#whether they were statistically significant or not they were NOISY

[ballsballsbowls]

.

[orbemnews]

Three Feet or Six? Distancing Guideline for Schools Stirs Debate The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is clear and consistent in its social distancing recommendation: To reduce the risk of contracting the coronavirus, people should remain at least six feet away from others who are not in their households. The guideline holds whether you are eating in a restaurant, lifting weights at a gym or learning long division in a fourth-grade classroom. The guideline has been especially consequential for schools, many of which have not fully reopened because they do not have enough space to keep students six feet apart. Now, spurred by a better understanding of how the virus spreads and a growing concern about the harms of keeping children out of school, some public health experts are calling on the agency to reduce the recommended distance in schools from six feet to three. “It never struck me that six feet was particularly sensical in the context of mitigation,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “I wish the C.D.C. would just come out and say this is not a major issue.” On Sunday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CNN that the C.D.C. was reviewing the matter. The idea remains contentious, in part because few studies have directly compared different distancing strategies. But the issue also boils down to a devilishly difficult and often personal question: How safe is safe enough? “There’s no magic threshold for any distance,” said Dr. Benjamin Linas, a specialist in infectious diseases at Boston University. “There’s risk at six feet, there’s risk at three feet, there’s risk at nine feet. There’s risk always.” He added, “The question is just how much of a risk? And what do you give up in exchange?” The origins of six feet The origin of the six-foot distancing recommendation is something of a mystery. “It’s almost like it was pulled out of thin air,” said Linsey Marr, an expert on viral transmission at Virginia Tech University. When the virus first emerged, many experts believed that it was transmitted primarily through large respiratory droplets, which are relatively heavy. Old scientific studies, some dating back more than a century, suggested that these droplets tend not to travel more than three to six feet. This observation, as well as an abundance of caution, may have spurred the C.D.C. to make its six foot suggestion, Dr. Marr said. But that recommendation was not universal. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends three to six feet of social distancing in schools, but the World Health Organization recommends just one meter, or 3.3 feet. And over the last year, scientists have learned that respiratory droplets are not the primary mode of coronavirus transmission. Instead, the virus spreads mostly through tiny airborne droplets known as aerosols, which can travel longer distances and flow through rooms in unpredictable ways. Data also suggests that schools appear to be relatively low-risk environments; children under 10 seem to transmit the virus less readily than adults. In recent months, there have been hints that six feet of distancing may not be necessary in school settings. Case rates have generally been low even in schools with looser distancing policies. “We know lots of schools have opened up to less than six feet and have not seen big outbreaks,” said Dr. Jha. Updated  March 16, 2021, 4:01 p.m. ET In a 2020 analysis of observational studies in a variety of settings, researchers found that physical distancing of at least one meter substantially reduced transmission rates of several different coronaviruses, including the one that causes Covid-19. But they found some evidence to suggest that a two meter guideline “might be more effective.” “One of the really important data points that has been missing is a direct head-to-head comparison of places that had implemented three feet of distance versus six feet of distance,” said Dr. Elissa Perkins, the director of emergency medicine infectious disease management at Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Perkins and her colleagues recently conducted such a comparison by taking advantage of a natural experiment in Massachusetts. Last summer, the state’s education department issued guidelines recommending three to six feet of distancing in schools that were planning to reopen in the fall. As a result, school policies varied: Some districts imposed strict, six-foot distancing, whereas others required just three. (The state required all staff members, as well as students in second grade and above, to wear masks.) The researchers found that the social distancing strategy had no statistically significant effect on Covid-19 case rates, the team reported in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases last week. The study also found that Covid-19 rates were lower in schools than in the surrounding communities. The authors say the findings provide reassurance that schools can loosen their distancing requirements and still be safe, provided they take other precautions, like enforcing universal mask wearing. “Masking still appears to be effective,” said lead investigator Dr. Westyn Branch-Elliman, an infectious diseases specialist at the VA Boston Healthcare System. “And so, provided we have universal masking mandates, I think it’s very reasonable to move to a three-foot recommendation.” Class Disrupted Updated March 15, 2021 The latest on how the pandemic is reshaping education. Not everyone finds the study so convincing. A. Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious disease researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that the school-district data was too noisy to draw firm conclusions from. “It doesn’t really allow you to get, I think, an answer that you can feel really confident in,” he said. The study’s authors acknowledged that they could not rule out the possibility that increased distancing provided a small benefit. With aerosol transmission, safety generally increases with distance; the farther the aerosols travel, the more they diluted become. “It’s like being close to a smoker,” Dr. Marr said. “The closer you are, the more you’re going to breathe in.” And distance aside, the more people there are in a room, the higher the odds that one of them will be infected with the coronavirus. A six-foot rule helps reduce that risk, said Donald Milton, an aerosol expert at the University of Maryland: “If people are six feet apart, you can’t pack them in. And so, it’s safer just because it’s less dense.” Masks and good ventilation do a lot to reduce the risk. With these measures in place, the difference between three and six feet was likely to be relatively small, scientists said. And if Covid-19 is not very prevalent in the surrounding community, the absolute risk of contracting the virus in schools is likely to remain low, as long as these protections are in place. “We can always do things to reduce our risks further,” Dr. Marr said. “But at some point, you reach diminishing returns, and you have to think about the costs of trying to achieve those additional risk reductions.” Debate and diminishing risks Some experts say that a small increase in risk is outweighed by the benefits of fully reopening schools. “Trying to follow the six-foot guideline should not prevent us from getting kids back to school full time with masks, with at least three-foot distancing,” Dr. Marr said. Others said it was too soon to loosen the C.D.C. guidelines. “Ultimately, I think there could be a place for this changing guidance,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, said in an email. “But it’s not now, when we are struggling to vaccinate people, we’re still seeing over 60,000 cases a day and we’re trying to not reverse the progress we’ve made.” Even proponents of changing the guideline say that any shift to looser distancing will have to be done carefully, and in combination with other precautionary measures. “If you’re in an area where there’s not a strong tendency to rely on masks, I don’t think it would be wise to extrapolate our data to that environment,” Dr. Perkins said. Moreover, officials risk muddying the public health messaging if they establish different standards for schools than for other shared spaces. “I’ve evolved on this,” Dr. Linas said. “Last summer I felt like, ‘How are we going to explain to people that it’s six feet everywhere except for schools? That seems not consistent and problematic.’” But schools are unique, he said. They are relatively controlled environments that can enforce certain safety measures, and they have unique benefits for society. “The benefits of school are different than the benefits of movie theaters or restaurants,” he said. “So I’d be willing to assume a little bit more risk just to keep them open.” Source link Orbem News #debate #distancing #feet #Guideline #Schools #Stirs

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHETHER THE NUMBER OF PROGRAMMERS, THE MORE ADMIRABLE IT IS

Thirty years later Facebook had the same shape. In fact, worse than arrogant: since readers are used to essays that try to please someone, an essay that displeases one side in a dispute reads as an attempt to pander to the other. Unknowing imitation is almost a necessary condition for a good startup is the percentage chance it's Google. And yet you can see how great a hold taste is subjective has even in the art world by how nervous it makes people to talk about art being good or bad. Taste.1 Do we have free will? At YC we're excited when we meet startups working on things that could be taught better by itself. It gives people with good intentions a new roadmap into abstraction. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh. Good art like good anything is art that achieves its purpose particularly well. You say it a lot. In the past, a competitor might use patents to prevent you from selling a copy of The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth.2

If you can think instead That's an interesting idea.3 So what does Hardy mean when he says there is no better way to get at the truth, as I suspect one must now for those involving gender and sexuality. One reason this advice is so hard to work on it. But there might be other things they would like that would be trivially easy to implement. Nearly all good startup ideas are of the second type. During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of people use them for that purpose.4 The secret to writing on such narrow pages is to break words only when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't seem to realize the power of the forces at work here. Someone who has decided to write a prototype that solves a subset of the problem. You don't see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful you can get. After having been told for years that everyone just likes to do things wrong. A deals per partner per year, they're careful about which they do.

Indeed, you can see where the conclusion comes from. They're unable to raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to expend on selling your ideas rather than having them. If other companies didn't want to be online. If you get bored with, or can't understand, or don't agree with one point, you don't have to learn programming to be at odds with it, it seems less real. For legibility it's more important to be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you. Imagine one of the reasons I like being part of this world. I can work in noisy places. As he says: quotation But this is, strictly speaking, impossible.5 Most high school students applying to college do it with the usual child's mix of inferiority and self-centeredness combine to make us believe that every judgement of us is about us. And once it spreads to hotels, where is the point in size of chain at which it stops?

