Sandbox

Think the Answer Clear? Look Again

The New York Times Science
by Katie Hafner
August 30, 2010

The article starts with

(1) Win an Academy Award and you’re likely to live longer than had you been a runner-up.

(2) Interview for medical school on a rainy day, and your chances of being selected could fall..

Such are some of the surprising findings of Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, a physician-researcher and perhaps the leading debunker of preconceived notions in the medical world

It is hard to believe that there are still people who believe that Oscor „Winners life longeer

The assertion that Oscar winners live longer was based on an article by Donald Redelmeier, and Sheldon Singh: "Survival in Academy Award-winning actors and actresses". Annals of Internal medicine, 15 May, 2001, Vol. 134, No. 10, 955-962.

This was convincdenlty debunked in Chance News by Peter Doyle and his student Mark Mixer. Mark illustrated the key of their solution with the remark "breaking your hip increases your life" and he and Peter used a simulation to show that Oscer winners do not live longer.

Later this was also explained in more detail in another article to the Annals Of Internam Medicine

Do Oscar Winners Live Longer than Less Successful Peers? A Reanalysis of the Evidence Marie-Pierre Sylvestre, MSc; Ella Huszti, MSc; and James A. Hanley, PhD

Here we read "in an article published in Annals of Internal Medicine in 2001, Redelmeier and Singh reported that Academy Award–winning actors and actresses lived almost 4 years longer than their less successful peers. However, the statistical method used to derive this statistically significant difference gave winners an unfair advantage because it credited an Oscar winner's years of life before winning toward survival subsequent to winning. When the authors of the current article reanalyzed the data using methods that avoided this “immortal time” bias, the survival advantage was closer to 1 year and was not statistically significant.

As a condition of publication, we required the authors to make the data set available to interested researchers. Unfortunately, various complications prevented its prompt dissemination, and it has taken almost 5 years for someone to come forward with a reanalysis of the data. We are glad to publish Sylvestre and colleagues' reanalysis, partly because the article affords a chance to amend a widely publicized result, but more so because the analytic methods at issue apply to many health care research questions.

Is the United States a religious outlier

Religious outlier by Charles Blow, The New York Times, September 4, 2010.

The following image was published on the New York Times website.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/09/04/opinion/0904OPEDBLOW_600sub.jpg

The author, Charles Blow, is the visual OpEd columnist for the New York Times. His comments about the graph are rather brief.

With all of the consternation about religion in this country, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of just how anomalous our religiosity is in the world. A Gallup report issued on Tuesday underscored just how out of line we are. Gallup surveyed people in more than 100 countries in 2009 and found that religiosity was highly correlated to poverty. Richer countries in general are less religious. But that doesn’t hold true for the United States.

Questions

1. Does the United States look like an outlier to you? Are there any other outliers on this graph?

2. Why would there be a relationship between GDP and percentage of people who call themselves religious? Does a higher GDP cause lower religiosity? Does a lower religiosity cause a higher GDP? What sort of data could you collect that might help answer this question?

3. Do you like how Mr. Blow presented this data? What would you change, if anything, in this graph?

Submitted by Steve Simon

Additional Discussion

Notice how many dimensions are included in addition to the axes (percentage who say religion is important and G.D.P. per capita). The Gallup poll from which the graph came can be found here. Gallup says:

Results are based on telephone and face-to-face interviews conducted in 2009 with approximately 1,000 adults in each country. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error ranges from ±5.3 percentage points in Lithuania to ±2.6 percentage points in India. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

What might be "practical difficulties in conducting surveys"? "wording difficulties"? Ignoring population size, the regression line is downward sloping so that the higher the religiosity, the poorer the people monetarily. One is tempted to say that money "causes" people to be less religious. Reversing the axes, one is tempted to say that religion "causes" people to be poor. Defend and criticize these supposed causes.

Paul Alper