## Saturday, December 28, 2013

### "Keep The Change" Tipping Guide

The author behind Waiter Rant --- Steve Dublanica --- followed up his successful first book with a book about tipping, Keep The Change:  A Clueless Tipper's Quest to Become the Guru of the Gratuity, and although the book is an entertaining and informative treatise on tipping, I thought it would have benefited from a matrix presenting who should be tipped and how much.  Aside from Dublanica including two appendices listing (a) who gets tipped and what during the holidays and (b) who gets tipped at a wedding, he didn't collate and list all the tipped professions in a single place for easy reference.  Since I also have, on more than one occasion, suffered from tip anxiety, I decided to create a matrix listing all the tipped professions Dublanica discusses and the expected tip amount.  Where appropriate, I also included any relevant comments (mostly his, but occasionally mine).

It should be emphasized that the expected tips are amounts that those in the industry regard as appropriate (and expected).  Clearly there is a difference between what is expected and what is received.   The amounts below reflect what is expected.

## Friday, December 27, 2013

### Type I and Type II Errors: Lay Explanation

I'm reading a book titled Merchants of Doubt:  How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway and I thought their explanation of Type I and Type II errors was particularly clear.  Although somewhat long, what they wrote is re-presented below (pp. 156-7):
The 95 percent confidence level is a social convention, a value judgement.  And the value it reflects is one that says that the worst mistake a scientist can make is to fool herself:  to think an effect is real when it is not.  Statisticians call this a type 1 error.  You can think of it as being gullible, naive, or having undue faith in your own ideas.  To avoid it, scientists place the burden of proof on the person claiming a cause and effect.  But there's another kind of error -- type 2 -- where you miss effects that are really there.  You can think of that as being excessively skeptical or overly cautious.  Conventional statistics is set up to be skeptical and avoid type 1 errors.  The 95 percent confidence standard means that there is only 1 chance in 20 that you believe something that isn't true.  That is a very high bar.  It reflects a scientific worldview in which skepticism is a virtue, credulity is not.  As one web site puts it, "A type 1 error is often considered to be more serious, and therefore more important to avoid, than a type 2 error."  In fact, some statisticians claim that type 2 errors aren't really errors at all, just missed opportunities.
Is a type 1 error more serious that a type 2?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  It depends on your point of view.  The fear of type 1 errors asks up to play dumb.  That makes sense when we really don't know what's going on in the world -- as in the early stages of a scientific investigation.  This preference also makes sense in a court of law, where we presume innocence to protect citizens from oppressive governments and overzealous prosecutors.  However, when applied to evaluating environmental hazards, the fear of gullibility can make us excessively skeptical and insufficiently cautious.  It places the burden of proof on the victim -- rather than, for example, the manufacturer of a harmful product -- and we may fail to protect some people who are really getting hurt.
There are many, many statistical texts that provide mathematical and symbolic definitions of Type I and Type II errors but when a lay book nicely articulates the definitions, it is worth noting (and remembering).

## Wednesday, November 27, 2013

### Create Fake Data: SAS vs. Stata

There are a lot of resources in both SAS and Stata for accessing fabricated (or publicly available) data shipped with the software program (e.g. -sysuse- in Stata) but it isn't immediately obvious how to create fake data from scratch.  I'm not sure if this is because doing so is largely unnecessary due to the availability of _actual_ data but I figured it would be useful to know how to create a fictional dataset on the fly if, for instance, I wanted a break from using the program datasets or if none of them were suitable for my needs.

In SAS, a single DATA step can generate several variables then output them to a SAS dataset.  A cursory Google search turned up a paper from a SAS Users Group Meeting by Andrew J. L. Cary discussing creation of data in SAS that was quite informative.  I adapted some of his code and eventually coded the block below:

data fiction (drop=i);
*set seed;
seed = 20131126;

## Thursday, January 3, 2013

### Writer's Diet Test

I'm reading Helen Sword's "Stylish Academic Writing" --- writing, especially mine, can always be improved --- and on page 60, Sword suggests visiting a website that tests your writing for its "fitness-level".  This diagnostic tool is free and examines your writing sample with respect to verb usage, stodgy nouns (nominalizations), prepositions, adjectives/adverbs, and prevalence of if/this/that/there.  An overall "fitness rating" is returned as well as ratings for each grammatical category.  The test can be accessed directly here.  I input the content of my previous blog post, "Am I?", into the test and was pleasantly surprised by the overall result:  Fit & trim (a screenshot of the result is pasted below).  I'm not so arrogant as to believe that all my writing will be as fit and as the website disclaimer states, grammatically fit writing doesn't necessarily translate to stylish or interesting.  Limitations of the test aside, though, it is an easy and fun way to diagnose your writing.