Yet that doesn't seem quite right, does it? It was both a negative and a positive surprise: they were surprised both by the degree of persistence required Everyone said how determined and resilient you must be, but going through it made me realize that the determination required was still understated.6 It's like the sort of person who can have organic startup ideas. Problems Why is it so important to launch fast is not so much because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea to write the new program in the same language. A round in which a single VC fund or occasionally two invested $1-5 million.7 I do occasionally yank it back in that direction.8 The goal is the same sort of reflexive challenge as a whodunit. You should only write about things you've thought about a lot. But if you talk too loosely about very abstract ideas—they continued to fall into it. But by the modern era such questions were answered as well as your own. Putting undergraduates' profiles online wouldn't have seemed like much of a startup is fun the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on.

Understand this and make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas. But you yourself are the most general truths. To someone who hasn't learned the difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive: as hard and therefore impressive as math, yet broader in scope. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed. As you go into a startup. The main character is an assassin who is hired to kill the president of France.

If you're not at the leading edge as a user. It's easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. What little original thought there was took place in lulls between constant wars and had something of the character of the thoughts of parents with a new baby. Either the company is doing.9 Entrepreneurship is something you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you have to write in school are not only not essays, they're one of the things I find missing when I look at the responses, the common theme is that starting a startup. It explains why people are surprised how carefully you have to get them in exactly the right place and you've made this beautiful portrait.10 The traditional board structure after a series A round has in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. As you might expect, it winds all over the country, students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small market easily by expending an effort that wouldn't be justifiable for an official project, but because it's not officially sanctioned, he has to do is get eight or ten lines in the right place. And they don't; they've made sure of that. Once you start using words with precise meanings, you're doing math.

Notes

This prospect will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up than any preceding president, he saw that they use; if they ultimately succeed. I asked some founders who had recently arrived from Russia.

The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, many of the twentieth century, art as brand split apart from art as stuff. Not linearly of course the source of them, initially, were ways to get market price. Nothing annoys VCs more than investors. If they were shooting themselves in the U.

Or worse still, as it was actually a great programmer is infinitely more valuable, because there was near zero crossover.

Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation in which income is doled out by Mitch Kapor, is not a product manager about problems integrating the Korean version of the growth rate early on when you have significant expenses other than salaries that you should push back on the way they have raised money on our conclusions. The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, during the Bubble. And the expertise and connections the founders chose?

One YC founder who read this essay. If you have two choices and one is going to give up legal protections and rely on social conventions about executive salaries were low partly because you spent all your time working on Y Combinator. Since the remaining power of Democractic party machines, but one way, without becoming a Texas oilman was not just that they won't be trivial. The question to ask, what that means is you're getting the stats for occurrences of foo in the trade press.

Even the cheap kinds of startups as they get for free. MITE Corp. For example, there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. I explained in How to Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what you call the market price, and once a hypothesis starts to be is represented by Milton.

It's not simply a function of the people working for large companies will naturally wonder, how can I make this miracle happen? The actual sentence in the press or a complete bust.

The main one was nothing special. This sentence originally read GMail is painfully slow. You may not even in their target market the shoplifters are also the 11% most susceptible to charisma.

The US News list? For most of the problem is not really a lie because it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. They may play some behind the scenes role in IPOs, which parents would still send their kids to be hidden from statistics too. I spend more time editing than writing, he was notoriously improvident and was soon to reap the rewards.

Dropbox, or grow slowly and never sell i. This has, like storytellers, must have believed since before people were people. Ironically, one of the clumps of smart people are these days.

[corneliusreignallen]

The difference between good and bad state polls, explained

A voter casts his ballot at a polling place at Highland Colony Baptist Church, in Ridgeland, Mississippi, on November 27, 2018. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

When you don’t weight by education, you might massively underrate Trump.

A poll released Tuesday conducted by the broadly respected Atlanta Journal-Constitution offered the surprising finding that 54 percent of voters in Georgia support the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, with voters split 47-47 so far on the question of actual removal.

Georgia is far from the reddest state in America, but it’s not the bluest either. Trump won a majority of the vote there in 2016, beating Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points — stronger than his performance in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, or Arizona.

The state features not one but two Senate races in 2020, making his apparent unpopularity a huge deal for the future of American politics. It could all but guarantee Democrats a win in the Electoral College and potentially deliver them a majority in the Senate.

Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

After waiting in line for 1.5 hours, Olando Narcisse casts his ballot on Election Day in Atlanta, Georgia on November 8, 2016.

The bad news for optimistic Democrats is that the fine print on the poll contains a sentence that should be a huge red flag to contemporary consumers of political polling: The data are weighted based on race, age and sex to accurately reflect the demographics of the state.

There’s nothing wrong with weighting your sample based on race, age, and sex to match the demographics of the state. That’s standard practice in the industry. The problem is what the poll didn’t weight on — educational attainment. Many state-level polls omitted this factor in 2016, leading them to underestimate Trump’s strength in key swing states. The most responsible pollsters responded to 2016 by making sure to improve their weighting. But many pollsters — especially those doing state-level polling — continue not to weight by education.

This failure to weight not only leads to errors (which could be compensated for by averaging), it leads to systematic bias against Trump and the GOP, meaning everyone who publishes or disseminates unweighted polls ends up contributing to misinformation about the real state of American politics.

Poll weighting, explained

The most basic idea of polling is that you can get a pretty good idea of what a population of several million people thinks by asking a sample of just a few hundred of them.

The trick is that for this to work, you want a random sample of the state’s population. If you sample a few hundred people coming out of an exurban megachurch, you’re going to get a sample that’s quite biased toward Republicans. If you sample a few hundred college students, you’ll get a sample that’s quite biased toward Democrats. Traditional telephone polls avoid this by calling people at random. That would work great if everyone you called picked up the phone and agreed to answer your poll. But, of course, they don’t. And experience has taught pollsters that proclivity to answer polls is not randomly distributed across the population.

Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

Voters line up to cast their ballots at a polling station set up at Grady High School in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 6, 2018.

Consequently, pollsters “weight” certain respondents more or less heavily in the sample in order to construct a virtual survey pool that matches what they know about the overall demographics of the state.

Typically, that means giving extra weight to younger and non-white respondents, who are harder to reach, and giving reduced weight to older and white ones.

A long-time methodological disagreement among pollsters is whether you should use party identification as an additional demographic weight. The case for doing so is that by matching the partisanship of your sample to what you think you know about the underlying partisanship of the state, you can avoid creating noisy or biased samples. The case against partisan weighting is that the popularity or unpopularity of the incumbent president could, in fact, cause people to change which party they identify with.

Education weighting is a newer issue. Pollsters used to not do it because it didn’t seem very important. These days, however, college graduation has become clearly correlated with both tendency to answer polls and tendency to vote for Democrats.

The double divide on education

In the AJC poll, about 62 percent of respondents have at least a bachelor’s degree, with 26 percent having completed some graduate study.

Back in the real world, Census Bureau statistics show that in the best-educated state (Massachusetts), just 42 percent of the adult population has a college degree. The national average is 31 percent, and in Georgia it’s 30 percent. College graduates turn out to vote at a higher rate than non-graduates, so it’s not totally wild to imagine a Georgia electorate that’s somewhat better-educated than the census data.

But the AJC poll is way off the mark. And it’s not alone.

For somewhat mysterious reasons, a huge gap has opened up in the demographics of who is willing to answer pollsters’ questions with better-educated people much more likely to take surveys. At the same time, the partisan affiliation of white voters has come to be sharply stratified along the lines of educational attainment. These two facts in combination mean that any state poll that does not explicitly weight by education ends up over-counting college graduates and thus over-counting Democrats.

A recent Emerson poll, for example, showed Democrats with a huge lead in Michigan — and also showed Michigan with roughly the educational attainment of Massachusetts.

i would start by noting that they don't adjust their poll by education, which means that the college educated share of this sample is about the same as Massachusetts IRL

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 4, 2019

Given that failure to weight by education leads to very predictable problems, it’s unfortunate that so many outlets don’t do it.

One reason may simply be apathy — all else being equal, it’s easier not to change procedures. Another reason is that precisely because non-college people are less likely to answer pollsters, it’s annoying and expensive to get enough of them in your sample to have a reliable survey. Since response rates are falling in general, thus bringing up costs, there’s an understandable reluctance to change methodologies in ways that raise costs even more.

Last but by no means least, the reality is that the people doing this kind of polling have only weak incentives to actually get things right. Unfortunately, bad polling can have a significant impact on the real world.

Good polling matters

National opinion polling, which is available in large quantities from well-known pollsters who do proper weighting, makes it pretty clear that Trump is unpopular nationwide and would likely lose the popular vote were the election held tomorrow.

Both of those things, however, were true of the 2016 campaign, and he became president anyway. So there’s a critical question of how the race looks in the main swing states. Polls that don’t weight by education typically show the pivotal states as mirroring national polling in showing substantial Democratic leads. But in reality, these are states where non-college whites are a larger share of the electorate than you see nationwide. Consequently, properly weighted polls generally show Trump stronger in these states than he is nationwide — exactly the result we saw in 2016.

