Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

Sydney had been planning to fly out to Boston tomorrow to give a paper at the philosophy association’s annual meeting.  But he’s now fighting his own round of the flu, and it looks like condition at the airports in both London and Boston will be messy, so he’s decided to cancel the trip.  Now we just have to extricate him from all of the plans he’s made to get there!  As glad as I am not to have sole charge of Katherine and the house for a week, and not to have to wonder whether my husband will join the hundreds of people sleeping in the terminals at Heathrow, I have to wish that he could remain here in better shape.

Erin

Ha.  Ha ha.  Not what we needed.  K managed to fend off the worst with a high fever and some sniffles (as well as waking nearly every hour for the past several nights).  I got nailed and am only just up and about again.  Sydney worries that he’s next.  So, bear with us, Christmas will be a pretty low-key affair around here.  But I am determined that we’ll have things together by next year and celebrate a bit more thoroughly: a good church home, a tree, more cooking, and more singing of carols.

A huge box arrived today, with clothes and diapers for the baby.  Thank you, Jenny, for passing them along to Mom, and thanks, Mom, for sending them all the way over here!  As I was looking at all of the little things that Katherine wore when she was born I realized a bit more that there really is a baby coming, and that it really will change things.  And, seeing that we have both pink and blue blankets, I wonder who we’ll get!

Erin

Last Sunday we had dinner with Sydney’s colleague, Chris, a man who bravely made the invitation for the whole family and who has two (grown) kids of his own.  Katherine did a great job of keeping her dress clean and she loved having a different house to conquer–err, explore.

Erin

Erin

Dissertation deadlines and the like have, to put it mildly, affected the Christmas spirit around here, but we’ve gotten a few nice surprises from Oxford to help us along.  On Friday Sydney and I enjoyed our first night out together, with the help of a babysitter.  I accompanied my tux-clad husband to the Christmas dinner in Merton, his college, and we had a nice time.  Lots of people to meet, lots of food to comment over, and lots of lovely rooms spruced up for the occasion, including Christmas trees in the courtyard and in the hall where we ate.

Academia is a bit different over here, with people from different disciplines mingling at meals, and then joined by distinguished guests with ties to the college at formal occasions.  Unlike the holiday occasions we’ve attended in the States, the philosophers and English types don’t simply stick to their own kind and have done with the rest of the world.  Here one is required to master the art of small talk; I was amused to hear Sydney’s physicist colleague explain his work (accompanied by two or three jokes) to a lord on one side and the wife of a philosophy professor on the other.

We woke up the next morning to snow, fluffy stuff which gradually grew to more than six inches over the course of the day.  I was invigorated by the light and freshness the snow brought.  K and I amused ourselves by watching people in various forms of winter dress make their way down the unploughed streets and sidewalks.  Since only about a quarter of the roads are being ploughed, and since all of the major English airports (and several of the European ones) and many train and bus services are closed, it really did feel like a holiday.  We took walks in the park, where I was grateful to have had a lot of experience treading snowy paths.  I tried to interest Katherine in the snow and share my enthusiasm with her, but she was much more interested in simply looking around than in getting down to play in it.

It looks like the snow is here to stay for awhile, with regular refreshing falls scheduled over the next week and consistently cold temperatures, so we’re planning to enjoy the extra quiet it brings to the town of Oxford.  And we’re not going to starve: we still live just down the street from the grocery store, and we’re expecting a huge box of vegetables to be delivered today.

Erin

Conversing with Katherine is quite entertaining.  She spends much of her day looking and pointing at objects (which you are supposed to then name), but sometimes she goes on lectures, sitting perfectly upright, pointing at various things around the room, and babbling on and on.  We try to “help” by asking questions, but, though she often gets the sense that we’re asking a question, she has only one answer.  She stops talking, looks at you slowly and seriously, and utters, with perfect clarity and severity, “Noooo nooo.”  And, just to make her point, “Ohhhh, noooooooo.”  Another solemn look and then she resumes her lecture.

Erin

Erin

– We find ourselves living in a house with sloped floors.  The one in the main area is obvious, with a clear slope rising up to the kitchen–which was obviously a late addition in this house sometime in its 400-year history.  The one in the main bedroom is less obvious, though it doesn’t take more than a minute of walking around to find that you are bracing yourself slightly as you stand.  The one on the top floor is subtlest, only discovered after half a night of sleeplessness and a slightly stuffy nose–after which you rip the bedclothes off and make the foot of your bed the new head!

– We buy Katherine bouncy balls, to take advantage of these built-in ramps.  Our house now looks like it has dogs or cats living in it, rather than children.

– After playing happily with the bouncy balls for weeks, Katherine, in a fit of teething frenzy, bites into one and proceeds to take out several chunks before we catch her at it.  Bouncy balls go into the trash.

– Erin, in love with bouncy balls herself, finds some that are harder rubber and larger (with glitter inside!), and our house is once again filled with ominous thumps and dangers for those not watching out for things underfoot.

Erin

Yeah, yeah, I know that for a lot of you diapers just mean “gross.”  You don’t need to read this.  Others of you, however, spend a good deal of your time contemplating the best way to keep your kids’ bottoms clean and dry, so I hope that this will be helpful.

