Author Archives: legallysociable

The end of the Lou Pinella era

Posted on by

As I listened to the Chicago Cubs pregame on WGN Radio, I heard the news that Lou Pinella is resigning after Sunday’s game against the Braves. A few of my thoughts about the Lou Pinella era:

1. This resignation spells the true end of this four year era of Cubs baseball. As the players leave (Lee, Theriot, Lilly) and now the manager is gone, the bottom has fallen out on the Cubs. The four year run included two playoff trips from two very good teams that couldn’t break through the first round.

2. Lou as a person has been fascinating to watch. He clearly has a wealth of baseball knowledge yet at the same time can often seem like another grumpy old man. He has one of the slowest walks to the mound. He can be grumpy with post-game questions. I have seen some pictures and I have read his statistics at Baseball-Reference.com but I still have a hard time believing he was a serviceable player for some good late 1970s New York Yankees teams.

3. I don’t know what to make of Pinella’s managerial skills. While he will certainly be remembered for two playoff losses (including yanking Carlos Zambrano early in Game 1 in 2007) and then asking for more left-handed hitting before 2009 (which seemed to backfire), I think managers are like the President of the United States: they get lots of credits when things are good, blamed for everything when things are bad. Ultimately, the players are the ones who make and break the team.

4. Hearing Ron Santo’s pregame interview with Pinella, I was reminded why some people don’t like listening to Santo and why some Cubs fans love him. Santo sounded depressed for much of the interview and talked about how much he enjoyed their friendship. Ron really does bleed Cubby blue.

5. I hope the Cubs go with a relative newcomer when selecting a new manager – the last two big names of Dusty Baker and Lou Pinella haven’t worked out. It looks like next year will be a rebuilding year and it would be interesting to see a younger guy (like a Ryne Sandberg?) mold a new Cubs team.

UPDATE 9:28 PM 8/22/10 – Listening to Pinella’s post-game press conference was touching as Pinella got choked up about his time in Chicago. He really did seem to enjoy his time with the Cubs – even if he may only be remembered for being another Cubs manager who couldn’t win a World Series.

Planning animal-shaped communities

Posted on by

The government of Southern Sudan has plans to create new cities in the shape of animals. The picture at the top of the news story of a city planned in the shape of a rhino is fascinating.

But there are some problems with this plan:

The $10.1 billion multi-decade project to re-create Southern Sudan’s 10 state capitals into elaborately-shaped dream towns may sound Dubai-esque — only Southern Sudan is no Dubai.

Actually, it is one of the poorest places on earth.

The undeveloped region — which lacks any paved roads outside its three main cities — is part of Africa’s largest nation, Sudan, which is ruled by the Khartoum government South Sudanese fought against for most of the past half century in two long civil wars.

But Southern Sudan expects to achieve independence next year through a January secession referendum promised in a 2005 peace deal that granted the war-torn region self-rule until the vote.

Even without the unique city designs, the multi-billion dollar price tag alone was sure to turn heads. Southern Sudan’s total budget for 2010 is less than $2 billion, 98 percent of which comes from the oil revenues it hopes will fund its postwar re-construction.

If Dubai can construct islands in the shape of palms, can a currently non-existent government build cities in the shape of giraffes? It sounds like there are a lot of hurdles to clear before these development plans become reality.

Why young Christians are not as concerned with gay marriage

Posted on by

There is data from several sources that suggests younger Christians are not as opposed to gay marriage as older Christians. Relevant suggests some reasons why this is the case.

John Wilson responds to “Hipster Christianity”

Posted on by

The other day, I linked to a piece from the Wall Street Journal written by Brett McCracken, author of a new book titled Hipster Christianity.

John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture, responds to McCracken’s piece. Part of his critique:

To write a book about would-be hipsters, you have to be hip yourself, even as you are criticizing those who aspire to hipness. It’s a tricky balancing act. In his role as hipster-scold, McCracken arches a brow…

Wilson suggests McCracken is creating shadowy figures when there aren’t any (“Evangelical Christian leadership”), doesn’t have figures to back up claims that such efforts are “increasing,” and reaches an untenable conclusion:

“We want real”: The combination of pretension and naïveté in this declaration is stunning, but it is par for the course, so to speak, in the McCrackenverse.

Would Wilson argue that such things are not going on in Evangelical churches? Is the issue the broad claims McCracken is making with limited data or that McCracken is critiquing attempts at being hip while still trying to remain hip?

The value of using multiple coders

Posted on by

A well-known psychologist from Harvard is in trouble for allegedly reporting false data from laboratory studies. How the allegations surfaced is illustrative of why researchers should have more than just one person looking at data. As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, here is what happened after the psychologist and a graduate student coded an experiment involving rhesus monkeys:

According to the document that was provided to The Chronicle, the experiment in question was coded by Mr. Hauser and a research assistant in his laboratory. A second research assistant was asked by Mr. Hauser to analyze the results. When the second research assistant analyzed the first research assistant’s codes, he found that the monkeys didn’t seem to notice the change in pattern. In fact, they looked at the speaker more often when the pattern was the same. In other words, the experiment was a bust.

But Mr. Hauser’s coding showed something else entirely: He found that the monkeys did notice the change in pattern—and, according to his numbers, the results were statistically significant. If his coding was right, the experiment was a big success.