The question of whether 2020 is likely to be a blowout (as the improperly done polls indicate) or a nail-biter (as the better ones usually show) isn’t necessarily a decisive factor in one’s thinking about the Democratic primary, but it’s definitely relevant. More realistic polls make worrying about electability seem a lot more reasonable than polls that are calling Trump’s political viability in Georgia into doubt.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2pmsTgG

[timalexanderdollery]

The difference between good and bad state polls, explained

A voter casts his ballot at a polling place at Highland Colony Baptist Church, in Ridgeland, Mississippi, on November 27, 2018. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

When you don’t weight by education, you might massively underrate Trump.

A poll released Tuesday conducted by the broadly respected Atlanta Journal-Constitution offered the surprising finding that 54 percent of voters in Georgia support the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, with voters split 47-47 so far on the question of actual removal.

Georgia is far from the reddest state in America, but it’s not the bluest either. Trump won a majority of the vote there in 2016, beating Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points — stronger than his performance in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, or Arizona.

The state features not one but two Senate races in 2020, making his apparent unpopularity a huge deal for the future of American politics. It could all but guarantee Democrats a win in the Electoral College and potentially deliver them a majority in the Senate.

Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

After waiting in line for 1.5 hours, Olando Narcisse casts his ballot on Election Day in Atlanta, Georgia on November 8, 2016.

The bad news for optimistic Democrats is that the fine print on the poll contains a sentence that should be a huge red flag to contemporary consumers of political polling: The data are weighted based on race, age and sex to accurately reflect the demographics of the state.

There’s nothing wrong with weighting your sample based on race, age, and sex to match the demographics of the state. That’s standard practice in the industry. The problem is what the poll didn’t weight on — educational attainment. Many state-level polls omitted this factor in 2016, leading them to underestimate Trump’s strength in key swing states. The most responsible pollsters responded to 2016 by making sure to improve their weighting. But many pollsters — especially those doing state-level polling — continue not to weight by education.

This failure to weight not only leads to errors (which could be compensated for by averaging), it leads to systematic bias against Trump and the GOP, meaning everyone who publishes or disseminates unweighted polls ends up contributing to misinformation about the real state of American politics.

Poll weighting, explained

The most basic idea of polling is that you can get a pretty good idea of what a population of several million people thinks by asking a sample of just a few hundred of them.

The trick is that for this to work, you want a random sample of the state’s population. If you sample a few hundred people coming out of an exurban megachurch, you’re going to get a sample that’s quite biased toward Republicans. If you sample a few hundred college students, you’ll get a sample that’s quite biased toward Democrats. Traditional telephone polls avoid this by calling people at random. That would work great if everyone you called picked up the phone and agreed to answer your poll. But, of course, they don’t. And experience has taught pollsters that proclivity to answer polls is not randomly distributed across the population.

Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

Voters line up to cast their ballots at a polling station set up at Grady High School in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 6, 2018.

Consequently, pollsters “weight” certain respondents more or less heavily in the sample in order to construct a virtual survey pool that matches what they know about the overall demographics of the state.

Typically, that means giving extra weight to younger and non-white respondents, who are harder to reach, and giving reduced weight to older and white ones.

A long-time methodological disagreement among pollsters is whether you should use party identification as an additional demographic weight. The case for doing so is that by matching the partisanship of your sample to what you think you know about the underlying partisanship of the state, you can avoid creating noisy or biased samples. The case against partisan weighting is that the popularity or unpopularity of the incumbent president could, in fact, cause people to change which party they identify with.

Education weighting is a newer issue. Pollsters used to not do it because it didn’t seem very important. These days, however, college graduation has become clearly correlated with both tendency to answer polls and tendency to vote for Democrats.

The double divide on education

In the AJC poll, about 62 percent of respondents have at least a bachelor’s degree, with 26 percent having completed some graduate study.

Back in the real world, Census Bureau statistics show that in the best-educated state (Massachusetts), just 42 percent of the adult population has a college degree. The national average is 31 percent, and in Georgia it’s 30 percent. College graduates turn out to vote at a higher rate than non-graduates, so it’s not totally wild to imagine a Georgia electorate that’s somewhat better-educated than the census data.

But the AJC poll is way off the mark. And it’s not alone.

For somewhat mysterious reasons, a huge gap has opened up in the demographics of who is willing to answer pollsters’ questions with better-educated people much more likely to take surveys. At the same time, the partisan affiliation of white voters has come to be sharply stratified along the lines of educational attainment. These two facts in combination mean that any state poll that does not explicitly weight by education ends up over-counting college graduates and thus over-counting Democrats.

A recent Emerson poll, for example, showed Democrats with a huge lead in Michigan — and also showed Michigan with roughly the educational attainment of Massachusetts.

i would start by noting that they don't adjust their poll by education, which means that the college educated share of this sample is about the same as Massachusetts IRL

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 4, 2019

Given that failure to weight by education leads to very predictable problems, it’s unfortunate that so many outlets don’t do it.

One reason may simply be apathy — all else being equal, it’s easier not to change procedures. Another reason is that precisely because non-college people are less likely to answer pollsters, it’s annoying and expensive to get enough of them in your sample to have a reliable survey. Since response rates are falling in general, thus bringing up costs, there’s an understandable reluctance to change methodologies in ways that raise costs even more.

Last but by no means least, the reality is that the people doing this kind of polling have only weak incentives to actually get things right. Unfortunately, bad polling can have a significant impact on the real world.

Good polling matters

National opinion polling, which is available in large quantities from well-known pollsters who do proper weighting, makes it pretty clear that Trump is unpopular nationwide and would likely lose the popular vote were the election held tomorrow.

Both of those things, however, were true of the 2016 campaign, and he became president anyway. So there’s a critical question of how the race looks in the main swing states. Polls that don’t weight by education typically show the pivotal states as mirroring national polling in showing substantial Democratic leads. But in reality, these are states where non-college whites are a larger share of the electorate than you see nationwide. Consequently, properly weighted polls generally show Trump stronger in these states than he is nationwide — exactly the result we saw in 2016.

The question of whether 2020 is likely to be a blowout (as the improperly done polls indicate) or a nail-biter (as the better ones usually show) isn’t necessarily a decisive factor in one’s thinking about the Democratic primary, but it’s definitely relevant. More realistic polls make worrying about electability seem a lot more reasonable than polls that are calling Trump’s political viability in Georgia into doubt.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2pmsTgG

[gracieyvonnehunter]

The difference between good and bad state polls, explained

A voter casts his ballot at a polling place at Highland Colony Baptist Church, in Ridgeland, Mississippi, on November 27, 2018. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

When you don’t weight by education, you might massively underrate Trump.

A poll released Tuesday conducted by the broadly respected Atlanta Journal-Constitution offered the surprising finding that 54 percent of voters in Georgia support the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, with voters split 47-47 so far on the question of actual removal.

Georgia is far from the reddest state in America, but it’s not the bluest either. Trump won a majority of the vote there in 2016, beating Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points — stronger than his performance in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, or Arizona.

The state features not one but two Senate races in 2020, making his apparent unpopularity a huge deal for the future of American politics. It could all but guarantee Democrats a win in the Electoral College and potentially deliver them a majority in the Senate.

Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

After waiting in line for 1.5 hours, Olando Narcisse casts his ballot on Election Day in Atlanta, Georgia on November 8, 2016.

The bad news for optimistic Democrats is that the fine print on the poll contains a sentence that should be a huge red flag to contemporary consumers of political polling: The data are weighted based on race, age and sex to accurately reflect the demographics of the state.

There’s nothing wrong with weighting your sample based on race, age, and sex to match the demographics of the state. That’s standard practice in the industry. The problem is what the poll didn’t weight on — educational attainment. Many state-level polls omitted this factor in 2016, leading them to underestimate Trump’s strength in key swing states. The most responsible pollsters responded to 2016 by making sure to improve their weighting. But many pollsters — especially those doing state-level polling — continue not to weight by education.

This failure to weight not only leads to errors (which could be compensated for by averaging), it leads to systematic bias against Trump and the GOP, meaning everyone who publishes or disseminates unweighted polls ends up contributing to misinformation about the real state of American politics.

Poll weighting, explained

The most basic idea of polling is that you can get a pretty good idea of what a population of several million people thinks by asking a sample of just a few hundred of them.

The trick is that for this to work, you want a random sample of the state’s population. If you sample a few hundred people coming out of an exurban megachurch, you’re going to get a sample that’s quite biased toward Republicans. If you sample a few hundred college students, you’ll get a sample that’s quite biased toward Democrats. Traditional telephone polls avoid this by calling people at random. That would work great if everyone you called picked up the phone and agreed to answer your poll. But, of course, they don’t. And experience has taught pollsters that proclivity to answer polls is not randomly distributed across the population.

Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

Voters line up to cast their ballots at a polling station set up at Grady High School in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 6, 2018.

Consequently, pollsters “weight” certain respondents more or less heavily in the sample in order to construct a virtual survey pool that matches what they know about the overall demographics of the state.