We’ve been pretty happy cloth diaperers with Katherine.  I hate throwing things away, and I also dislike having to run to the store for essentials every time I turn around.  The initial challenge of keeping up with the laundry became manageable over time, and, though I was less-than-thrilled with the conjunction of cloth diapering and six months of travel, I thought that was just an unfortunate–and unforseen–effect of our mobile life that would end with our settling in Oxford.

But I think the honeymoon is coming to an end.  In the past few months Katherine has simply outgrown her cloth diapers.  No amount of additional padding, super-absorbent layering, or frequent changing seems to be sufficient to keep up with her output.  Yeah, we know, potty-training, but we’re only just getting to the point where we can communicate with her about food and water, so we’re not there yet.  For our second child, I’m going to see how it goes.  Cloth diapers through breastfeeding: great thing.  Cloth diapers when serious-solid-food cleaning/numerous daily clothing changes/teething upset stomachs become issues: not worth the effort and the water use.

Since a number of you have small children or are contemplating them, I just thought I should be honest about what we’ve found.  Katherine does drink an outrageous amount of water, and she seems to teethe harder than a lot of other kids (and for months at a time), so I doubt that our situation is the norm.  Here’s hoping your kid is different, if you give cloth diapering a try!

Erin

One of the quirks at Merton College is that people with junior research fellowships, e.g., like me, are also members of the College’s Governing Body. As expected, this means that I get to go to long meetings where we talk about everything from who to elect as new fellows to who donated how much money to the college to which publishers get to use which images from our library in their books to how much damage some drunk alumni caused at a party last week. Less expected was the letter I received recently from some government agency or other informing me of just how seriously I should take my new role as a trustee of a charitable institution. Anyway, much of life as part of the Governing Body is tedium, but sometimes it is interesting to see what matters look like from the other side than the side visible to most people. For example, Merton College is being featured all over the place today (e.g., in this Guardian article) after a Labour MP gave Merton pride of place in his story of racism, classism, elitism, and so forth at Cambridge and Oxford. Merton’s sin? Not admitting any black students in the last five years. Now it’s worth noting that anyone who actually knows how to do decent statistical analysis could have told you that that fact (were it such) might well just be statistical noise given the numbers of applicants involved. But, as it happens, there isn’t even any such fact. Mertonians who have with their very own eyes seen black students walking around — as recently as this year, no less! — are rather unimpressed with the MP’s research abilities.

Mistakes of that sort could be multiplied, but that, too, would become tedious. There is, however, a much more interesting problem with the numbers presented for Oxford as a whole. The claim is that black applicants are admitted at lower rates than white applicants. That claim is, I believe, actually true. But here we face the spectre of Simpson’s Paradox. Since that is one of my very favourite paradoxes, I can’t resist talking about it.

Imagine we are considering the effectiveness of two medical treatments A and B and we have two test populations X and Y. We test treatment A on part of population X and part of population Y. Ditto for treatment B. Now consider the following argument:

1. A higher percentage of patients in population X taking treatment A recovered than those taking treatment B.
2. A higher percentage of patients in population Y taking treatment A recovered than those taking treatment B.
3. Therefore, a higher percentage of patients in the total population taking treatment A recovered than those taking treatment B.

Alternatively, suppose we have the aggregate data but not the data from the individual tests:

1. A higher percentage of patients in the total population taking treatment B recovered than those taking treatment A.
2. Therefore, in either population X or Y, a higher percentage of patients taking treatment B recovered than those taking treatment A.

The arguments look good, don’t they? But they’re bad. Both of them. And understanding Simpson’s Paradox will show you why. In short, Simpson’s Paradox shows that two variables can be correlated in a population but, when the population is partitioned, the same two variables can be inversely correlated.

We’ll have to use some numbers to see how this works. But first imagine the following scenario: Old College has two departments (let’s not make this more difficult than it has to be): History and Engineering. History is an old, large department. Economics is newer and smaller. Economics, however, is more popular with incoming students than History is and so the acceptance rates are much lower than for History. The college is progressive and so, in an effort to redress wrongs, has instituted an affirmative action program on behalf of black applicants. The college has directed both departments to accept twice as high a percentage of black applicants as of white applicants. Imagine the college president’s horror, then, on the day he reads the following headline in the morning paper: “Racist Old College accepts 17% of white applicants but only 11% of black applicants”. Worse, the numbers are right. He can’t even respond by denying them.

This is where we’ll need numbers:

So how is it possible that each department favours black applicants and yet whites are admitted at a higher rate than blacks when we look at the college as a whole? Easy: black applicants are applying in larger numbers to the department that is harder to get into.

And that is at least part of the story at Oxford. An astonishingly high percentage of black applicants are directed to a handful of the subjects that are the most difficult to get into. Is that the complete explanation? I doubt it. Stories are seldom quite that straightforward. Is institutional racism a major factor? I doubt that, too, though I haven’t been around here long enough to have much insight into that question.

More general moral of the story: statistics are valuable, but, even when true, they need to be interpreted carefully.

And, isn’t Simpson’s Paradox fun? I wish I could discover something ingenious like that. For more on it, see here and here (the latter includes a bunch of real-life examples).

Sydney