If the Internet were a person, her achievements would be myriad: community-based knowledge creation, an expansive index of fetish pornography, instant access to a world of current events, free real-time communication with anyone one the planet, and universal access to massive libraries of publicly-funded data reserves! The World Wide Web, coupled with her sister Geospatial Data, brings you the National Atlas, a two-dimensional gold mine of place-based information about the United States.
Yes! Geospatial data! That's up there with Lego in my nerdly pleasure hierarchy.
The National Atlas has many awesome features - printable maps of every presidential election result since 1789, dynamic maps of monthly vegetation growth in America, downloadable raw data on which the maps are based - but the coolest way to impress your friends is with the National Atlas Map Maker. Go ahead, indulge in a few hours of exploration. Each layer is a tasty little nugget of data visually describing our country's energy use, geology, economic health, or some other nifty construct. Most data are disaggregated by county, which is neat when trying to illustrate, for example, how different San Francisco is from, say, Inyo County.
Not only are the maps a fun and easy way to absorb information about your United States, they're also a handy tool in political debates. Is your racist Midwestern uncle claiming that Mexicans are taking his job? Go ahead and show him that his county is less than 3% Hispanic, then let him observe the apparent lack of correlation between Hispanic population and jobs per capita and unemployment rates! You'll be the life of the party.
Or show all your cheese-eating in-laws that colon cancer rates are highly concentrated in the upper Midwest, then illustrate that the American West enjoys lower cancer rates than everyone else. Everyone likes a know-it-all.
Or, less argumentatively, simply peruse cool information like vegetable harvesting acreage or fertility rates among women over 40 or the location and magnitude of earthquakes since the late 16th century. (California leads the pack in all three categories.)
A caveat: Raw number data in the same category might not be easily compared across time periods due to varied distribution of color codes from one map to the next. For example, in the map of "Percent of Population: White" for 2000, the bright yellow indicates a percentage range of 0.1 to 33.1; in the 1980 map of the same variable, the bright yellow represents 6.332 to 38.928 percentage points. This distribution is based on a formula I learned about in my brief ArcGIS training; I forgot the name of the formula, but it distributes ranges in a more informative way than a simple linear distribution would.
Hopefully USGS will include a map illustrating climate change over the centuries and degades once it's available. I look forward to the depressing news.
Happy mapmaking!
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Saturday, December 16, 2006
I Can Give You Facts and Figures, I Could Give You Plans and Forecasts
If you want to see me angry, remind me about the Bush administration's insistence that sex education funds be given exclusively to abstinence-only programs. This isn't because I think teenagers shouldn't be abstinent (it didn't hurt me none). It's not even that I think abstinence-only education is the underhanded tool of fundamental Christians trying to shoehorn religious teachings into public education (though it totally is).
No, the reason I get so steamed about abstinence-only sex ed is because it doesn't even work! More comprehensive sex ed programs, such as those touting abstinence and condoms, are more successful at preventing teen pregnancy, STDs, and sexual activity. So, based on the research, if fundies really wanted to curb the clap and unwanted babies (and, by extension, abortions), they'd promote comprehensive sex ed over the laughable "not 'til you're married" policy.
Beware--I invoked the holy name of Research when debating an emotionally-charged topic. For some reason research isn't a popular tool in policy making; in some contexts, it's practically a dirty word. There's something about a nerd with a pie chart telling you that your 12-year-old daughter should watch her teacher roll a condom over a banana that, well, rubs parents the wrong way. Who the hell do you think you are, with your fancy applied statistics degree and flashy bar graphs. Do you even have a daughter of your own?
Sure, we pretend to advocate the use of research in civic decision-making. Representatives like to walk onto Capitol Hill with a stack of charts and data under their arm. Constituencies like the authenticity that research affords their lawmakers. When a bearded Berkeley professor goes on the local news to act as an expert about the connection between carbon emissions and climate change, audiences hold that researcher in a certain regard. For a moment.
When it comes down to it, though, beliefs will always trump facts.
There are plenty of reasons for this. The first and most subtle is that Americans don't like know-it-alls. Data are exotic and mysterious, and come to think of it most of us have always hated math. Sarah Vowell writes about this phenomenon when assessing why voters undervalued Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. Al Gore embodies what the populace hates about research-oriented thinkers: he uses big words, cites numbers and trends and published reports, and then acts like he knows more than I do because, most likely, he knows more than I do. He's a big nerd, and he makes us feel dumb. Researchers, experts, and Al Gore spend their whole careers rubbing it our face that they know better than we do how we should spend our lives. The audacity!
