Perspectives on Inference

            The following paper was submitted by me as a final project for a Hampshire College cognitive science course. It has been edited into a second draft, and has also been edited and formatted significantly from its original version for pulication on this site.

            Numbers never lie is a phrase etched into our collective minds at a young age. Unfortunately this could not be further from the truth, especially in regards to statistics. In fact, one professor went as far to say that statistics is often classified as a subcategory of lying. (Moore 1985). As powerful tools of inference, statistical tests are able to give us insights from the data we collect about the world around us. However, these insights are generalizations and are open into interpretation; just as a translation can only ever be an interpretation, statistical results are also only interpretations of data and variables.

            Before this paper begins, it is important to start with a disclaimer. By no means am I stating that the statistical inferences we have today are the “begin and end all” of data assessment. If anything, they are just another perspective to assimilate data and makes the data easier to “work” with. For instance, the student’s T-test is much more conservative in terms of data analysis than the z test, although there is criterion for using each; even then this criterion can be vague. One textbook I have states that you should use the z-test when you have a sample size under 30 (Diez, 2012). But this is by no means a standardized rule, and can be up to the researcher’s discretion.  

            As a result of this amalgamation of what statistics can mean, different groups of people have different ways of perceiving their intended use and for the layperson, the media, students, and academics, statistics analysis have very different meanings. I would like to explore what these perceptions are. Before that, I would also like to present some ways in which statistics can be altered in malicious ways in order to suit the needs of a researcher. While not the only ways one can be dishonest in academic literate, doing so will demonstrate how easy such feats can be.            
            A very simply way one could change their statistically insignificant results to statistically significant results would be to change their one tailed test to a two tailed test. Doing so would lover the p-value (the probability of getting your result if the null hypothesis is true) of your result, possibly changing the outcome of your study. This is dishonest because you need to start off with a good reason as to why you are using a one or two-tailed test, One–tailed tests are for studies where we know that there will be no sort of adverse result, or studies where we are not interested in that result for a valid reason. For example, if we were testing the effects of meditation on blood pressure, we would not expect meditation to increase a subject’s blood pressure. As a result, your alpha level (where one’s p-value needs to fall in order to reject the null) is only on one side of a distribution and would be five percent. However, if we were to test some sort of new way for students to study, we would want to see if our independant variable increased or decreased subbects' scores Therefore we would 

(Different image used for online article, image from The heritiage foundation.)

split the 0.05 alpha level between the two tails of the distribution, so that it is now 0.025. If we were to run our "new study method" experiment, and at the end we get a p-value of 0.033; if we decided that we wanted to change our study to a one-tail experiment, this would be dishonest.
            One of a more obvious way to misinterpret statistics is to literally change the perspective of the visual representation of your data. In the following example, the samples closest to us would be considered larger, because they appear larger.

(Chartingcontrol.com)

A verbal example of the same phenomena would be how you expressed your figure. Would you like to say that you had a one percent return on sales, a fifteen percent return on investment, a ten-million dollar profit, or a sixty percent decrease from last year (Huff, 1954)? This topic alone could be covered in volumes (such as the one just cited), however I am trying to show that there are many different ways one can misrepresent, and misinterpret statistical information. One could write multiple papers as well on each of these subjects (performing logical fallacies, such as asking loaded questions, throwing out data, manipulating data, have biased samples, etcetera). I just wanted to show how one can present data in such a way that it would appear to be justified to an uninformed reader.

            There are many real world examples of studies that misrepresent their data or have had their data misrepresented by others, whether it was an accident or just a simple mistake. Duncan MacDougall’s attempt to find the weight of the human soul in the twentieth century is something that has entered Americans’ minds as a faucet of pop-science. While MacDougall reported that the human soul might have an average weight of about twenty-one grams. The truth is that his methodology was seriously lacking. MacDougall only had a sample size of six, two of which were discarded, with the rest there was trouble with determining the exact time of death. The weight of subjects often fluctuated after death, and contemporaries of the time provided a laundry list of physiologically plausable alternitive reasons as to why the subjects would have lost weight (Evans, 1947). Never the less, MacDougall continued his research and his results found no difference in weight with dying dogs.