## Wednesday, January 2, 2013

### Am I?

Am I an asshole?

The question has been wearing on me for a couple of days.  On new year's eve, I had a drunken conversation with a friend of mine and at one point I jokingly wondered aloud if I was asshole, to which she replied:  "You know I love you, Clint, but sometimes you can be an asshole." Wow.  I wasn't really expecting that kind of no-hesitation response but, okay, I guess that clears up any lingering doubt.
 Photo credit:  memegenerator.net

But what constitutes asshole-ish behavior, exactly?  Occasionally, I'm guilty of breaching the asshole boundary.  I can say some insensitive things and if I'm feeling randy, I can be almost ruthless (i.e. an offensive asshole) when talking religion with someone.  A couple of instances come to mind.  The first occurred about two weeks ago at the airport.  My wife and I were pulling into the arrivals terminal to park curbside and en route to the designated area, a taxicab driver blocked our lane (they have a separate lane) then proceeded to load a few passengers with little regard for the fact that he was breaking protocol and blocking the flow of traffic.  It really irritated me so I inched up close enough to his rear bumper to make loading his trunk difficult.  He glared at me, pointed at my bumper, then gestured for me to back off.  I gestured back, put the car in reverse, and gave him the space he needed but made it clear while doing so (via wild hand waving) that he needs to get the hell out of the way.  At the time, my behavior seemed appropriate and justified --- the cabbie was breaking the rules so it seemed prudent to let him know --- but was what he did really that big of deal?  And did it justify acting like an asshole?  In the grand scheme of things, a few minutes spent waiting is trivial.  But then again, what about principle?  Some people will take advantage of nearly any situation, cheat at the first opportunity, and ruthlessly exploit loopholes --- where does society draw the line?  Do you need someone to occasionally emerge as the asshole and let them know, in no uncertain terms, that they need to queue in the back of the taxicab line and not obstruct traffic?  Depending on my mood, I can vigorously defend each position.

The second instance occurred over dinner about a week ago.  The conversation turned to religion after I made a couple of snide remarks about Catholicism and the taking of communion ("snack time!") that then dovetailed into a few earnest questions I had about Catholicism.  After my dinner mate tried to answer my questions, she then posed a few of her own:  What was my beef with Mormonism?  Could I, in a non-biased way, summarize and describe the tenets of Mormonism?  What was my religious background?  Do I believe in anything now?  (I'm not Mormon but grew up in Mormon suburbia and have read a fair amount of Mormonism so she seemed to think I was qualified to educate her on the basics of the Mormon faith.)  I realize religion and faith are very sensitive and personal topics --- a point I felt I emphasized repeatedly and diplomatically --- but I couldn't help but point out that religious moderates can't conveniently ignore and condemn the religious zealots because acknowledgement and respect of one (some?) faith(s) necessitates acknowledgement and respect of all faiths.  I insisted that my objection to religious faith isn't how religious people choose to explain the inexplicable or the way they spend their Sundays --- I really don't care --- but that a lot of religions are trying to make further inroads into the public sphere by trying to erode the barrier between church and state.  After much back-and-forth, the conversation eventually wound down to an uncomfortable and implied mutual respect for differing viewpoints.  I like to have conversations like this and am genuinely interested in understanding viewpoints different from mine and I didn't think anything I said or did during the discussion would qualify as asshole-ish but I left the dinner table feeling somewhat asshole-ish.  Is asserting one's view, especially if it may be offensive to another person's religious sensibilities, characteristically asshole-ish?   I'm not sure.  But I intend to investigate and reflect on what it means to be an asshole and whether I am one.

I just downloaded Aaron James' "Assholes:  A Theory" onto my Kindle and I'm hopeful that in spite of the occasional asshole-ish lapse, I'm not, according to James's rubric, an unadulterated, unapologetic asshole.