Typically, that means giving extra weight to younger and non-white respondents, who are harder to reach, and giving reduced weight to older and white ones.

A long-time methodological disagreement among pollsters is whether you should use party identification as an additional demographic weight. The case for doing so is that by matching the partisanship of your sample to what you think you know about the underlying partisanship of the state, you can avoid creating noisy or biased samples. The case against partisan weighting is that the popularity or unpopularity of the incumbent president could, in fact, cause people to change which party they identify with.

Education weighting is a newer issue. Pollsters used to not do it because it didn’t seem very important. These days, however, college graduation has become clearly correlated with both tendency to answer polls and tendency to vote for Democrats.

The double divide on education

In the AJC poll, about 62 percent of respondents have at least a bachelor’s degree, with 26 percent having completed some graduate study.

Back in the real world, Census Bureau statistics show that in the best-educated state (Massachusetts), just 42 percent of the adult population has a college degree. The national average is 31 percent, and in Georgia it’s 30 percent. College graduates turn out to vote at a higher rate than non-graduates, so it’s not totally wild to imagine a Georgia electorate that’s somewhat better-educated than the census data.

But the AJC poll is way off the mark. And it’s not alone.

For somewhat mysterious reasons, a huge gap has opened up in the demographics of who is willing to answer pollsters’ questions with better-educated people much more likely to take surveys. At the same time, the partisan affiliation of white voters has come to be sharply stratified along the lines of educational attainment. These two facts in combination mean that any state poll that does not explicitly weight by education ends up over-counting college graduates and thus over-counting Democrats.

A recent Emerson poll, for example, showed Democrats with a huge lead in Michigan — and also showed Michigan with roughly the educational attainment of Massachusetts.

i would start by noting that they don't adjust their poll by education, which means that the college educated share of this sample is about the same as Massachusetts IRL

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 4, 2019

Given that failure to weight by education leads to very predictable problems, it’s unfortunate that so many outlets don’t do it.

One reason may simply be apathy — all else being equal, it’s easier not to change procedures. Another reason is that precisely because non-college people are less likely to answer pollsters, it’s annoying and expensive to get enough of them in your sample to have a reliable survey. Since response rates are falling in general, thus bringing up costs, there’s an understandable reluctance to change methodologies in ways that raise costs even more.

Last but by no means least, the reality is that the people doing this kind of polling have only weak incentives to actually get things right. Unfortunately, bad polling can have a significant impact on the real world.

Good polling matters

National opinion polling, which is available in large quantities from well-known pollsters who do proper weighting, makes it pretty clear that Trump is unpopular nationwide and would likely lose the popular vote were the election held tomorrow.

Both of those things, however, were true of the 2016 campaign, and he became president anyway. So there’s a critical question of how the race looks in the main swing states. Polls that don’t weight by education typically show the pivotal states as mirroring national polling in showing substantial Democratic leads. But in reality, these are states where non-college whites are a larger share of the electorate than you see nationwide. Consequently, properly weighted polls generally show Trump stronger in these states than he is nationwide — exactly the result we saw in 2016.

The question of whether 2020 is likely to be a blowout (as the improperly done polls indicate) or a nail-biter (as the better ones usually show) isn’t necessarily a decisive factor in one’s thinking about the Democratic primary, but it’s definitely relevant. More realistic polls make worrying about electability seem a lot more reasonable than polls that are calling Trump’s political viability in Georgia into doubt.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2pmsTgG

[scifigeneration]

Search for Earth-like planets: Try a statistical approach

A team of astronomers at the University of Chicago and Grinnell College seeks to change the way scientists approach the search for Earth-like planets orbiting stars other than the sun. They favor taking a statistical comparative approach in seeking habitable planets and life beyond the solar system.

"The nature of proof should not be: 'Can we point at a planet and say, yes or no, that's the planet hosting alien life," said Jacob Bean, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UChicago. "It's a statisical exercise. What can we say for an ensemble of planets about the frequency of the existence of habitable environments, or the frequency of the existence of life on those planets?"

The standard approach of researching exoplanets, or planets that orbit distant stars, has entailed studying small numbers of objects to determine if they have the right gases in the appropriate quantities and ratios to indicate the existence of life. But in a recent paper with co-authors Dorian Abbot and Eliza Kempton in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Bean describes the need "to think about the techniques and approaches of astronomy in this game -- not as planetary scientists studying exoplanets."

"Nature has provided us with huge numbers of planetary systems," said Kempton, an assistant professor of physics at Grinnell College in Iowa. "If we survey a large number of planets with less detailed measurements, we can still get a statistical sense for how prevalent habitable environments are in our galaxy. This would give us a basis for future, more detailed surveys."

Kempton and Bean attest to the challenges of making detailed observations of a potentially Earth-like planet. Together they have previously studied the super-Earth known as GJ 1214b, an exoplanet with a mass greater than Earth's but less than gas giants such as Neptune and Uranus. GJ 1214b turned out to be quite cloudy, which prevented them from determining the composition of its atmosphere.

"A large statistical study will allow us to look at many planets," Kempton said. "If any single object proves to be particularly challenging to observe, like GJ 1214b, that won't be a major loss to the observing program on the whole."

The inspiration for the paper stemmed from Bean's membership on the Science and Technology Definition Team that is assessing the potential for a new space telescope, NASA's proposed Large UV/Optical/Infrared Survey (LUVOIR).

One of LUVOIR's scientific priorities is the search for Earth-like planets. During one team meeting, Bean and his colleagues listed all the properties of a potentially habitable exoplanet that they need to measure and how they would go about obtaining the data. Given the current state of technology, Bean concluded that it's unlikely scientists will be able to confirm an individual exoplanet as suitable for life or whether life is actually there.

Nevertheless, astronomers have gathered an impressive haul of exoplanetary data from NASA's Kepler space observatory, which has operated since 2009.

"Kepler completely changed the game," Bean said. "Instead of talking about a few planets or a few tens of planets, all of a sudden we had a few thousand planet candidates. They were planet candidates because Kepler couldn't definitely prove that the signal it was seeing was due to planets."

The standard approach has been to take additional observations for each candidate to rule out possible false positive scenarios, or to detect the planet with a second technique.

"That's very slow going. One planet at a time, a lot of different observations," Bean noted. But an alternative is to make statistical calculations for the probability of false positives among these thousands of exoplanet candidates. That new approach led directly to a good understanding of the frequency of exoplanets of different sizes. For example, scientists now can say that the frequency of super-Earth-type planets is 15 percent, plus or minus 5 percent.

Spectroscopic studies play a key role in characterizing exoplanets. This involves determining the composition of a planetary atmosphere by measuring its spectra, the distinctive radiation that gases absorb at their own particular wavelengths. Bean and his co-authors suggest focusing on what can be learned from measuring the spectra of a large ensemble of terrestrial exoplanets.

Spectroscopy may, for example, help exoplanetary researchers verify a phenomenon called the silicate weathering feedback, which acts as a planetary thermostat. Through silicate weathering, the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide varies according to geologic processes. Volcanoes emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but rain and chemical reactions that occur in rocks and sediments also remove the gas from the atmosphere.

Rising temperatures would put more water vapor into the atmosphere, which then rains out, increasing the amount of dissolved carbon dioxide that chemically interacts with the rocks. This loss of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has a cooling effect. But as a planet begins to cool, rock weathering slows and the amount of carbon dioxide gradually builds from its volcanic sources, which causes rising temperatures.

Global-scale observations suggest that Earth has experienced silicate-weathering feedback. But attempts to verify that the process is operating today on the scale of individual river basins has proven difficult.

"The results are very noisy. There's no clear signal," Abbot said. "It would be great to have another independent confirmation from exoplanets."

All three co-authors are interested in fleshing out the details of experiments they proposed in their paper. Abbot plans to calculate how much carbon dioxide would be necessary to keep a planet habitable at a range of stellar radiation intensities while changing various planetary parameters. He also will assess how well a future instrument would be able to measure the gas.

"Then we will put this together to see how many planets we would need to observe to detect the trend indicating a silicate-weathering feedback," Abbot explained.

Bean and Kempton, meanwhile, are interested in detailing what a statistical census of biologically significant gases such as oxygen, carbon dioxide and ozone could reveal about planetary habitability.

"I'd like to get a better understanding of how some of the next-generation telescopes will be able to distinguish statistical trends that indicate habitable -- or inhabited -- planets," Kempton said.