            Still today, MacDougall’s research is something I have been told by others with conviction is a scientific fact. I personally have had a high-school history teacher relate this faux factoid to us. “A scientist once measured the human soul” she began. A few students backed her up, they too had heard about the doctor who was able to weigh the human soul and that because he was a scientist, there was some validity to the point being made. While this example is mostly harmless, being confined to everyday “did you know?” situations, misinterpreted studies can become toxic in the realm of news media.

Take the television show Ancient Aliens as another example many should be familiar with. While there is virtually no manipulation of statistics in the show, there is vast falsifying of information and misinterpretation of current archeologist evidence making such absurd claims such as the pyramids were carved out of lasers, and ancient peoples having the ability to build aircrafts (Heiser, 2012). An example more related to Neuroscience and statistics would the studies on average brain size often distributed by ignorant racists to support their beliefs that certain races of people are more intelligent. With the cited papers (an example would be: Witelson, 2005), these racists claim that other races have smaller brains, and then insinuate that this somehow means they must be less intelligent. Besides the fact that the results of the study provided; many others like it are almost always either insignificant or too vague to come to a solid conclusion, it is still a red herring to say that brain size is related to or correlated with intelligence. However, this is not an inference that an average layperson may make, and they could be led to believe that certain bigoted viewpoints have some sort of validity. Here is a different example from May of this year (2012 at the time of submission), CNBC reported a story with the headline “The Inflation of Life, The Cost of Raising a Child Has Soared" (CNBC). The article states that the cost of raising a child has raised 25%. What they don’t state is that this can be reflected in ten years of inflation (Olitsky, 2012).

Students are also prone to these mistakes. Any person who spends some time in a psychology class is eventually bound to hear something along the lines of “Therefore this study proved X”. I am not accusing these students of being malicious, and it would be unfair to hold them to the same standard that we should the media, specifically news outlets and a television channel that claims to have history as the primary subject matter. This may partially be due to the fact that statistics are rarely taught outside of higher education, and even then statistics may not be offered or required outside of certain programs. One may argue as to why a high-school student or English major would need to take statistics, but when statistics are used every day, it is important for a more general understanding of what they mean, and how they are used.

We can take a step further and examine who exactly are teaching these statistics course. The author of the book Sense and Nonsense of Statistical Inference, Chamont Wang, claims that many researchers do not even understand the statistical methods they are applying. He cites a paper that approximated half of the articles published in medical journals at the time used statistical methods incorrectly (Wang, 1993. Glantz, 1980). And at this level of academic research, a major problem is conflict of interest. Many professors are in a situation where they are pressured to publish significant research in order to keep their jobs. Deemed “publish or perish” this environment  is lethal for the integrity of science as it puts many academics in situations where they can easily manipulate their data in order to just keep their jobs, or to continue funding. A simple Google search of “scientific misconduct” will yield thousands of studies that have been deemed invalid or fraudulent in the last decade alone.

In closing, there are an exhausting number of ways to misrepresent data, and what has been presented here is a brief overview that does not even being to scratch the surface of misinterpreting statistics. I would have liked to expanded more and more on each one of these subjects provided, but I don’t know if I would have known when to stop. While this paper has been rather bleak, I would like to note that one of the beautiful things about science is that it is always open for discussion and criticism, and with due time we may hopfully be able to cast out instances of bad research as examples of what is naught to be done.

Works Cited

Ancient Aliens Debunked. Dir. Mike Heiser. N.p., 30 Sept. 2012. Web. 5 Dec. 2012.

Diez, David M., Christopher D. Barr, and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel. OpenIntro Statistics. Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2012. Print.

Evans, Bergen. The Natural History of Nonsense,. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1947. Print.

Glantz, S. A. (1980). Biostatistics: How to Detect, Correct and Prevent Errors in The Medical Literature. Vol. 61, 1-7.

Huff, Darrell, and Irving Geis. How to Lie with Statistics. New York: Norton, 1954. Print.

Introduction to SAS.  UCLA: Statistical Consulting Group. (accessed December 5, 2012).

Moore, David S. Statistics: Concepts and Controversies. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1985. Print.

Olitsky, Morris. "Misuse of Statistics a National Problem. Amstat News, 1 Aug. 2012. Web. 10 Dec. 2012. .

