fatvegan

Apparently, riding a motorcycle now makes you impotent. If you're 50 years or older and ride a motorcycle you are basically guaranteed to have erectile problems (93%). I find the statistics pretty unlikely, but even if they're true I reckon it's more likely that men who've lost interest in sex go out an buy themselves motorcycles to keep themselves entertained.

Canadian GSS 1991

I like it how if people say they can't read a newspaper with or without glasses, only then do they ask if the person is blind. I also enjoy the mild sense of exasperation in the last question.

It has recently been used to estimate the demand for primary health care (Puffer 1987; Winter, 1986).

An econometric analysis of the demand for private health insurance in England and Wales (Carol Propper)

I wish my surname was Puffer. You know you can trust health care demand research done by someone with a sweet name like Puffer.

There seem to be so many academics with cute surnames. Even Propper is a cute name. Winter isn't so cute, but it is certainly pleasant. I could well imagine getting a solid primary crush on a teacher called Miss Winter.

ATTITUDE TOWARD WOMEN WORKING: EMPLYMT OF WIVES LEADS TO JUVENILE DELINQUENCY
     411       1 STRONGLY AGREE
    1543       2 AGREE
     236       3 UNDECIDED
    1870       4 DISAGREE
     288       5 STRONGLY DISAGREE

What was the world like in 1972? Surveys are great.

In 1977, seven women out of 2233 asked said the thing they disliked most about their work was job insecurity. Low earnings, long hours were much more likely to be the worst aspect of a job. I find it hard to imagine a world where nobody is worried about job security. Or even just a world where women aren't.

INTERVIEWER: HAS RESPONDENT LOST ONE OR BOTH ARMS:
IF TELEPHONE INTERVIEW, DO NOT ASK RESPONDENT.  SELECT TELEPHONE
INTERVIEW BELOW AND CONTINUE.

    8213       1 R HAS BOTH ARMS
      35       2 LOST RIGHT ARM
       4       3 LOST LEFT ARM
      70       4 LOST BOTH ARMS
     686       5 TELEPHONE INTERVIEW

I often enjoy the way research types talk about "sensitive" topics. Often in their eagerness to appear sensitive, they end up thoroughly failing to be sensitive.

Migrants from non-English speaking countries are less likely to be volunteers than Australian-born people or migrants from English-speaking nations, a new study shows.

The study, by Ernest Healy, senior research fellow at the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, challenges the notion that ethnic diversity leads to a stronger, more cohesive society.

Using levels of volunteering as an indicator of social cohesion, the study shows that suburbs with a high degree of ethnic diversity have markedly lower rates of volunteering than more homogenous localities.

Freaking ridiculous! Let's use a Western tradition like "volunteering" as an indicator for social cohesion across any community. Even communities who probably think volunteering is an odd way of spending time with people. Having been a volunteer for many years I would attest that it is thoroughly strange, but better than not spending time with people at all.

Isn't it possible that volunteering is the West's totally flawed response to our failure to build community organically? We need managers to tell us how to help people, because we're not sufficiently in touch with community to just go and help them. Volunteering is really the corporatisation of social cohesion. I'm not convinced it even serves as a good measure of cohesion even in Western societies.

I reckon a much better indicator of cohesion would be to measure the number of times you have had tea with your neighbours grandparents in the last few days. Then we'll really know who cares the most.

Fewer volunteers in migrant suburbs (SMH)

What do you think are the chances that you could find an equally good job in
the same line of work within the next few months?

   N      Min         Max          Mean            SD    Miss
4717        0         100         47.02         36.52   13672

This is from the Health and Retirement Survey. This question only covers workers over the age of 50. A few months is a pretty long time to find a new job and a 47% chance of finding one is pretty low.

The PSID is poised to become the only data ever collected on life course and multigenerational health in a long-term panel representative of the full U.S. population.

I'm reading about a number of long-term panel studies at the moment. The longest of them is the Panel Study of Income Dynamics in the US. It started in 1968 and has been running ever since. So it's pretty long.

There's a bit of excitement surrounding the PSID at the moment because some of the people who were born into the study are starting to die. So all these researchers are jumping up and down with glee because they've capture the whole life-cycle. I mostly love their use of the term "poised" to describe the imminent death of some of their longest participants.