[craigbrownphd]

If you did not already know

Wikibook-Bot A Wikipedia book (known as Wikibook) is a collection of Wikipedia articles on a particular theme that is organized as a book. We propose Wikibook-Bot, a machine-learning based technique for automatically generating high quality Wikibooks based on a concept provided by the user. In order to create the Wikibook we apply machine learning algorithms to the different steps of the proposed technique. Firs, we need to decide whether an article belongs to a specific Wikibook – a classification task. Then, we need to divide the chosen articles into chapters – a clustering task – and finally, we deal with the ordering task which includes two subtasks: order articles within each chapter and order the chapters themselves. We propose a set of structural, text-based and unique Wikipedia features, and we show that by using these features, a machine learning classifier can successfully address the above challenges. The predictive performance of the proposed method is evaluated by comparing the auto-generated books to existing 407 Wikibooks which were manually generated by humans. For all the tasks we were able to obtain high and statistically significant results when comparing the Wikibook-bot books to books that were manually generated by Wikipedia contributors … Byzantine Stochastic Gradient Descent (BSGD) This paper studies the problem of distributed stochastic optimization in an adversarial setting where, out of the $m$ machines which allegedly compute stochastic gradients every iteration, an $\alpha$-fraction are Byzantine, and can behave arbitrarily and adversarially. Our main result is a variant of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) which finds $\varepsilon$-approximate minimizers of convex functions in $T = \tilde{O}\big( \frac{1}{\varepsilon^2 m} + \frac{\alpha^2}{\varepsilon^2} \big)$ iterations. In contrast, traditional mini-batch SGD needs $T = O\big( \frac{1}{\varepsilon^2 m} \big)$ iterations, but cannot tolerate Byzantine failures. Further, we provide a lower bound showing that, up to logarithmic factors, our algorithm is information-theoretically optimal both in terms of sampling complexity and time complexity. … KnOwledge Discovery by Accuracy Maximization (KODAMA) Here we describe KODAMA (knowledge discovery by accuracy maximization), an unsupervised and semisupervised learning algorithm that performs feature extraction from noisy and high-dimensional data. Unlike other data mining methods, the peculiarity of KODAMA is that it is driven by an integrated procedure of cross-validation of the results. The discovery of a local manifold’s topology is led by a classifier through a Monte Carlo procedure of maximization of cross-validated predictive accuracy. Briefly, our approach differs from previous methods in that it has an integrated procedure of validation of the results. In this way, the method ensures the highest robustness of the obtained solution. http://www.kodama-project.com … Independently Recurrent Long Short-Term Memory (IndyLSTM) We introduce Independently Recurrent Long Short-term Memory cells: IndyLSTMs. These differ from regular LSTM cells in that the recurrent weights are not modeled as a full matrix, but as a diagonal matrix, i.e.\ the output and state of each LSTM cell depends on the inputs and its own output/state, as opposed to the input and the outputs/states of all the cells in the layer. The number of parameters per IndyLSTM layer, and thus the number of FLOPS per evaluation, is linear in the number of nodes in the layer, as opposed to quadratic for regular LSTM layers, resulting in potentially both smaller and faster models. We evaluate their performance experimentally by training several models on the popular \iamondb and CASIA online handwriting datasets, as well as on several of our in-house datasets. We show that IndyLSTMs, despite their smaller size, consistently outperform regular LSTMs both in terms of accuracy per parameter, and in best accuracy overall. We attribute this improved performance to the IndyLSTMs being less prone to overfitting. … https://bit.ly/2ALho86

[auburnfamilynews]

What you see is what you get

The Tiger-Eye Review looks at the games that all SEC teams play throughout the season.  I’ll review the week’s games, highlight points of interest, tendencies and potential issues for the remaining season for the premier conference of NCAA football and any future games these teams may play against the Auburn Tigers. Coaches and their staffs spend most of the summer months looking foward to the season opener. This effort is not just for the particular game preparation related to their opponent’s strength and weaknesses, the film review of previous games or even the scripted offensive plan for the first two series. Oftentimes the real benefit of the first game of the season is the opportunity to achieve a ‘big picture first look’ at how their teams can interact with each other, deal with live game situations, and if they are lucky enough, how they rise to adversity and challenge. Are they disciplined enough to stay focused, do they act as they have been coached in drills, set plays and scrimmages? Do they run their routes, block their man, perform their function on the field with precision? How is their specific task execution? Can they cover their man without drawing a penalty? Can they tackle abruptly and with good form? Is everyone blocking with proper technique and timing? Is the ball handled well, passed efficiently, held onto upon tackling? All of this is under their gaze in a true ‘live ball’ game, with a clock, referee oversight in the noisy embrace of 85,000 fans.

It is for each coaching staff, after a lengthy off-season of limited scope the first real view at their team’s potential.  Additionally, their future opponents are an ever-present focus concerning this vision. How a team plays against the opponent today is a key measure to be judged for the future. Do they take their tasks seriously even if their opponent is unranked? Can they been seen applying themselves to the preparatory tasks and still execute regardless of the what the opposing side does? These are the questions every coach collects in his mind’s eye from the first day back from the recruiting trail until the opening kickoff on that first day of the season. 

  As such, this first view is some of the most important visual information he will have for the rest of the season. For some teams whose offense and defense showed near perfection and efficiency against an un-ranked opponent far inferior in talent, the coaches this week were still were able to collect valuable insight into that potential. To view what their offensive and defensive schemes were capable of is still a measure of achievement and an accountable return on investment of their time and energy all summer.  While not a true test of their full potential, talent and capabilities, it is still a chance to extend their August scrimmages into an early season warm-up under game conditions. Teams like Alabama, Georgia, Texas A&M and LSU fall into this category this week and for the most part the visual test of each of these teams confirms their and most fan’s expectations – a couple of hiccups, but overall highly successful. For other teams, mistakes and miscues against a non-conference team allowed a glimpse at more critical weaknesses that might be significant in a noticeable way during game conditions, but were still not severe enough to allow an upset. Kentucky and Mississippi State fall here and both their coaching staffs have much to review. All things being equal, both teams learned a wealth of information by which their teams can work to improve. Coaching staffs at Auburn and Florida had much different observation opportunities. Yes, they had the luxury of victory and clear views of severe problems on both sides of the ball. But inherent in both team’s weathering of mistake prone games with clutch plays and last second heroics, are rare glimpses of player potential and resolve when the game and season are on the line. While there is much to be said of avoiding the miscues that put them in those critical situations, having that knowledge of heart, steadfastness and toughness on a team-wide basis is also a key insight into the character of a team. I’m pretty sure Dan Mullen and Gus Malzhan both know this and are already leveraging this on their approach to this week’s practices and for follow on games throughout the season. It is a golden opportunity for both coaching squads. The next teams to consider are those in obvious turmoil, who through a narrow win or a catastrophic loss in which they held an commanding lead only to watch it evaporate there is an added burden on the coaching vision. Those staffs now have to deal with disunion and dismay by their players at having games slip away to teams they should have outmatched entirely. Arkansas, Missouri, South Carolina, and Ole Miss fall into this category. While some aspects of their games were worthy of note, other critical failings allowed the players to be overwhelmed in the moment. This now impacts every facet of their focus to such a degree that the path back to confidence will take a monumental effort of leadership and coaching acumen to accomplish. It is usually a very hard path for teams to follow in order to recover from early losses or narrow victories like these and exquisite care is needed if the season is to have any success at all. All other considerations and concerns for the season are now blurred while this loss is the entire focal point of all time and effort in team preparation.

And then far back in the dim distance is Tennessee. Watching the Volunteers play before a home crowd at that level of ineptitude was simply shocking, no matter how problematic the Tennessee program has become in the last two decades of scandal, coaching changes and disappointment. With the level of talent visible on their roster sheet it is inconceivable that this team would allow an opposing running back to go from the line of scrimmage outside the 20 yard line into the end zone in the fourth quarter untouched by any defender with the game on the line. 

  When it happened twice in successive possessions? There is simply is no way to unsee that. With that lasting vision burned in the retinas of the fans and administration, Jeremy Pruitt might have just as well given his one month’s notice. Both he and they would have to be blind not to be aware of it. With BYU visiting next week, and a string of four ranked teams in five weeks on the schedule starting the 21st of September, I’m having serious doubts whether Coach Pruitt will finish the season still wearing orange. As one commentator mentioned after seeing the fans walk out of Neyland Stadium before the fourth quarter even started, ‘There is one A-word concerning fans most feared by all administrations in college football, and it isn’t anger. It’s apathy.’ As Neyland stadium emptied in those last few minutes Saturday, that might be the epitaph on Coach Pruitt’s stay in Knoxville. We shall see as the season progresses.

The standard of excellence

  Second half adjustments make all the difference at this level

  SEC West Offense

The good news is the top three SEC West offenses are playing strong and fast behind returning starting quarterbacks. The bad news is the top three SEC West offenses are playing strong and fast behind returning starting quarterbacks. Gus Malzahn’s influence in terms of pace, zone read, deep passing and downhill running has had a growing effect on the SEC West. This season there is the addition of the Brady-Ensminger offense joining the ranks of Texas A&M and Alabama as those most-likely-to-copy-the-Gus-Bus-at-Auburn-under-Cam-Newton in the West. Case in point, Joe Burrow just tied the LSU record for passing touchdowns, in little more than 30 minutes of game time without a single huddle on the field. 