Pie3d. N.d. Photograph. Charting Control. Chartin Control. 2012. Web. 9 Dec. 2012.

"The Inflation of Life - Cost of Raising a Child Has Soared." Yahoo! Finance. CNBC, 7 May 2012. Web. 12 Dec. 2012.

Wang, Chamont. Sense and Nonsense of Statistical Inference: Controversy, Misuse, and Subtlety. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1993. Print.

Witelson, S. F. "Intelligence and Brain Size in 100 Postmortem Brains: Sex, Lateralization and Age Factors." Brain 129.2 (2005): 386-98. Print.

Accessing Scholarly Journals

Many of the articles on this website would not have been possible without access to sholarly, peer reviewed journals. Being a university student makes journal access 1,000 times easier, as there are hundreds of walls set in place for sholarly journal access due to large bloodsucking publishing companies whom universities and colleges pay millions of dollars to a year. Open access can't come soon enough! In a year I'll be out on my ass, and my fortunate opportunity will have passed on by. I have compiled a short list of alternative ways to access scholarly journals without necessarily being a college student. Please comment if this proves helpful to you in any way, or if you know of an alternative method.

/r/scholar - is probably the easiest way to access whatever you're looking for. It is a community of redditors who have journal access, and will find for you whatever journal article you need. If you currently have journal access, consider "paying in" to the system with the hope that others will do it for you in the future. If you are going to post there, read the guidelines on the right of the page.

Get in touch with your nearest university library - My host institution has gratuitous requirements for obtaining a library card. This will grant you journal access in the library, and perhaps e-journal access. It may sometimes be possible to get journal access just by using the library's Internet to access the databases. This probably works best with public institutions.

Get in touch with your former university or college - Nazareth College was willing to set me up with my old .edu email address even though I transferred four years ago. Many schools will not let you keep your student email after graduation. I found that I was also able to use my library account. Although this may have been a fluke, it's worth the phone call.

Directory of Open Access Journals - requires no membership or fees.

Your local library - has a list of databases you can access with a library card there, once again just a phone call away. They may get you copies of journal articles through inter-library loan if you cannot access the digital version of the article.

Google Scholar - Provides a search of scholarly literature, although is very limited in that it may only pull up certain pages of the journal article you are trying to read.

arxiv - is Cornell's open access archive of physics, mathematics, computer science, Biology, Finance and Statistics journal articles. 

Censorship on Campus

A recent post just bumped off of the front page was about Liberty University's restrictive policies. A couple of days ago an anonymous reader sent me a Slashdot article entitled How Free Speech Died on Campus. It links to The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's website, an organization founded by Alan Kors designed to help protect first amendment rights at universities and colleges. The website also contains a database of campuses, listing what 'speech code rating' they have been assigned (red, yellow, or green).

My host institution received a red light. Interesting, because one would believe that the flagship university of Massachusetts would receive a better "free speech" rating. However when looking at other schools, it became apparent that I could not find a single school with a GREEN light. The WSJ suggests that The Fire is really trying to stop is censorship though political correctness. Almost the radical opposite of what is going on at a school like Liberty, in some cases schools are so vague in their guidelines they actually legislate political correctness. (There is of course more to the issue of censorship than that.) At UMASS another problem is that 'conservitive' ideas do not receive as warm of a welcoming by students. I am ashamed that some of my fellow students consider being liberal as some sort of team, rather than a philosophy. Then again I wounder what an individual's definitions of the word 'liberal' would be?

When I spent time at Nazareth College, political correctness and diversity was an issue they really liked to push. Of course, this was really to hide the facade that about eighty percent of the student population was Caucasian. Issues that needed support from groups like FIRE never really arose because of how apolitical the students were; that is just AS scary as schools limiting your first amendment rights.

In an example of campus censorship not provided in the WSJ article, it is illegal in the state of California to criticise the state of Israel on college campuses, within certain vague contexts:

   WHEREAS, The United States Department of State, the United Kingdom'
s All-Party Parliamentary Group Against  Anti-semitism
  Antisemitism  , and the Organization for Security
and Co-operation in Europe have adopted or endorsed the European
Union Agency for Fundamental Rights' working definition of
anti-Semitism, which notes that in context certain language or
behavior demonizes and delegitimizes Israel or attacks Israel with
classic anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as denying the Jewish people
their right to self-determination, applying double standards by
requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other
democratic nation, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli police
to that of the Nazis, and accusing the Jewish people, or Israel, of
inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust...