That brings me to the next reason Americans dismiss poindexters and their highfalutin' data: we don't like people telling us what to do. A lot of research out there is exploratory--it seeks to discover unknown facts. It's when research gets prescriptive, however, that we get ornery. And when research hops in bed with policy, the most prescriptive element of our society, it feels like mom and dad are making us eat our veggies.
Along those lines, the most obvious reason we poo-poo research in policy is that we're confident that we know how to take care of ourselves, no matter what the bespectacled number-crunchers say. It's the same mentality that prompts some of us to never wear our seat belts; seat belts are for bad drivers, not me. Or sometimes the research results in question counter everything we've experienced in our lives. How can pork be bad for you if my granny ate a rack of ribs every day until the day she died at the age of 98? Or the research results might simply be counter-intuitive. You mean red light cameras actually increase car accidents? No way! Very simply, research can prescribe behaviors that completely violate preexisting beliefs, morals, or folk knowledge, and it's going to take more than a few papers published in Harvard Educational Review to change our minds about how schools should be run. If my parents always told me that milk builds strong bones, I'm not going to value research that says it doesn't. If I think pre-teens shouldn't be exposed to condoms, I don't care if the Mighty World of Research says they should. If I think God created the Earth in six days, fossil records mean nothing to me.
There is one last, and semi-logical, reason to question the role of research in your daily life. Frankly, research results are confusing, conflicting, and ever-changing. Is milk bad for me or good for me? What about beef? Vitamins? Some research says yes, and some says no! From a layperson's perspective, the Research Community can't make up its mind. "Research" is viewed as an amorphous lump of scientists in lab coats, a unified coalition of smarty-pants who convene every year to agree on the Truth. So it's a little confusing when one member of the research community says milk makes you fat while another equally believable source says it'll help you lose weight. To decipher all the conflicting information would require a degree of research methods and statistics literacy that very few people actually have.
The truth is that most the research that gets published and makes headlines is internally valid, and usually fairly externally valid. The source of confusion is in how these data are presented to the public: the USA Today headline says something earth-shattering like "Watching TV Makes your Kids Stupid," when in reality the research study simply correlated television viewing with lower grades. How is Joanne Meatball supposed to detect the nuanced differences between those two statements? If you carefully examine every study that makes the front page, you'll find that most of them are sound, and most of the studies that reveal ostensibly opposed truths are actually measuring completely different constructs. But if I can't understand what the data imply, why should I trust it?
The question is whether these are actually good reasons to discourage the marriage of research and law.
The advantages of research-based policy are clear. We would expect to see laws actually yield their intended results at a greater rate than currently enjoyed, assuming the policies are enforced properly. Fewer pregnant teenagers, fewer women with osteoporosis, fewer inmates on death row, fewer gun deaths, fewer accidents at lit intersections. It's a utopia waiting to happen.
The disadvantages are not easily overlooked, though. What if the policy that research prescribes violates the sanctity of civil liberties? So what if tracking sex offenders with GPS devices is effective at reducing repeat crimes? It's also invasive and cruel. (Come to think of it, though, I doubt if it'll prove effective.) Relying heavily on research to inform policy is precariously undemocratic. When lawmaking is put in the hands of unelected experts, the public's right to enforce their beliefs, however unfounded, is limited. For better or worse, it's my right as an American to demand that morals, not science, dictate policy. And given how inscrutable most research is, who would mediate between the academic world and the policy-making world? Would their motives be free of bias? Finally, as new data are collected, the "facts" can change with generations. Can we afford to bend law around a seemingly fickle collection of truths?
Despite these drawbacks, research should play a more prominent role in lawmaking. I think resistance to fact-based policy is rooted primarily in unfounded skepticism and ignorance, and perhaps a little in hardheadedness. Americans display a distrust of science not observed in comparable nations, and while it hasn't been stifling our short-term economic health, our environmental and personal health is suffering as a result.
Plus my income for the last three years has relied on publicly funded education research, so maybe I'm just looking out for Numero Uno.
No, the reason I get so steamed about abstinence-only sex ed is because it doesn't even work! More comprehensive sex ed programs, such as those touting abstinence and condoms, are more successful at preventing teen pregnancy, STDs, and sexual activity. So, based on the research, if fundies really wanted to curb the clap and unwanted babies (and, by extension, abortions), they'd promote comprehensive sex ed over the laughable "not 'til you're married" policy.