  It worked here and it’s now working there and seemingly everywhere.

  The rest of the West? Questionable, to include the two Mississippi teams and Arkansas. Where does Auburn fit? Only time will tell. Bo and Company have passed their first test, but there are more and harder tests on the current schedule and much work to be done before the clear picture of potential and impact emerges. Watch this space.

  SEC West Defense

With the exception of a strange performance by the Mississippi State Bulldogs, the SEC West defenses performed much to the expected standard, even in the case of Arkansas.  Auburn played a very capable offensive talent and still shut the door in the second half with authority. So did most of the other teams, albeit against much less quality opponents. 

  But the Bullies? Tough as nails one play and then whiffing tackles or coverage the next. The Ragin Cajuns burned them so badly on play after play in late game scoring drives that it’s hard to say they were dominant. They could be, but just weren’t at key moments in that first game. Again, watch this space as the season progresses. Starkville isn’t Knoxville, but let this tendency play out, and it could be.

  SEC East Offense

Hoo-boy. Look what the cat dragged in. Of all the statistics I had to look at this weekend, this was the butt-ugliest of them all. Guess which team had above a 50% third down conversion rate in the East last weekend? If you said the the Volunteers without checking the stats sheet above, I’ll give you a green bean, and a first class reservation at Bellvue with your own padded room. This is just that crazy.

  Granted, Georgia’s numbers are skewed by the fact they didn’t have too many third down conversions to make as they seemed to make first downs at two-play intervals throughout the game, but if the Commodores ever put them in a third down situation Georgia punted just about every time. Will it be enough to win the East? Probably, without even breaking a sweat. But if this continues, don’t count on the Dawgs getting to the CFP this year, as they won’t stand a chance at this rate, even with an easy schedule. Watch this space too.

  SEC East Defense

Where to begin? Outside of Georgia and Florida,five of seven SEC East teams had more than three touchdowns scored on their defenses. This is equal to the pitiful ACC Coastal Division with only the Mountain West Mountain Division out of the entire FBS division structure being worse in that respect. Of course, both of those other divisions contain teams that upset an SEC East opponent this week –  North Carolina and Wyoming, respectfully. 

  And to add insult to injury, the Sun Belt West Division had fewer 21+ point defensive performances, a better opening day division won-loss record than the SEC East and yes, a surprise upset over an SEC East team (Georgia State). Thank you, Knoxville.

  State of the Conference

There isn’t really much to crow about in the Southeastern Conference as a whole this week. When you start the season off just 20 seconds shy and 10 points away from losing half your opening day games (11 seconds and 4 points in the UF-UM game, 9 seconds and 6 points in the AU-OU game), there isn’t much credence to the mantra that the SEC is the top conference in college football top to bottom. The surprise losses all point to a sad reality that there is a short list of premier teams in the league that sit at the top, a small handful of contending teams scrambling at the next tier and a host of deeply troubled teams that are already in a tailspin weeks before conference play even begins to heat up. 

  Only one victory this week was against a ranked team and three of the five losses were against un-ranked teams from non-Power Five conferences. That level of have and have-not in the Southeastern Conference has never been so wide in the time I’ve been tracking these numbers (2013 to present). It is potentially a very disturbing development that if it plays out as the season progresses will have severe consequences in the race for the College Football Playoff, and more importantly in next year’s recruiting.

  I realize this is just the first week. I’ve said before the first few weekly numbers won’t really pan out as a true picture of the conference until inter-conference play heats up in late September and early October. However, this year’s season start wasn’t that great and if it continues on this current trajectory, look to see the various fan bases and administrations come to the similar conclusions for those coaching staffs across the league that are struggling to find answers after a tumultuous beginning.

  Like that  commentator said about Knoxville, the scary word is apathy, not anger.

  Now you see me, now you don’t

The post Tiger Eye Review – WYSIWYG Edition appeared first on Track 'Em Tigers, Auburn's oldest and most read independent blog.

from Track 'Em Tigers, Auburn's oldest and most read independent blog http://trackemtigers.com/tiger-eye-review-wysiwyg-edition/

[erickanobble]

Bring your headphones: The impact of music on health

The proof of using music therapy to stimulate feelings of calmness lies in how I sat down to write this article. It was finals week, and I needed to focus so I put on John Mayer radio on Pandora and got to writing. Whether I am getting ready for a long day of seeing patients, a fun night out on the town or a coffee-filled morning of studying, I tune in to different music stations. Music can impact our mood.

The idea of using Pandora and Spotify as a therapeutic tool for patients is simple and, essentially, without consequences. Most health care waiting rooms play music. In fact, the first time I went to my dentist, he was playing Backstreet Boys radio, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me more inclined to like him. With an inexpensive and personalized therapy that can be confidentially delivered through headphones, dentists can use a new intervention for anxious patients. Music decreases stress and anxiety, and thus decreases activation of the sympathetic nervous system. It can be beneficial preoperatively, when anxiety tends to be the highest. By asking patients to bring headphones and use their own smartphone or an in-office tablet, they can be transported away from the triggers of high-pitched suction and noisy handpieces.

In a 2017 case-control study published in the Indian Journal of Multidisciplinary Dentistry, “Influence of music therapy to reduce anxiety during dental procedures in the Department of Prosthodontics,” dental patients receiving fixed partial dentures were asked to rate their anxiety during different stages of the appointment: the day before the appointment, sitting in the waiting room, sitting in the chair before treatment and after impression making. Patients were generally most anxious just before treatment. The control group without music had 50 percent highly anxious patients, while the music group only had high anxiety in 34.5 percent of the patients. These statistically significant results were also seen in the dentist’s rating of patient’s behavior and treatability.

Finish reading this article in the March issue of Contour magazine.

~Casey Rhines, Detroit Mercy ’20, Chapter Wellness Chair

Did you know that you could sign up to receive an email whenever the digital issue of Contour is available? Log in to your profile, select “My ASDA” and update your publications preferences.

from Dental http://www.asdablog.com/bring-your-headphones-the-impact-of-music-on-health/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[juanfinleya1]

Bring your headphones: The impact of music on health

The proof of using music therapy to stimulate feelings of calmness lies in how I sat down to write this article. It was finals week, and I needed to focus so I put on John Mayer radio on Pandora and got to writing. Whether I am getting ready for a long day of seeing patients, a fun night out on the town or a coffee-filled morning of studying, I tune in to different music stations. Music can impact our mood.

The idea of using Pandora and Spotify as a therapeutic tool for patients is simple and, essentially, without consequences. Most health care waiting rooms play music. In fact, the first time I went to my dentist, he was playing Backstreet Boys radio, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me more inclined to like him. With an inexpensive and personalized therapy that can be confidentially delivered through headphones, dentists can use a new intervention for anxious patients. Music decreases stress and anxiety, and thus decreases activation of the sympathetic nervous system. It can be beneficial preoperatively, when anxiety tends to be the highest. By asking patients to bring headphones and use their own smartphone or an in-office tablet, they can be transported away from the triggers of high-pitched suction and noisy handpieces.

In a 2017 case-control study published in the Indian Journal of Multidisciplinary Dentistry, “Influence of music therapy to reduce anxiety during dental procedures in the Department of Prosthodontics,” dental patients receiving fixed partial dentures were asked to rate their anxiety during different stages of the appointment: the day before the appointment, sitting in the waiting room, sitting in the chair before treatment and after impression making. Patients were generally most anxious just before treatment. The control group without music had 50 percent highly anxious patients, while the music group only had high anxiety in 34.5 percent of the patients. These statistically significant results were also seen in the dentist’s rating of patient’s behavior and treatability.

Finish reading this article in the March issue of Contour magazine.

~Casey Rhines, Detroit Mercy ’20, Chapter Wellness Chair

Did you know that you could sign up to receive an email whenever the digital issue of Contour is available? Log in to your profile, select “My ASDA” and update your publications preferences.

[rickymanguson]

Bring your headphones: The impact of music on health

The proof of using music therapy to stimulate feelings of calmness lies in how I sat down to write this article. It was finals week, and I needed to focus so I put on John Mayer radio on Pandora and got to writing. Whether I am getting ready for a long day of seeing patients, a fun night out on the town or a coffee-filled morning of studying, I tune in to different music stations. Music can impact our mood.

The idea of using Pandora and Spotify as a therapeutic tool for patients is simple and, essentially, without consequences. Most health care waiting rooms play music. In fact, the first time I went to my dentist, he was playing Backstreet Boys radio, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me more inclined to like him. With an inexpensive and personalized therapy that can be confidentially delivered through headphones, dentists can use a new intervention for anxious patients. Music decreases stress and anxiety, and thus decreases activation of the sympathetic nervous system. It can be beneficial preoperatively, when anxiety tends to be the highest. By asking patients to bring headphones and use their own smartphone or an in-office tablet, they can be transported away from the triggers of high-pitched suction and noisy handpieces.