During a time when this certain country is engaged in a military conflict, it is illegal to "delegitimize" them. Now what is the definition of THAT word in a legal context? Also, is it not a double standard to make certain inclusions for a certain group of people. Does this mean that it is legal to burn an American flag in protest, but not one from the state of Israel, because it is a delegitimising act? It is easy to see where The Fire is coming from, and what the implications of such campus and state policies could be.

On one hand there are religious schools, and on the other liberal ones that restrict their students on ideological grounds. The religious schools do tend to be more strict, Liberty students claim that their school monitors on-campus Internet usage. I suppose that the real question lies within the domain of political correctness. In that the system that was created to fight intolerance is itself intolerant because it restricts freedom of speech. Which is in strong contrast of a principle of free speech: " I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".

Coursea To Offer 'Drugs and the Brain' Course

On December first, a free (as always) Drugs and the Brain course will be starting on Coursea. It is being taught by Cal Tech professor, Dr. Henry Lester and lasts for five weeks. It might be a good way to keep your brain fresh over the long winter break. You won't receive any college credit upon completion, but you do receive a certificate stating that you satisfactorily completed the course.

Udacity To Offer $100 Degrees?

The website Udacity offers free computer science related courses. They offers certificates of completion for these courses as well. However I have avoided mentioning websites like this, as compared to established universities who have been doing the same thing because, well... Stanford and Princeton are a lot more prestigious than some website nobody has ever heard of.

However Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun plans to change that. In this interview he mentions that he is looking to pair up with testing centers so that students can receive a more valid form of certification in the classes they take. While the classes will remain free, the certification is what would cost money.

This situation offers an interesting question. Can websites receive certification? If University of Phoenix can be run as a for profit school, and Liberty University can give away science degrees with full accreditation while teaching creation science, why not Udacity? This could be a tremendous slap in the face to all the private and public colleges and universities in the US that have gradually been increasing tuition every year. This can't happen soon enough.

Free College Lectures and Courses

Do you see my Sallie Mae balance on the right side of the page? Fuck college, take free courses online, and learn a tangible skill. Stanford and MIT both are offering online material for free. MIT, like UC Berkley, has over one-thousand Youtube video lectures online. I am hoping maybe I can take a calculus class, before I have to take one at my host university.

Stanford is offering free online courses which start in January. Some of the courses include Computer Science, Game Theory (the two I signed up for), Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and others.

This is amazing! As the bachelors degree continues to be the most over markets product in the United States, I hope more colleges follow suit.

Meaning and Cognition Readings

Yesterday I posted about one of the reading for my Meaning and Cognition class. Instead of a textbook, we have selections from various books in which we must read. These readings were made publicly available, so if you are interested in reading them yourself, you can find them here.

Free College Courses

Frank Zappa

One of the many things a college freshmen probably notices after their first semester is that they are not paying for what they are learning in class, but their degree. In fact I would argue that if one can get away from college with a vocational skill, then they are much better off than any of their fellow students.

Do to this bizarre set of circumstances; college classes are free, unless you want the credits. Thanks American academic system! Honestly, does this not make a college degree virtually worthless? I will give an awkward back massage to anyone who can persuade me otherwise. Many courses are mostly homework anyways, where you go home, read a few chapters, and then your professor briefly covers it all again in the next class. Like Frank Zappa says; if you want an education, go to the library.

Nevertheless some colleges place their courses online. Thanks to sites like Youtube, as well more and more professors switching over to power-point style presentations. I remember about five years ago when a particular college decided to start recording, and posting professors' lectures online. The files were only audio files, and after picking a Sociology lecture I was a little frustrated when the professor decided to play a fifty minute film on homeless people for the class.

