Month: February 2015

One Can only Hope that California will foll of the Example of ……… Mississippi

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H/t Neo at Stellar Parthenon for the Pic

In California, a state with one of the highest rates of unvaccinated children in the nation, multiple schools have been sending non-inoculated children home in the wake of the Measles outbreak:

A California high school barred dozens of non-vaccinated students from school on Wednesday over concern that a classmate may have contracted measles in a rare outbreak of the highly contagious disease that began at a Disneyland resort last month.

 The order, which affects 66 students at Palm Desert High School near the resort community of Palm Springs, marks at least the second time a California school has prohibited non-vaccinated students from classes since the outbreak began.

 Earlier this month, a school in the Los Angeles suburb of Huntington Beach ordered non-vaccinated children to stay home until this Thursday. And in nearby Arizona, officials in Maricopa County asked non-vaccinated students who were potentially exposed to the disease to stay home.

 “We are simply responding, being very careful and making sure we’re taking the best care of students and staff,” said Mary Perry, a spokeswoman for the Desert Sands Unified School District, which overseas Palm Desert High. She said the non-vaccinated students have been ordered to stay home until Feb. 9.

All the while, Mississippi has the best child vaccination rate in the nation:

It’s tough being a child in Mississippi. The state has the nation’s worst rates for infant mortality and low-weight newborns. Its childhood poverty rate ranks as the nation’s second worst. Overall, the residents of Mississippi are the unhealthiest in the country.

 But there is one notable exception to these dour health stats: Mississippi has the highest vaccination rate for school-age children. It’s not even close. Last year, 99.7 percent of the state’s kindergartners were fully vaccinated. Just 140 students in Mississippi entered school without all of their required shots.

 Compare that with California, epicenter of the ongoing Disney measles outbreak, where last year almost 8 percent of kindergartners — totaling 41,000 children — failed to get the required immunizations against mumps, measles and rubella. In Oregon, that number was 6.8 percent. In Pennsylvania, it was nearly 15 percent, or 22,700 kindergartners. And each of these states has suffered measles outbreaks in the last two years.

 “It’s nice not having measles in Mississippi,” said Mary Currier, Mississippi state health officer.

 The secret of Mississippi’s success stems from a strong public health program and — most importantly — a strict mandatory vaccination law that lacks the loopholes found in almost every other state.

I am not quite sure just why Mississippi has the best policy in the nation, no exemption except for real medical issues, things like compromised immune systems.

The antivaxxers endanger all the rest of us on the basis of myths promulgated by a doctor who was paid off by lawyers who wanted a ready pool of rubes plaintiffs.

The final word of the day has to come from Nigerian writer and lawyer Elnathan John:

Our thoughts are also with the measles-ravaged country America. I hope we are screening them before they come to Africa.
— Elnathan John (@elnathan) February 1, 2015

My Thoughts on this Year’s Super Bowl

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Let me ask you, who are you gonna believe, Tom Brady, the greatest man in all of humanity, or a bunch of a**h**** on Twitter?

First, I do not have a dog in this hunt, though Sharon* does, being a die hard Pats fan since before Tom Brady.

I am watching for the ads.

Remember that article by Warren Sharp in Slate that said that the Patriots fumble numbers were mathematically impossible?

Yeah, not so much:

The data science community responded with a number of rebuttals (I put together a roundup of my favorite ones below). Collectively, these posts did a great job of breaking down the Statistics 101 problems with Sharp’s original analyses. But even if Sharp had been less sloppy, it would have been right to take issue with the larger implication of his work — that any major outlier, if shown to be statistically significant, should be seen as evidence of rule-breaking.

 Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong were outliers. But so is Lionel Messi. And Phil Jackson. And the San Antonio Spurs. It would be irresponsible — and depressing — to assume every incredible performance equals cheating. Celebrating outliers is one of the best parts about being a sports fan.

 I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that, in cases such as these, our traditional methods of determining statistical significance can severely underestimate the odds of something happening due to chance. That’s because of the so-called Wyatt Earp Effect, named after the frontier lawman known for taking part in lots of gunfights without getting hurt. Earp’s feat seems improbable in hindsight, but given the sheer number of shootouts in the Old West, it was actually pretty likely that somebody would make it out alive.

 Likewise, it’s difficult to estimate the true odds against a team preventing fumbles to the extent Sharp originally suggested New England did. Knowing particulars about the Patriots after the fact can bias us into computing the odds that a specific team would have a specific fumble record over a specific period of years. But the real question regarding New England’s outlier-ness should surround the odds that any team would post any outlier statistic over any span of seasons. And the probability of that happening, as you may imagine, is a lot higher than the odds of a very specific set of circumstances.

 Here were some of the responses to Sharp’s posts:

 ………

  • The harshest counterargument belonged to data scientist Drew Fustin. Fustin challenged Sharp’s choice to exclude dome teams (Sharp’s own post says outdoor teams barely fumble more often than those based in domes), instead looking at fumble rates across all teams in outdoor games only — whereupon the Patriots don’t even rank first in the NFL at fumble avoidance over the 2010-2014 period. He also questions whether Sharp’s decision to use that 2010-14 period was a case of cherry-picking the timeframe that would make the Patriots look most like an extreme outlier.

(emphasis mine)

Seriously, it’s a tempest in a teapot, and distracting all of us from the true meaning of the Super Bowl:  To sell us useless sh%$ that we really do not need and to pump up the profile of advertising firms.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.