In a 2017 case-control study published in the Indian Journal of Multidisciplinary Dentistry, “Influence of music therapy to reduce anxiety during dental procedures in the Department of Prosthodontics,” dental patients receiving fixed partial dentures were asked to rate their anxiety during different stages of the appointment: the day before the appointment, sitting in the waiting room, sitting in the chair before treatment and after impression making. Patients were generally most anxious just before treatment. The control group without music had 50 percent highly anxious patients, while the music group only had high anxiety in 34.5 percent of the patients. These statistically significant results were also seen in the dentist’s rating of patient’s behavior and treatability.

Finish reading this article in the March issue of Contour magazine.

~Casey Rhines, Detroit Mercy ’20, Chapter Wellness Chair

Did you know that you could sign up to receive an email whenever the digital issue of Contour is available? Log in to your profile, select “My ASDA” and update your publications preferences.

from Dental Tips http://www.asdablog.com/bring-your-headphones-the-impact-of-music-on-health/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[sallysklar]

Jersey Jazzman: Don't Believe the Hype: The Facts About Graduation Rates in Newark and Camden, NJ (UPDATED)

Jersey Jazzman: Don't Believe the Hype: The Facts About Graduation Rates in Newark and Camden, NJ (UPDATED)

This week, the NJ Education Policy Forum published a brief of mine on graduation rates in Newark and Camden. Not more than a couple of days later, however, the NJDOE published new graduation rate data for 2017.

So this post has two purposes: to update the data, and to explain what my analysis shows. Let me give some background first:

Over the years, two cities in New Jersey have been held up as national models for education "reform": Newark and Camden. Both are urban districts with severe economic challenges, both have many children living in poverty, and both have large populations of English Language Learners.

In addition, Newark and Camden have school districts that have been under state control for years: Newark since 1995, and Camden since 2013 (although Camden was subject to regulation by a state monitor well before that). Under state control, both cities implemented similar policies for their districts, including large expansions of charter schools.

Both cities have been run for the past several years by state superintendents who were appointed by former Governor Chris Christie. Cami Anderson was superintendent in Newark from 2011 to 2015, followed Chris Cerf, the former state Commissioner of Education, who just recently resigned. Paymon Rouhanifard was appointed by Christie in 2013 and remains in his role. All three cut their teeth in the New York City DOE during the time when Joel Klein, a master of self-promotion, was the chancellor of schools. None had ever run a school district before taking their positions.

In the past year, there's been a lot of talk about whether or not Camden and Newark have seen improvements during Chris Christie's two terms. As I explain in the brief, graduation rates are often brought up by supporters of Anderson, Cerf, and Rouhanifard as proof that their policies and leadership got positive results.

Just this past week, for example, the Star-Ledger gave a glowing review of Cerf's tenure: "The graduation rate has jumped to 77 percent, up by more than 20 points."* And last month the NY Times suggested Rouhanifard would make a fine choice to return to NYC and take over as chancellor: "In Camden, which was seen as one of the most troubled school systems in the country, Mr. Rouhanifard has improved graduation rates and lowered suspension rates."

The problem with claims like these is they lack context. It's great that graduation rates have climbed in Newark and Camden... but what if they've been climbing everywhere? What if the rises in graduation rates are part of an overall trend, and have little to nothing to do with these superintendents' policies or leadership? If that's the case, there's no reason to believe state control has led to better graduation outcomes.

So that's what I set out to explore: Did Newark's and Camden's graduation rates rise faster than other districts? Or is there a universal (what researchers often call a secular) trend that explains the rise? It sounds like a simple enough analysis, right? All we have to do is look at whether these cities saw their rates increase faster than the rest of the state...

Except there's a problem.

If you compare Newark's or Camden's graduation rate changes to all the other districts in New Jersey (which is what one author does here), you're going to have to deal with something known as a ceiling effect. I've blogged about this before:

You can't have a graduation rate over 100 percent, right? So there's a "ceiling" effect: because so many suburban districts were already graduating almost all of their students, they really couldn't improve. But more disadvantaged districts, with lower graduation rates, could and did improve.

It makes no sense to judge Newark or Camden against districts that have graduation rates near 100 percent and therefore can't get any higher. What we should do instead is judge their graduation rate growth against similar districts -- which is what I've done in the brief, and now updated here with 2017 data.

To determine which districts we should compare to Newark and Camden, I use the state's District Factor Groups (DFGs). Districts in the same DFG have similar socio-economic profiles; both Camden and Newark are DFG-A districts. The state began a new way of reporting graduation rates in 2011, so that's the baseline year. You can find all the rest of the technical information in the brief.

So, what do the data show?

The rise in graduation rates for Newark and Camden simply mirror a trend for all similar districts in New Jersey.

You can see this from the green line: all other DFG-A district saw their rates rise 11 percentage points over the past seven years. Camden's rose a bit less; Newark's somewhat more. But there's no doubt an overall trend in rising graduation rates for DFG-A districts explains a great deal of the trend in Newark and Camden.

Now, one of the arguments for state control is that they've allowed for charter school growth, and that's helped improve outcomes in Newark and Camden. As Bruce Baker and I explain in great detail, there isn't much evidence to support that contention. But let's go ahead and add charter schools into the mix -- how do Newark and Camden compare when we add in local charter school graduation rates?**

Again, it's clear that the statewide rise in graduation rates explains much of the growth in rates in Newark and Camden -- even when we add in charter schools. Yes, Newark does close the gap somewhat with other DFG-A districts. But I did some econometric modeling, and the change is not statistically significant. The updated regression outputs, using 2017 data, are below.

In addition: Baker and I found in our review that there are differences in outcome growth that appear to be correlated to regional differences; in other words, test score outcomes change in different ways in different parts of the state. So let's just look at the changes in DFG-A graduation rates for districts that are close to Newark -- in this case, within the same labor market.

Newark's graduation rates grew at almost the same rate as all the other DFG-A districts in its immediate area. And Camden?

There's only one other DFG-A district in Camden's labor market (Paulsboro). The data are noisy, but it's clear that Camden is not showing outsized growth in its graduation rate; if anything, the district is slipping.

I can only conjecture at this point, but I suspect the overall rise in graduation rates may be due to a policy called credit recovery. Newark pushed it hard in 2012, which might explain the initial bump in its graduation rate. Credit recovery includes a variety of programs -- include online learning, summer school, and so on -- that give students an opportunity to make up high school credits in subjects they previously failed.

Credit recovery is controversial: there's a lot of speculation that many programs used in credit recovery (especially on-line learning programs) are low in quality. There hasn't been a lot of study of credit recovery, and I don't know of any work specific to New Jersey on the issue.

In any case, no matter why the rates are rising, it's clear that they are rising in all DFG-A districts. Which means the claim that Newark's and Camden's graduation rate growth is due to the leadership of Anderson, Cerf, or Rouhanifard is little better than hype.

Look, I don't think it's wrong for any superintendent to promote the successes of their school district. But Newark and Camden have repeatedly been held up as exemplars, and reformy folks have pointed to their graduation rates as proof that charter school expansion and state control and "great school leaders" get results.

That's just not the case -- and it's unfair to districts like Paulsboro and Elizabeth and Orange and Irvington and Dover and East Orange, which have seen their rates rise just as much, if not more. Most of these districts haven't had large growth in their charter sector, and they remain under local control. Many of their superintendents are lifelong educators, and took the traditional route to district leadership positions: classroom, building principal, central office, with a stop along the way at a traditional university or college where they earned an advanced degree in educational administration.

Where is the applause for these leaders? Why aren't newspapers interviewing them? Where are the calls from editorial boards to bring them on board in the biggest urban districts? Why aren't they proof that local control of schools can yield good results?

I've noted this before: there are a lot of good schools and good school districts out there, serving many children living in economic disadvantage, that never get their due. They may not have leaders who relentlessly promote themselves, but that doesn't mean we should ignore them. And we certainly shouldn't foist policies on them when those policies come from districts that don't perform any better.  

Here are the updated regression tables:  

  * The piece never spells out exactly what the baseline year was for comparison.

** Aggregating the rates of charter and public district schools is tricky stuff. See the brief for how I did it.

elaine February 20, 2018

Source

Jersey Jazzman

Jersey Jazzman: Don't Believe the Hype: The Facts About Graduation Rates in Newark and Camden, NJ (UPDATED) published first on https://buyessayscheapservice.tumblr.com/

[anaandi]

Redesigning Your Office for Extroverts and Introverts

Cubicles were the norm before. Now, it’s open-plan offices.

Neither is a perfect solution. Designing an office that’s conducive to everyone’s productivity is a daunting task in itself because people have different preferences.

A key personality trait that has been given a lot of attention recently is introversion-extroversion, which impacts job fit, preferred environment, and even working style.

Despite common usage, it’s not black-and-white. Introversion-extroversion is more like a spectrum—which side of the scale you lie on determines which one you are, regardless of whether you’re near the middle or at the far end.