Beware--I invoked the holy name of Research when debating an emotionally-charged topic. For some reason research isn't a popular tool in policy making; in some contexts, it's practically a dirty word. There's something about a nerd with a pie chart telling you that your 12-year-old daughter should watch her teacher roll a condom over a banana that, well, rubs parents the wrong way. Who the hell do you think you are, with your fancy applied statistics degree and flashy bar graphs. Do you even have a daughter of your own?
Sure, we pretend to advocate the use of research in civic decision-making. Representatives like to walk onto Capitol Hill with a stack of charts and data under their arm. Constituencies like the authenticity that research affords their lawmakers. When a bearded Berkeley professor goes on the local news to act as an expert about the connection between carbon emissions and climate change, audiences hold that researcher in a certain regard. For a moment.
When it comes down to it, though, beliefs will always trump facts.
There are plenty of reasons for this. The first and most subtle is that Americans don't like know-it-alls. Data are exotic and mysterious, and come to think of it most of us have always hated math. Sarah Vowell writes about this phenomenon when assessing why voters undervalued Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. Al Gore embodies what the populace hates about research-oriented thinkers: he uses big words, cites numbers and trends and published reports, and then acts like he knows more than I do because, most likely, he knows more than I do. He's a big nerd, and he makes us feel dumb. Researchers, experts, and Al Gore spend their whole careers rubbing it our face that they know better than we do how we should spend our lives. The audacity!
That brings me to the next reason Americans dismiss poindexters and their highfalutin' data: we don't like people telling us what to do. A lot of research out there is exploratory--it seeks to discover unknown facts. It's when research gets prescriptive, however, that we get ornery. And when research hops in bed with policy, the most prescriptive element of our society, it feels like mom and dad are making us eat our veggies.
Along those lines, the most obvious reason we poo-poo research in policy is that we're confident that we know how to take care of ourselves, no matter what the bespectacled number-crunchers say. It's the same mentality that prompts some of us to never wear our seat belts; seat belts are for bad drivers, not me. Or sometimes the research results in question counter everything we've experienced in our lives. How can pork be bad for you if my granny ate a rack of ribs every day until the day she died at the age of 98? Or the research results might simply be counter-intuitive. You mean red light cameras actually increase car accidents? No way! Very simply, research can prescribe behaviors that completely violate preexisting beliefs, morals, or folk knowledge, and it's going to take more than a few papers published in Harvard Educational Review to change our minds about how schools should be run. If my parents always told me that milk builds strong bones, I'm not going to value research that says it doesn't. If I think pre-teens shouldn't be exposed to condoms, I don't care if the Mighty World of Research says they should. If I think God created the Earth in six days, fossil records mean nothing to me.
There is one last, and semi-logical, reason to question the role of research in your daily life. Frankly, research results are confusing, conflicting, and ever-changing. Is milk bad for me or good for me? What about beef? Vitamins? Some research says yes, and some says no! From a layperson's perspective, the Research Community can't make up its mind. "Research" is viewed as an amorphous lump of scientists in lab coats, a unified coalition of smarty-pants who convene every year to agree on the Truth. So it's a little confusing when one member of the research community says milk makes you fat while another equally believable source says it'll help you lose weight. To decipher all the conflicting information would require a degree of research methods and statistics literacy that very few people actually have.
The truth is that most the research that gets published and makes headlines is internally valid, and usually fairly externally valid. The source of confusion is in how these data are presented to the public: the USA Today headline says something earth-shattering like "Watching TV Makes your Kids Stupid," when in reality the research study simply correlated television viewing with lower grades. How is Joanne Meatball supposed to detect the nuanced differences between those two statements? If you carefully examine every study that makes the front page, you'll find that most of them are sound, and most of the studies that reveal ostensibly opposed truths are actually measuring completely different constructs. But if I can't understand what the data imply, why should I trust it?
The question is whether these are actually good reasons to discourage the marriage of research and law.
The advantages of research-based policy are clear. We would expect to see laws actually yield their intended results at a greater rate than currently enjoyed, assuming the policies are enforced properly. Fewer pregnant teenagers, fewer women with osteoporosis, fewer inmates on death row, fewer gun deaths, fewer accidents at lit intersections. It's a utopia waiting to happen.