UC Berkley has uploaded over two-thousand video to Youtube, many all of which are lectures. This is particularly appealing to me because Berkley has a Cognitive Science department. Yes, there are lectures for at least one Cognitive Science class:
                                               

Hm... Rene Descartes looks like an awful lot like Frank Zappa.
For the record, you can skip the first twenty-eight and a half minutes, it is all administrative stuff for the school. That is, unless you are interested in learning how to reschedule an exam.

Stuff like this makes me drool. FREE KNOWLEDGE! YUM! If CS classes are not your thing they also have electrical engineering, statistics, and chemistry. Why not take a semester's worth of classes before the semester actually starts and guarantee yourself a less stressful semester as well as one with more free time? If you do watch the administrative stuff you can find what textbook the class is using, or other resources they may use.

When I can, I actually like to get the textbook for a class I know am going to take, and read the whole thing over the summer. You will always be a step ahead of the classes, and you are that much closer to the A. Chances are there is only a week or two until your semester starts, what else are you gonna do with the rest of your summer that is as worthwhile?

Announcement Update

Recently I have had inquires regarding the direction of Always Avoid Alliteration. I wanted to take some time to clear things up and let readers know what to expect. Ideally, when this project first started I wanted to post five days a week. Background work on this site (tweaking html as well as the blogger code for example) takes up some of this time, as well as making sure the posts are a quality of the highest standard.

Considering that I will be here, you shouldn't
feel bad that I will be gone for a little while.

In September I will be going to Freiburg, Germany for a year. I will still update while I am there, but there will be some downtime while I first get adjusted. In order to work around this I have done two things. First, I have already written articles which will auto-post while I am away. Second, I have contacted people about being guest writers for the site. Their knowledge and interests coincide with languages, but I am also working out letting them make posts that are loosely related, or pertaining to Cognitive Science or their interests. Also while I am in Germany there of course be a larger influx of German language learning posts; considering my primary goal while I am there is to become fluent in the language. Be sure to keep posted!

Next week will also be an "off topic week". I don't know what I'm going to call it yet, but there will be five days of posts consisting of topics that don't necessarily have to do with the site. Some of the topics have briefly come up in other posts and I have gotten a lot of positive reactions to those so I figure why not cater to the audience? Topics will include social engineering, and censorship in video games. This will also give me time to come up with some more material pertaining to language, and Cog Sci.

If I could get published, this is how the cover of
the book would look like when you hold it open.

Finally, I am working on a book. It has been coming along nicely now, and when it is finished it will be available to download for free! A lot of information I have ingested over the years has come from the Internet, and as such has been free. I am simply repaying the favor after all these years. The title will be 'Motherfucker Why You Reading?' Not only is it a throwback to a Bill Hicks joke, it is also a reference to an incident I had in middle school. Another reason I am giving the book away for free is that even if I could ever get published, I probably couldn't keep the title, and frankly if I can't write a book with the word Motherfucker in it, then I would rather not write a book at all. Motherfucker Why You Reading will be about my experiences facing incompetent teachers, policies, and anti-intellectualism in the American school system. I have been through three catholic schools, two public schools, one of which was ranked in the bottom five in the state, as well as a liberal arts college and state university. I figure I have enough "academic diversity" to pull through something like this. I promise that the book will be as entertaining, informative, and funny as a free book can be.

Thanks for reading!

Applicable Learning

This book was cited in another book I was reading. I originally thought it was going to be an academic article that I could read in under an hour, but now that it's a whole book, and with my giant reading list this summer; it will take some time before I get to read the whole thing.

One of the points made by this book, as well as an academic article by Steinke is on how figuring out ways to apply the material you are trying to learn is more useful to the learner than memorization (full source and citation at the bottom of this post). This is because you are thinking critically and using problem solving:

"As a pedagogy, service-learning inherently teaches the kind of thinking skills and knowledge application necessary for success outside academia."

For this reason it is always important to think about how something is applicable when you are learning it, especially if you have a terrible professor. "How is this equation important or useful to something I might do?", "Why am I learning this?"  And "Is this course work important for what I want to do after school?" are all important questions to ask yourself time to time. If you can't answer these question, it might be time to reevaluate your academic priorities.

Steinke, Pamela. "Assessing Service-Learning." Research & Practice in Assessment 1.2 (2007): 1-8. Penn State. Web. 23 May 2011.