Introversion and Extroversion                                     

We’re not quite using the terms correctly, though. Being an extrovert doesn’t necessarily mean you’re loud, noisy, or talkative, and being introverted isn’t about being shy and quiet.

The actual distinguishing factor is what gives you energy: if you get energy from being alone, then you’re an introvert, but if you’re energized by being around people, you’re an extrovert. This means that extroverts actually get drained when they have to spend too much time alone, while introverts can only handle being around other people for so long.

Delving deeper into that, introverts are much more sensitive to stimuli—what excites an extrovert might overwhelm an introvert. Cue the lemon test: if you squeeze a lemon on people’s tongues, introverts will salivate more than extroverts.

Accurate statistics can be hard to obtain, but it’s safe to say that a significant chunk of the population belongs to each group. This means that if you want a more productive workforce, then you have to cater to the needs of both—and a crucial part of this can be reconfiguring your office to be more accommodating and pleasant to work in.

What This Means For the Office

For introverts, it’d be great if you could have places in your office where they can work in solitude if they want to. Even though most companies are converting to open-space offices now, there are studies that say that these might be more distracting than collaborative.

Introverts naturally prefer having a lot of quiet time to think, and might get stressed if they get a seat right next to the door or have to deal with frequent interruptions. Another way that they establish boundaries is putting on earphones to block out noise.

On the other hand, extroverts probably feel uncomfortable when forced to stay inside a cubicle the whole day. Because interacting with other people gets their energy levels up, it’s second nature for them to engage in conversation and banter with coworkers, and they’d be happy to have a space where they can easily reach out to other people.

Unlike introverts who get their best ideas when thinking through something on their own, extroverts tend to come up with insights when talking to others.

Compromising

But regardless of whether they’re introverted or extroverted, people still need both privacy and socializing. The best office design, then, would have different rooms that cater to both of these needs.

This makes sense when you consider that the ideal workspace may also vary per department—teams such as sales need space to interact, while product-oriented teams like design and development require solitude for deep work.

The solution to this would be an office with open-plan rooms, but also with plenty of comfortable nooks and quiet spaces, as well as meeting rooms where people can gather. People generally feel happier when they can choose where to work: give people their own desks, yes, but let them have the freedom to move around and work wherever they want in the office.

It may seem like a lot effort to customize your office with introversion-extroversion in mind, but consider that employees will be spending most of their day inside your office. Physical environment will definitely have a huge impact on their productivity, and you’d rather get it right at once rather than having to remodel or redesign when feedback streams in.   

The post Redesigning Your Office for Extroverts and Introverts appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/redesigning-office-extroverts-introverts/

[ubgamingnews]

Redesigning Your Office for Extroverts and Introverts

Cubicles were the norm before. Now, it’s open-plan offices.

Neither is a perfect solution. Designing an office that’s conducive to everyone’s productivity is a daunting task in itself because people have different preferences.

A key personality trait that has been given a lot of attention recently is introversion-extroversion, which impacts job fit, preferred environment, and even working style.

Despite common usage, it’s not black-and-white. Introversion-extroversion is more like a spectrum—which side of the scale you lie on determines which one you are, regardless of whether you’re near the middle or at the far end.

Introversion and Extroversion                                     

We’re not quite using the terms correctly, though. Being an extrovert doesn’t necessarily mean you’re loud, noisy, or talkative, and being introverted isn’t about being shy and quiet.

The actual distinguishing factor is what gives you energy: if you get energy from being alone, then you’re an introvert, but if you’re energized by being around people, you’re an extrovert. This means that extroverts actually get drained when they have to spend too much time alone, while introverts can only handle being around other people for so long.

Delving deeper into that, introverts are much more sensitive to stimuli—what excites an extrovert might overwhelm an introvert. Cue the lemon test: if you squeeze a lemon on people’s tongues, introverts will salivate more than extroverts.

Accurate statistics can be hard to obtain, but it’s safe to say that a significant chunk of the population belongs to each group. This means that if you want a more productive workforce, then you have to cater to the needs of both—and a crucial part of this can be reconfiguring your office to be more accommodating and pleasant to work in.

What This Means For the Office

For introverts, it’d be great if you could have places in your office where they can work in solitude if they want to. Even though most companies are converting to open-space offices now, there are studies that say that these might be more distracting than collaborative.

Introverts naturally prefer having a lot of quiet time to think, and might get stressed if they get a seat right next to the door or have to deal with frequent interruptions. Another way that they establish boundaries is putting on earphones to block out noise.

On the other hand, extroverts probably feel uncomfortable when forced to stay inside a cubicle the whole day. Because interacting with other people gets their energy levels up, it’s second nature for them to engage in conversation and banter with coworkers, and they’d be happy to have a space where they can easily reach out to other people.

Unlike introverts who get their best ideas when thinking through something on their own, extroverts tend to come up with insights when talking to others.

Compromising

But regardless of whether they’re introverted or extroverted, people still need both privacy and socializing. The best office design, then, would have different rooms that cater to both of these needs.

This makes sense when you consider that the ideal workspace may also vary per department—teams such as sales need space to interact, while product-oriented teams like design and development require solitude for deep work.

The solution to this would be an office with open-plan rooms, but also with plenty of comfortable nooks and quiet spaces, as well as meeting rooms where people can gather. People generally feel happier when they can choose where to work: give people their own desks, yes, but let them have the freedom to move around and work wherever they want in the office.

It may seem like a lot effort to customize your office with introversion-extroversion in mind, but consider that employees will be spending most of their day inside your office. Physical environment will definitely have a huge impact on their productivity, and you’d rather get it right at once rather than having to remodel or redesign when feedback streams in.  

The post Redesigning Your Office for Extroverts and Introverts appeared first on Sprout.

Source: https://sprout.ph/blog/redesigning-office-extroverts-introverts/

[violetp0et]

Redesigning Your Office for Extroverts and Introverts

Cubicles were the norm before. Now, it’s open-plan offices.

Neither is a perfect solution. Designing an office that’s conducive to everyone’s productivity is a daunting task in itself because people have different preferences.

A key personality trait that has been given a lot of attention recently is introversion-extroversion, which impacts job fit, preferred environment, and even working style.

Despite common usage, it’s not black-and-white. Introversion-extroversion is more like a spectrum—which side of the scale you lie on determines which one you are, regardless of whether you’re near the middle or at the far end.

Introversion and Extroversion                                     

We’re not quite using the terms correctly, though. Being an extrovert doesn’t necessarily mean you’re loud, noisy, or talkative, and being introverted isn’t about being shy and quiet.

The actual distinguishing factor is what gives you energy: if you get energy from being alone, then you’re an introvert, but if you’re energized by being around people, you’re an extrovert. This means that extroverts actually get drained when they have to spend too much time alone, while introverts can only handle being around other people for so long.

Delving deeper into that, introverts are much more sensitive to stimuli—what excites an extrovert might overwhelm an introvert. Cue the lemon test: if you squeeze a lemon on people’s tongues, introverts will salivate more than extroverts.

Accurate statistics can be hard to obtain, but it’s safe to say that a significant chunk of the population belongs to each group. This means that if you want a more productive workforce, then you have to cater to the needs of both—and a crucial part of this can be reconfiguring your office to be more accommodating and pleasant to work in.

What This Means For the Office

For introverts, it’d be great if you could have places in your office where they can work in solitude if they want to. Even though most companies are converting to open-space offices now, there are studies that say that these might be more distracting than collaborative.

Introverts naturally prefer having a lot of quiet time to think, and might get stressed if they get a seat right next to the door or have to deal with frequent interruptions. Another way that they establish boundaries is putting on earphones to block out noise.

On the other hand, extroverts probably feel uncomfortable when forced to stay inside a cubicle the whole day. Because interacting with other people gets their energy levels up, it’s second nature for them to engage in conversation and banter with coworkers, and they’d be happy to have a space where they can easily reach out to other people.

Unlike introverts who get their best ideas when thinking through something on their own, extroverts tend to come up with insights when talking to others.

Compromising

But regardless of whether they’re introverted or extroverted, people still need both privacy and socializing. The best office design, then, would have different rooms that cater to both of these needs.

This makes sense when you consider that the ideal workspace may also vary per department—teams such as sales need space to interact, while product-oriented teams like design and development require solitude for deep work.

The solution to this would be an office with open-plan rooms, but also with plenty of comfortable nooks and quiet spaces, as well as meeting rooms where people can gather. People generally feel happier when they can choose where to work: give people their own desks, yes, but let them have the freedom to move around and work wherever they want in the office.

It may seem like a lot effort to customize your office with introversion-extroversion in mind, but consider that employees will be spending most of their day inside your office. Physical environment will definitely have a huge impact on their productivity, and you’d rather get it right at once rather than having to remodel or redesign when feedback streams in.   

The post Redesigning Your Office for Extroverts and Introverts appeared first on Sprout.

Source: https://sprout.ph/blog/redesigning-office-extroverts-introverts/