The second research assistant was bothered by the discrepancy. How could two researchers watching the same videotapes arrive at such different conclusions? He suggested to Mr. Hauser that a third researcher should code the results. In an e-mail message to Mr. Hauser, a copy of which was provided to The Chronicle, the research assistant who analyzed the numbers explained his concern. “I don’t feel comfortable analyzing results/publishing data with that kind of skew until we can verify that with a third coder,” he wrote.

A graduate student agreed with the research assistant and joined him in pressing Mr. Hauser to allow the results to be checked, the document given to The Chronicle indicates. But Mr. Hauser resisted, repeatedly arguing against having a third researcher code the videotapes and writing that they should simply go with the data as he had already coded it. After several back-and-forths, it became plain that the professor was annoyed.

These discrepancies in the data led to indications that something similar had happened in other experiments.

Having multiple coders is good for several reasons:

1. Helping to eliminate or catch problems such as these where someone might be tempted to falsify data.

2. To help interpret ambiguous situations.

3. To demonstrate to the broader research community that the results are more than just one person’s conclusions. (This should also be aided by the review process as other researchers look over the work.)

Quick Review: The Canon

Posted on by

When recently at the Field Museum in Chicago, I encountered several books in the bookstore. I tracked down one of them, a former bestseller, down at the library: The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier. A few quick thoughts about the book:

1. This book is an overview of the basic building blocks of science (there are the chapters in order): thinking scientifically, probabilities, scale (different sizes), physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, geology, and astronomy. Angier interviewed a number of scientists and she both quotes and draws upon their ideas. For someone looking for a quick understanding of these subjects, this is a decent find. From this book, one could delve into more specialized writings.

2. Angier is a science writer for the New York Times. While she tries to bring exuberance to the subject, her descriptions and adjectives are often over the top. This floweriness was almost enough to stop me from reading this book at a few points.

3. To me, the most rewarding chapters were the first three. As a social scientist, I could relate to all three of these and plan to bring some of these thoughts to my students. Thinking scientifically is quite different than the normal experience most of us have of building ideas and concepts on anecdotal data.

a. A couple of the ideas stuck out to me. The first is a reminder about scientific theories: while some think a theory means that it isn’t proven yet so it can be disregarded, scientists view theories differently. Theories are explanations that are constantly being built upon and tested but they often represent the best explanations scientists currently have. A theory is not a law.

b. The second was about random data. Angier tells the story of a professor who runs this activity: at the beginning of class, half the students are told to flip a coin 100 times and record the results. The other half of the students are told to make up the results for 100 imaginary coin flips. The professor leaves the room while the students do this. When she returns, she examines the different recordings and most of the time is able to identify which were the real and imaginary results. How? Students don’t quite understand random data; usually after two consecutive heads or tails, they think they have to have the opposite result. In real random data, there can be runs of 6 of 7 heads or tails in a row even as the results tend to average out in the end.

Overall, I liked the content of the book even as I was often irritated with its delivery. For a social scientist, this was a profitable read as it helped me understand subjects far afield.

Predicting working class job growth

Posted on by

Richard Florida (of The Rise of the Creative Class fame) writes at Atlantic.com about where working class jobs will increase in the future.

The largest metro areas are expected to have the greatest amount of blue-collar job growth. Why these places are expected to have this kind of growth is left unexplained.

Overall, Florida describes the situation:

The good news is that the U.S. will continue to create relatively high-paying working class jobs. These jobs will continue to provide good livelihoods for the workers fortunate enough to have them. The bad news is that their rate of growth will be sluggish and not nearly enough to provide the amount of good, family-supporting jobs required to undergird a middle class of lower-skilled workers.

Takeaway: there will be some good blue collar jobs in the future – but they will be limited.

Comparing male and female drivers

Posted on by

A recent study by New York City shed some light on gender differences in driving and traffic behavior:

80 percent of all crashes in a five-year period in which pedestrians were seriously injured or killed involved men who were driving. The imbalance is far too great to be explained away by the predominance of men among bus, livery, taxi and delivery drivers, said Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the city’s Transportation Department…

The males of the species are not only more dangerous as drivers, they are more likely to be hurt while walking, the city’s study found. More men than women were killed or injured as pedestrians in every age group except among those over 64 (perhaps because women live longer and were overrepresented). Boys 5 to 17 years old ranked first in the absolute number of pedestrian deaths and serious injuries, with 785, more than twice the number of girls in that age range, though elderly people were more vulnerable as a share of the population.

The article suggests that boys and girls learn these behaviors at a young age: boys think it is okay to be more aggressive around the street.

So where exactly do boys pick up this information? From their fathers/role models, the media, watching people drive or walk around? This socialization process would an intriguing one to delve into.

Varying statistics about DNA matches

Posted on by

NewScientist has a story about a criminal case that demonstrates how scientists can disagree about statistics regarding DNA analysis:

The DNA analyst who testified in Smith’s trial said the chances of the DNA coming from someone other than Jackson were 1 in 95,000. But both the prosecution and the analyst’s supervisor said the odds were more like 1 in 47. A later review of the evidence suggested that the chances of the second person’s DNA coming from someone other than Jackson were closer to 1 in 13, while a different statistical method said the chance of seeing this evidence if the DNA came from Jackson is only twice that of the chance of seeing it if it came from someone else…

[W]e show how, even when analysts agree that someone could be a match for a piece of DNA evidence, the statistical weight assigned to that match can vary enormously.

I recall reading something recently that suggested while the public thinks having DNA samples in a criminal case makes the case very clear, this is not necessarily the case. This article suggests is a lot more complicated and it depends on what lab and scientists are looking at the DNA samples.