More good charts on health care costs

As you know, I keep an eye on Kaiser Fung's blog "Junk Charts." I'm also interested in the rising costs of health care. Here's a link to Fung's blog post "Look What I Found: Two Amazing Charts" about . . . health care costs. Screenshot of one is below, but read the full post for Fung's quick reprise about what makes the charts good.

via Junk Charts

Recipe organization

Organizing recipes, especially the kind clipped out of newspapers and magazines over many years, can be a challenge. Here's how one (perhaps obsessive? what do you think? let me know in the comments) New York Times staffer managed it. In case you are not ready to program your own recipe database, in addition to the options the article lists, you might also check out Evernote - I like it because it syncs across platforms, letting you link to recipes at your desk but look up ingredients on your phone while you're grocery shopping. And for another approach, try Cookstr, which allows searches by ingredients and has a separate gluten-free index.

Photo via cookstr.com

Admitting cognitive mistakes

In case you missed it over the weekend, here is a link to the NY Times story about how Dr. Robert Spitzer, author of a 2001 study that supposedly showed that self-reports of change in sexual orientation after therapy were credible, has now changed his mind. More than that, in a letter to the editor of the journal that published the initial study, he says, "I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy." You can read the text of the letter here.

In its exploration of a scientist's decision to admit he'd made a mistake it's quite a moving story. It's also a nice illustration of substitution, one of the shortcuts in thinking Daniel Kahneman describes in his fascinating book "Thinking Fast and Slow." As Kahneman puts it, "If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly . . . [we] find a related question that is easier and will answer it." According to Spitzer's letter, he substituted an easier question (how do individuals undergoing reparative therapy describe changes in sexual orientation) for the hard one (can some version of reparative therapy enable individuals to change their sexual  orientation from homosexual to heterosexual).

Spitzer then compounded the study's flaws by persuading himself that the self-reports in the studies were credible. In Kahneman's terms, he "focuse[d] on existing evidence and ignore[d] absent evidence." We all make these kinds of mistakes, and Kahneman not only shows how, he offers some useful correctives. I highly recommend the book.

Twitterati and Facebook's trading price

Update, May 26: Check out this chart from Bloomberg News, via Derek Thompson of The Atlantic comparing Facebook's IPO performance to other IPOs.


Update, May 24: Here's an article on Business Insider claiming that the correct valuation for Facebook is $29/share. 

In case you were tempted to buy Facebook on Friday, the day of its IPO: be glad you didn't. Via Alexis Madrigal's blog at TheAtlantic.com, here's a look at predictions on Twitter for FB's closing price on its first day of trading.

Notice anything about the shape of the distribution? And remember where Facebook closed Friday? At just above $38, about where it started.

Two good stats articles from the NY Times

OK, I spend a fair amount of time on this blog making fun of the NY Times' statistical reporting. So today, two articles where the Times does a good job explaining, reporting, and illustrating statistics.

I thought the Times did a great job explaining the census data released this morning, which show that 50.4% of the US population younger than age 1 are minorities as of July 1, 2011. Interestingly, when I read the Census Bureau press release, I learned also that there are four majority-minority states (Hawaii, California, New Mexico, and Texas). The District of Columbia is also majority-minority. I did think that the Times' graphic illustrating Generational Gaps in Minority Births was confusing (screenshot below). A better title might have been "States with Largest Generational Gaps in White Population" because that is what I think the graphic shows.

Source: The New York Times
I would also quibble with the "tipping point" characterization of the births graphic illustrating the article.
Any thoughts about this? Let me know in the comments.

In a different kind of article, I thought the Times did a very thorough job of explaining new research on HDL, "good cholesterol" and why simply raising HDL may not prevent heart disease. The story is a good illustration of the point that I've made and reiterated about using statistics: correlation and causation are not the same thing. I've just begun reading Jim Manzi's book "Uncontrolled," (I'll be writing more about that later). The episode is a good illustration of the progress of scientific knowledge he describes in his third chapter.

Slime mold and highways

You may have read about the experimenters in the UK who have put slime mold into boxes shaped like various countries or cities, put food at the nodes, and then watched what happened. . . . the slime mold recreated the US highway system, or the Tokyo transit system, to name just a couple. n case you find it hard to believe from the still pictures, here's a video of slime mold recreating the Canadian highway system.

How to lose weight

FWIW, here's a link to the human weight simulator designed by a mathematician at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. I've been playing with it today. That's a screenshot of one of my scenarios: energy intake and expenditure for a 30 year old male weighing 200 pounds who wants to bring his weight down to 165 in 6 months, and keep it there. My assumption is that he'd increase his physical activity by 20%. Oh, and the starting point is a diet of 2,669 calories per day. That has to be brought down to 1904 calories for six months - but if my guy can keep up the increased physical activity permanently, he can increase  his consumption to 2456 calories a day.

Here's the Times interview, worth reading for its insights that, a) we're getting fatter because food is cheaper and b) weight change takes a long time.