Chance News 52

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Quotations

Correlation coefficients are now about as ubiquitous
and unsurprising as cockroaches in New York City.

In Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man,
Second edition, 1996, Page 286.

Forsooths

Growing up in China [Yale Assistant Professor of Genetics] Jun Lu might have pursued a career in math if his father, a mathematician, hadn't advised against it.

His reasoning: Math can be done with little more than a pen, paper and your mind. For 2,000 years, thinkers have had those tools to contemplate the questions of mathematics. "Any questions left behind by them are probably very hard to address," Lu said.

But biology, his father said, capitalized on advances in technology. His son could have the chance to explore a new frontier.

Arielle Levin Becker, "Weeding Out Cancer"
The Hartford Courant, July 12, 2009


Wednesdays, summer/spring seasons associated with increased suicide rates

“National Study Finds Highest Rate Of Suicide On Wednesdays”
by Arielle Levin Becker, The Hartford Courant, July 11, 2009

A University of California at Riverside study, published in Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, found, surprisingly, that suicides are more likely to occur on Wednesdays than on any other day of the week. The study’s results were based on the 131,636 suicides in U.S. death records for the period 2000-2004.

One chart [1] gives the percentages of all U.S. adult suicides by day of the week: Sunday 11.8%; Monday 14.3%; Tuesday 12.7%; Wednesday 24.6%; Thursday 11.1%; Friday 11.2%; Saturday 14.4%.

A social worker suggested that workplace stress might mount up through the week, with weekend relief seeming too far away by Wednesday. A reader [2] blogged that a person in crisis might be upset to find that his/her therapist has Wednesday off, while he/she has to work. One of the researchers advised mental health workers to schedule more patient appointments on Wednesdays.

The researchers also found that summer and spring were more common seasons for suicide than fall or winter, another counterintuitive finding. A second chart [3] gives the percentages of all U.S. adult suicides by season: Autumn 23.8%; Winter 24.4%; Spring 25.8%; Summer 26%.

A third chart [4] shows the trend in the number of U.S. adult suicides (eyeballed approximations): 24,200 in Year 2000; 25,100 in Year 2001; 29,000 in Year 2002; 26,100 in Year 2003; 26,900 in Year 2004.

A Hartford Courant analysis of the 966 reported adult suicides in Connecticut for the period 2001-2004 showed less variation in rates among the days of the week. “Most suicides – 16.7 percent — occurred on Tuesday, while 16.4 percent occurred on Monday and 14.5 percent on Wednesday. Thursday had the lowest occurrence, 12.1 percent.”

However, Connecticut records agreed with the national study with respect to summer and spring being the more common seasons for suicides. A Connecticut mental health worker hypothesized that:

“People think it’s normal to be depressed in the winter. “Spring is the time of year when people are supposed to be rejuvenated and outside and enjoying themselves, and if you’re not, it makes you feel comparatively worse than everybody else, which may make you feel more hopeless,” he said.

Discussion

1. With respect to the national study, do you think that the differences among days of the week and/or among seasons of the year were statistically significant?

2. Were you surprised that the Connecticut analysis showed less variation than the national study, in rates among the days of the week, from a statistical point of view?

Two new anti-aging studies

“Two Mammals' Longevity Boosted”
by Keith J. Winstein, The Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2009

In the journal Nature, anti-aging researchers from Maine, Michigan, and Texas have released a report of a study that found that a chemical (Wyeth’s rapamycin) used to treat organ transplant patients increased the life span of mice by 9% to 14%. Because the chemical suppresses the immune system, humans are advised against taking the drug to prolong their lives.

Mice given rapamycin -- starting when they were 600 days old, or roughly the equivalent of 60 human years -- lived longer on average than mice who didn't get the drug. Their "maximal life span" -- meaning the age at which 10% of the mice were still alive -- increased to 1,245 days for females, compared with 1,094 days for those not fed the drug, or a 14% increase. For males, the maximal life span was 1,179 days, a 9% increase over the 1,078 days for those not fed the drug.

In an upcoming issue of Science magazine, University of Wisconsin scientists will publish results of a study that shows that reducing the calorie intake of monkeys extends their lives “substantially.”

The Wisconsin study, which began in 1989 with 30 monkeys and added 46 more in 1994, is an effort to test calorie restriction in an animal genetically closer to humans. Researchers have known since the 1930s that eating 30% fewer calories than normal lengthens the life span of mice. Half the monkeys were given a normal diet, and half had their food intake cut back by 30% at roughly age 10.

A British gerontologist commented, "Aging is, unequivocally, the major cause of death in the industrialized world and a perfectly legitimate target of medical intervention."

A blogger [5] provided the following hypothetical dialogue.
Joe: Do you want to live to 100?
Pete: Don't ask me; ask the guy who's 99.

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