Monday, February 14, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
The common statistical thread between psychiatric diagnosis and grad school rankings. - By Jordan Ellenberg - Slate Magazine
The common statistical thread between psychiatric diagnosis and grad school rankings. - By Jordan Ellenberg - Slate Magazine
The Mathematics of Narcissism
The common statistical thread between psychiatric diagnosis and grad school rankings.
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2011, at 6:32 AM ET
Another long-gestating project—the National Research Council's ranking of U.S. graduate programs in 59 subject areas—wrapped up in 2010 as well. The ranking came in five years overdue, and its results, like the new DSM, roused widespread dissatisfaction. Stephen Stigler, a professor of statistics at the University of Chicago, described the methodological problems as so severe that the project was "doomed from the start."
The particulars of the two scientific disputes are too gnarled to detail here. In a mathematical sense, though, the controversies are much alike. They both rest on the tension between two fundamentally different strategies of data analysis, clusteringand dimension reduction.
Suppose you've got a large collection of objects—say, graduate programs in mathematics, or psychiatric patients. For each object you have a large collection of measurements. For the graduate programs, you can assess the average time to degree or median publications per faculty member. For the patients, the measurements could be responses to diagnostic questionnaires or assessments by clinicians on various scales.
But when someone wants to know "what's wrong with my patient?" or "which graduate school should I go to?" a list of two dozen numbers isn't so helpful. You need a human-readable description of the object in question.
One way to do this is clustering—you look for divisions along which the objects of study cleave naturally into groups bearing common features. This is the DSM-IV approach to clinical diagnosis: Narcissists resemble other narcissists more than they resemble paranoids, or borderlines, or people without any personality disorder at all. Humans are born clusterers—we almost can't help doing it. Entities neither fish nor fowl discomfit us: Politicians are liberal or conservative, animals break up into phyla, pop songs are black metal or death metal or math rock or shoegaze or grime.
Then there's dimension reduction—here, we try to boil down the many measurements to a few numbers that really matter. This is what we do when we boil down all the aspects of a baseball player's performance to his batting average (or, nowadays, OPS and Wins Above Replacement). It's what the NRC was charged with doing—given all the data about graduate programs, put them in order from best to worst. And it's the way the DSM, in its latest edition, now proposes to reclassify personality disorders. Instead of partitioning patients into groups, they are now measured on six personality axes: negative emotionality, introversion, antagonism, disinhibition, compulsivity, and schizotypy. The patient previously known as "the narcissist" will now be a high scorer on four facets of "antagonism": callousness, manipulativeness, narcissism, and histrionism. In the new paradigm, there's no breakpoint where one personality disorder stops and another begins—there's such a thing as narcissism, but no such thing as a narcissist.
The tough part of dimension reduction is figuring out which few numbers to use. Getting to consensus on the six personality axes took years. And if that sounds hard, consider the charge given to the NRC, which had to capture the essential features of a graduate program with a single number. That's a tall order—imagine if the DSM group had to devise a linear scale to rank patients from sanest to most crazy!
In the end, the NRC group couldn't agree on a uniform ranking. Instead, they offered a range of possible metrics and an interactive tool where users can rank departments via various dimensions endorsed by the NRC or using their own homebrewed measures. This compromise, statistically principled though it may have been, satisfied nobody. After waiting 10 years for the rankings to come out, people wanted their department's standing to be more definitive than "between 6th and 16th, depending on which metric you choose." (And the complaints about the NRC rankings weren't purely methodological—many departments complained the dataset itself was hopelessly shot through with error.)
So, what's the right way to tame your data? It depends on the objects. The researchers driving the changes in DSM take the view, which has some empirical support, that peoplereally do vary continuously from normal to disordered. On that account, carving out various precincts of psychopathology is like divvying up people into "beanpoles," "fatties," and "pipsqueaks" instead of reporting their height and weight. Dimension reduction is the way to go.
The NRC, on the other hand, might have done better to toss the idea of rankings entirely, and just clustered the departments into natural groupings. The statistician Leland Wilkinson ran a quick and dirty clustering on the NRC data for math departments. He found that the departments broke up into five clusters: 10 elite departments, a big group of 59 upper-tier departments, 47 lower-tier departments, and two smaller clusters whose meaning, if any, isn't clear to me. This is much coarser information than a full ranking—but it has the advantage of not depending on politically contentious choices as to which criteria matter most.
In the end, dimension reduction and clustering are going to have to coexist. We rely on continuous metrics to describe baseball players, but at the same time we form mental clusters around prototypes like the plodding slugger and the crafty slap hitter. We cluster our music collections into genres and our politicians into parties, but it can be just as illustrative to map bands and senators in two dimensions using continuous coordinates. So narcissists, and the therapists who treat them, can breathe easy—the notion of the narcissist was alive before the diagnosis broke into the DSM in 1980, and it will persist after the diagnosis is gone.
