As you’ve no doubt heard by now, there’s been a new recommendation issues
which proposes changing the breast-cancer screening protocol for women under
50, by eliminating mammograms for women who don’t have significant risk
factos. While Orac has done a terrific job of covering this here and
here, I wanted to throw
in a couple of notes and a personal perspective.
I’ve been writing this blog for a long time – nearly four years. You’d think that
after all of the bad math I’ve written about, I must have reached the point where
I wouldn’t be surprised at the sheer innumeracy of most people – even most supposedly
educated people. But alas for me, I’m a hopeless idealist. I just never quite
manage to absorb how clueless the average person is.
Today in the New York Times, there’s an editorial which talks about
the difficulties faced by the children of immigrants. In the course of
their argument, they describe what they claim is the difference between
the academic performance of native-born versus immigrant children:
Whereas native-born children’s language skills follow a bell
curve, immigrants’ children were crowded in the lower ranks: More than
three-quarters of the sample scored below the 85th percentile in English
proficiency.
Scoring in the 85th percentile on a test means that you did better on that
test than 85 percent of the people who took it. So for the population as a
whole, 85% of the people who took it scored below the 85th percentile –
by definition. So, if the immigrant population were perfectly matched
with the population as a whole, then you’d expect more than 3/4s the
score below the 85th percentile.
As they reported it, the most reasonable conclusion would be that on the
whole, immigrant children do better than native-born children! The
population of test takers consists of native-born children and immigrant
children. (There’s no third option – if you’re going to school here, either
you were born here, or you weren’t.) If 3/4s of immigrant children are scoring
85th percentile or below, then that means that more than 85% of
the non-immigrant children are scoring below 85th percentile.
I have no idea where they’re getting their data. Nor do I have any idea of
what they thought they were saying. But what they actually said is a
mind-boggling stupid thing, and I can’t imagine how anyone who had the most
cursory understanding of what it actually meant would miss the fact that
the statistic doesn’t in any way, shape, or form support the statement it’s
attached to.
The people who write the editorials for the New York Times don’t even
know what percentiles mean. It’s appalling. It’s worse that appalling – it’s
an absolute disgrace.
(This is a revised repost of an earlier part of my Haskell tutorial.)
Haskell is a strongly typed language. In fact, the type system in Haskell
is both stricter and more expressive than any type system I’ve seen for any
non-functional language. The moment we get beyond writing trivial
integer-based functions, the type system inevitably becomes visible, so we
need to take the time now to talk about it a little bit, in order to
understand how it works.
For those who have slightly better memory of recent events than an average
gerbil, you’ll surely remember that not too long ago, the Intelligent Design
folks, with the help of Ben Stein, put together a whole movie about how
evilutionists are all a bunch of evil fascists, out to silence the poor,
hard-working IDers.
You’ll also remember that Bill Dembski has been talking up the fact that
he’s got two peer reviewed papers allegedly about intelligent design. So,
you’d think that after complaining about being locked out of the debate,
now that he has some actual papers to talk about, he’d be eager to, well,
talk about them!
Yeah, right. As it turns out, debate is the last thing that Bill
wants. When someone took a good look at one of his papers, and
posted a critique, Bill’s response was the threaten to sue them for
copyright violation. Knowing how utterly trustworthy the Disco gang
is, I’ve got a screen-capture of the post with the threat below the fold, in
case they try to change history by deleting it.
(This is a heavily edited repost of the first article in my original
Haskell tutorial.)
(I’ve attempted o write this as a literate haskell program. What that
means is that if you just cut-and-paste the text of this post from your
browser into a file whose name ends with “.lhs”, you should be able to run it
through a Haskell compiler: only lines that start with “>” are treated as
code. The nice thing about this is that this blog post is itself a
compilable, loadable Haskell source file – so I’ve compiled and tested
all of the code in here in exactly this context.)
A couple of people pointed out that in my wednesday post about Go, I completely left out the concurrency stuff! That’s what I get for rushing the post – I managed to leave out one of the most interesting subjects! Go provides very strong support for communicating processes.
I haven’t done a lot of hacking with the concurrency stuff yet – so my impressions of it are still very preliminary. But my early impressions are very good.
I’ve been being peppered with questions about Go, the new programming language just released as open-source by Google. Yes, I know about it. And yes, I’ve used it. And yes, I’ve got some strong opinions about it.
Go is an interesting language. I think that there are many fantastic things about it. I also think that there are some really dreadful things about it.
A warning before I go on: this post is definitely a bit of a rush job. I wanted to get something out before my mailbox explodes :-). I’ll probably try to do a couple of more polished posts about Go later. But this should give you a first taste.
Way back, about three years ago, I started writing a Haskell tutorial as a series of posts on this blog. After getting to monads, I moved on to other things. But based on some recent philosophizing, I think I’m going to come back to it. I’ll start by explaining why, and then over the next few days, I’ll re-run revised versions of old tutorial posts, and then start new material dealing with the more advanced topics that I didn’t get to before.
To start with, why am I coming back to Haskell? What changed since the last time I wrote about it?
An anonymous tipster sent me a note to let me know that on one of the Disco
Institute’s sites, my old pal David Berlinski has been arguing that all sorts of
famous mathematicians were really anti-evolution.
I’ve written
about Berlinski before. In my opinion, he’s one of the most pointlessly
arrogant pompous jackasses I’ve ever been unfortunate enough to deal with. He
practically redefines the phrase “full of himself”.
This latest spewing of him is quite typical. It is mostly content free –
it consists of a whole lot of name-dropping, giving Berlinski a chance to talk
about all of the wonderfully brilliant people he’s close personal
friends with. And, quite naturally, his close personal friends have told
him all sorts of things about what other famous mathematicians
really thought about evolution.