The disadvantages are not easily overlooked, though. What if the policy that research prescribes violates the sanctity of civil liberties? So what if tracking sex offenders with GPS devices is effective at reducing repeat crimes? It's also invasive and cruel. (Come to think of it, though, I doubt if it'll prove effective.) Relying heavily on research to inform policy is precariously undemocratic. When lawmaking is put in the hands of unelected experts, the public's right to enforce their beliefs, however unfounded, is limited. For better or worse, it's my right as an American to demand that morals, not science, dictate policy. And given how inscrutable most research is, who would mediate between the academic world and the policy-making world? Would their motives be free of bias? Finally, as new data are collected, the "facts" can change with generations. Can we afford to bend law around a seemingly fickle collection of truths?
Despite these drawbacks, research should play a more prominent role in lawmaking. I think resistance to fact-based policy is rooted primarily in unfounded skepticism and ignorance, and perhaps a little in hardheadedness. Americans display a distrust of science not observed in comparable nations, and while it hasn't been stifling our short-term economic health, our environmental and personal health is suffering as a result.
Plus my income for the last three years has relied on publicly funded education research, so maybe I'm just looking out for Numero Uno.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
What's Wrong with America
For some ungodly reason (I think his Hungarian grandpa, who also belives in hexes, is the responsible party), my boyfriend was sentenced to a subscription to the paragon of baseless conservative outrage-mongering, The Reader's Digest, so when it shows up in our apartment mailbox, I peruse it sometimes, just for laffs.
One article in the September issue examines three case studies of "A+" students, one from a home school, another from a private school, and the third from--and this is supposed to be shocking to the reader--a plain-old public school! Anyhow, the introductory paragraph rattles off a litany of indicators that America's schools are failing: a quarter of students don't finish high school, only a third of eighth graders score at grade level in math and reading, etc.
Naturally these startling--startling!--figures aren't compared to statistics from previous generations' students (thanks, Paul), but rest assured that "[w]hen it comes to education, our children are in trouble." Assuming we're worse off now that twenty years ago (which I doubt), whom should we blame for our crippling moral failure as a nation? Lack of funding from federal and state governments? Increased grade-level standards and AYPs? Atheists and homosexuals? No, silly. Teachers!
In an unrelated story, as reported by the Wall Street Journal this morning (this also arrives into my house under my boyfriend's name--this time it's his dad's fault), bears are bothering people in their homes and recreational areas more than they used to. (They are?) Of course this troubling conflict is because bears are getting too bold, not because humans continue to encroach upon bears' habitat. Uh, yeah.
If I were queen of America I'd pass a law that if you publish supposedly alarming statistics then you have to (a) offer comparative statistics (from either another geographic area or time period, just so we know why we should be pissed off) and (b) actually analyze the causes in a fair, realistic way.
If American schools are failing to do anything it's teaching people how to examine causes when citing an effect.
One article in the September issue examines three case studies of "A+" students, one from a home school, another from a private school, and the third from--and this is supposed to be shocking to the reader--a plain-old public school! Anyhow, the introductory paragraph rattles off a litany of indicators that America's schools are failing: a quarter of students don't finish high school, only a third of eighth graders score at grade level in math and reading, etc.
Naturally these startling--startling!--figures aren't compared to statistics from previous generations' students (thanks, Paul), but rest assured that "[w]hen it comes to education, our children are in trouble." Assuming we're worse off now that twenty years ago (which I doubt), whom should we blame for our crippling moral failure as a nation? Lack of funding from federal and state governments? Increased grade-level standards and AYPs? Atheists and homosexuals? No, silly. Teachers!
There are plenty of reasons for all that failure--from stultifying school bureaucracy to reform-resistant teachers unions to poorly qualified teachers.Does anyone actually believe this? Are morons across this great nation actually falling for the witch-huntery that the media levy against educators? Do people actually think that waves of unqualified idiots are plucked from local rehab clinics and prison cells to teach American children? Where did all these horrible teachers come from?
In an unrelated story, as reported by the Wall Street Journal this morning (this also arrives into my house under my boyfriend's name--this time it's his dad's fault), bears are bothering people in their homes and recreational areas more than they used to. (They are?) Of course this troubling conflict is because bears are getting too bold, not because humans continue to encroach upon bears' habitat. Uh, yeah.
If I were queen of America I'd pass a law that if you publish supposedly alarming statistics then you have to (a) offer comparative statistics (from either another geographic area or time period, just so we know why we should be pissed off) and (b) actually analyze the causes in a fair, realistic way.
If American schools are failing to do anything it's teaching people how to examine causes when citing an effect.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)