PSID records deaths (over 4,000 since 1968) for all panel members

Over 4000! Hurrah.

Large shopping centres, elevators and the dominance of the car are driving Australia's obesity epidemic, an Australian report has found.

I would have thought that, in terms of reducing weight, large shopping centres would better than small shopping centres. The article is on SMH and is called City slickers are the new city thickers. I won't link to it because smug obesity puns make me cross, and I don't want to encourage that sort of behaviour.

I read a paper last week which attempted to find out what aspects of a visit to their GP were most important to them. It was a discrete choice experiment and one of the attributes related to the trustworthiness of the doctor. There were two possible levels of the attribute:

• doctor is trustworthy
• doctor is untrustworthy

The conclusion of the paper was that having a trustworthy doctor was the most important issue for people.

The overall design exclusive of follow-up prices can be described as a 2⁷ factorial. All profiles include cough with phlegm and most include one or more of the three other symptoms.

Parental altruism and the value of avoiding acute illness: are kids worth more than parents?

Patients with menorrhagia and menopausal problems were less likely to take part in the review appointment, which emphasises the fact that the Shared Decision Making model as currently formulated might be too optimal for certain conditions.

Involving patients in primary care consultations: assessing preferences using discrete choice experiments

Se we'll need to start optimising the level of optimality.

By convention, irrational traders and non-traders (participants who always chose the no cost option) were excluded prior to analysis.

Discrete Choice Experiment to Derive Willingness To Pay for Methyl Aminolevulinate Photodynamic Therapy Versus Simple Excision Surgery in Basal Cell Carcinoma

This is the sort of that often happens in discrete choice experiments. People whose decisions don't fit in with their assumptions are not considered worth including. In this case, people who always prefer to save money in making health care decisions (for skin cancer) are totally ignored. Those people are probably also the poorest, who may seem irrational or stubborn to comfortably off researchers, but most likely reflect the reality of not having much money. I can imagine someone conducting research on health care preferences of the uninsured and ignoring everyone whose decisions are dominated by cost.

The researchers will argue that they aren't interested in the poor and that they just want to get a general idea of what's going on. But when ignoring certain results is this arbitrary it becomes very easy to remove stuff for the wrong reasons. And when certain social groups are systematically excluded like this it's a bit troubling.

I am reading a paper about the aspects of arthritis treatment that people believe are most important. They ask people about hypothetical treatments and ask them which ones they prefer. One of the hypothetical features of these hypothetical treatments is the number of swollen joints remaining after the treatment is complete. The options available are 0, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25. Imagine having 25 swollen joints. You'd just be one big ball of swell.

As an experiment, kind of suggested by Lesley, I decided to go and do the Myers-Briggs test on behalf of Tom. I probably know Tom better than I know most other people, so I didn't have to completely make the answers up.

I won't say what results I got until Tom does it. Then we can compare and everyone can vote on which is the most accurate.

Your personality type is ISTJ.

Update: Tom has done it now. The results I got were this.

New research suggests that it isn't just mothers making children fat. Depressed parents are responsible for the obesity crisis as well. If we are to have any success in combating this obesity crisis the government must intervene to remove depressed parents and mothers from the homes of overweight children before they do anymore damage.

Sometimes my jobs leads me into funny areas.

Variation in social rank acquisition influences lifetime reproductive success in black-capped chickadees

This is one of the articles that is sort of related to our topic, but sadly won't be included because it isn't about a health issue. Not for humans at least. Problems with chickadee impotency is clearly health-related if you're a chickadee.

I'm starting to write it properly. That is a good thing.

As hypothesized by researchers, both lean and obese AAW possess a lower capacity for skeletal muscle FAO, but EET increases FAG similarly, in both AAW and CW.

Just as I always suspected.

This article is from the Border Mail. I don't like to point fingers at newspapers because they are all equally crap, but this is really crap. The title is crap. The photo is crap and meaningless. The whole idea that parents are basically to blame for child obesity is not well supported and in my opinion also crap.

Update: I just noticed that the government report was called "Weight of Opinion". What is it with obesity researchers and smug word plays in their titles?

It reminds me of a presentation a couple of years ago about contraceptive usage. It wasn't a wordplay, but it was called "A Rising Tide?" The final punchline of the presentation was "... and the data shows that the tide will rise." It managed to make safe sex practices sound quite frightening.