Like Slate on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.
Or join the discussion
on the Fray
on the Fray
Like This Story
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
The Bum Game
The Bum Game.
The object of this game is to hold a steady job and find a real home. You start out as a bum on the street so you'll need to beg for change and find food anywhere you can.
Disclaimers:
This game simulates real life as a bum so if you're some wussy, politically correct cry-baby who hates loud music and likes to ban books, you probably shouldn't play it. However, unlike you, we're not in the business of telling people what to do or think, so if you want to play it, go right ahead.
The Bum Game was inspired by Front Door Enterprises' brilliant Bumvertising™ marketing campaign. If you've never heard of Bumvertising™, learning more about that form of advertising and bum society in general will give you an advantage in this game. All images relating to Bumvertising™ have been used with permission.
The object of this game is to hold a steady job and find a real home. You start out as a bum on the street so you'll need to beg for change and find food anywhere you can.
Disclaimers:
This game simulates real life as a bum so if you're some wussy, politically correct cry-baby who hates loud music and likes to ban books, you probably shouldn't play it. However, unlike you, we're not in the business of telling people what to do or think, so if you want to play it, go right ahead.
The Bum Game was inspired by Front Door Enterprises' brilliant Bumvertising™ marketing campaign. If you've never heard of Bumvertising™, learning more about that form of advertising and bum society in general will give you an advantage in this game. All images relating to Bumvertising™ have been used with permission.
| The Bum Game | |
| Character Info | |
| Money: |  $0.27 |
| Job: | None |
| Housing: | None |
| |
| Special Skill: | Harmonica |
| Impairment: | Chronically Lazy |
| Health: | • • • • Excellent |
| Hygiene: | • • • • Clean |
| Hunger: | • • • • Satisfied |
| Fatigue: | • • • • Wide Awake |
| Happiness: | • • • • Joyful |
| |
| Clothes | |
| Clean White T-Shirt Clean Blue Jeans Leather Boots | |
| |
| Inventory | |
| Tin Cup Harmonica | |
More games from the makers of the Bum Game >> | |
Exit Game | |
Corner of 75th and Maple
Homeless People Advertising - Marketing with a Bumvertising Campaign
Homeless People Advertising - Marketing with a Bumvertising Campaign
Homeless People Advertising - Bumvertising™Bumvertising™, or the use of sign holding vagrants to advertise, is a development of Front Door Enterprise, a specialty marketing firm.Benjamin Rogovy, president and chief economist of Front Door Enterprises, developed this system after realizing the enormous potential in wasted homeless labor. Bums use a business model that takes advantage of high volume traffic, with the expectation that, on average, a certain number of people will donate to them in the form of cash, clothing, or food. Some people, by principle, will never give a homeless man money. Some will give food to them whenever they can. But what is the use of holding up a bum sign to 99% of car traffic that will only read but never donate to these vagrants? With such great exposure, Mr. Rogovy imagined that there had to be some value that was not being utilized. Many other companies, such as Strategy Game Network have also pledged to endorse this model. Through his own effort and the assistance of his marketing team, Mr. Rogovy developed signs and accumulated the resources that most bums would find attractive. Money, sandwiches, chips, apples, water, and other beverages have all been dispensed in order to compensate the homeless in the Seattle Bumvertising™ campaign.  It is also Mr. Rogovy's belief that bums will incur higher revenues from donations after showing the initiative to seek out semi-legitimate employment. Many of the vagabonds of our Bumvertising campaigns remark that they are receiving more comments and questions than ever. "People are actually reading my signs!", remarked Robert, one of Bumvertising's most loyal derelicts. "I thought they just handed me a dollar but never read what I was saying."Currently, the highest concentration of Bumvertisements are being placed at the on and off ramps of I-5 at the 45th and 50th street exits. Please learn more about some of the Bumvertising campaign's most important assets at the gallery. |
Bad Alf! VIDEO: YouTube Clip of N-Word-Laced 'Alf' Outtakes Ignites Controversy - Live Feed
VIDEO: YouTube Clip of N-Word-Laced 'Alf' Outtakes Ignites Controversy - Live Feed
A classic '80s TV character is getting a second shot at fame -- or actually, infamy -- thanks to a blooper reel posted on YouTube that features the puppet star of Alf using the N-word repeatedly.
The clip of outtakes was posted online a year ago without much notice, but controversy was recently ignited when it went viral after being featured on the kitsch website BadTVBlog on Dec. 21.
The video includes excerpts from show rehearsals in which the alien character (a hand-puppet operated by series creator Paul Fusco) is seen parodying a then-recent 1989 episode of L.A. Law that included a character with Tourette's Syndrome uttering the N-word. The puppet can also be heard cursing and using sexual innuendo during scenes with a female co-star. The Tourette's segment begins at the 4:40 mark in the video below. Warning: graphic language.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)