income level here.)

Hicks and her team can’t yet explain the connection between obesity and high rates of antibiotic prescription. “There might be reasons that more obese people need antibiotics,” she says. “But it also could be that antibiotic use is leading to obesity.”

Indeed, a growing body of evidence suggests that antibiotics might be linked to weight gain. A 2012 New York University study found that antibiotic use in the first six months of life was linked with obesity later on. Another 2012 NYU study found that mice given antibiotics gained more weight than their drug-free counterparts. As my colleague Tom Philpott has noted repeatedly, livestock operations routinely dose animals with low levels of antibiotics to promote growth.

No one knows exactly how antibiotics help animals (and possibly humans) pack on the pounds, but there are some theories. One is that antibiotics change the composition of the microbiome, the community of microorganisms in your body that scientists are just beginning to understand. (For a more in-depth look at the connection between bacteria and weight loss, read Moises Velasquez-Manoff’s piece on the topic.)

Hicks says that more research is needed on the potential connection between antibiotics and obesity. But there are other reasons for doctors to change the way they prescribe antibiotics. As I noted a few weeks back, a recent study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that doctors commonly prescribe antibiotics for symptoms such as sore throat and bronchitis—which don’t usually require the drugs. Considering that bacteria are already evolving to withstand many antibiotics, it’s probably time to figure out how to use them more prudently.

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Maps: The Mysterious Link Between Antibiotics and Obesity

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E.U. car efficiency info may be more ‘creative’ than accurate

by 2KeaheySchoeffler461 Posted on March 14, 2013

E.U. car efficiency info may be more ‘creative’ than accurate

By Susie Cagle

When it comes to legit auto fuel-economy data, a new report suggests there may be some sugar in the gas tank.

Activist group Transport & Environment says European car makers are consistently “optimizing” their cars’ performances on fuel efficiency and emissions tests, i.e. cheating. Overall, T&E estimates that European car manufacturers are falsely claiming their cars are 25 to 50 percent more efficient than they really are.

“It’s lots and lots of small tweaks,” T&E’s Greg Archer told the BBC. “And they all add up.”

The report accuses car-makers of all sorts of MacGyver-like fuel-efficiency tricks used just during testing: taping up tiny cracks around doors and windows to reduce air resistance; lightening their cars; using special lubricants; slicking up test tracks; and stopping the car’s battery from recharging. “Creative, but legal,” according to The Guardian.

Transport & EnvironmentClick to embiggen.

All that alleged trickery adds up to car drivers thinking they’re getting a more efficient, cheaper vehicle, and officials thinking they’re getting lower emissions and a cleaner environment. From The Guardian:

Greg Archer … says: “This new evidence shows that carmakers in Europe are cheating their own customers by manipulating official tests, which leads to thousands of euros of additional fuel costs for drivers.

“They are also cheating legislators, as EU laws intended to reduce CO2 emissions from cars and vans are only being met in the laboratory, not on the road. The only way to rebuild this trust is by closing loopholes in the current test procedures, to ensure that cheaters never prosper.” …

Raw mileage and emission data is not made public by European carmakers, who only advertise combined figures of laboratory and other tests done on new cars. T&E says it obtained the data on the condition it did not identify the models or manufacturers. Data in the report for the “real world” driving by the public was obtained from online fuel mileage calculators and databases, including Spritmonitor.de, which allows drivers to compare their experiences with million of others.

T&E is calling for new rules that would close testing loopholes. If car companies really have advanced MacGyver skills, now would be a good time to practice. Maybe not for this kind of test drive, though.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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E.U. car efficiency info may be more ‘creative’ than accurate

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