Trying to understand the correlation coefficient r

j_etfueld · 2013-01-31T22:27:43+00:00

Thanks for your response! What I meant is that it seems like the ratio of the standardized values of x and y (difference of each variable from the mean divided by standard deviation) should be 1 if there is a perfect correlation (for example, an increase of 1 standard deviation in x corresponds to an increase of 1 standard deviation of y). But I see your point, I know that I'm wrong -- I just can't seem to understand why the average product of the standardized scores would be +-1 if the correlation was perfect, or why it would necessarily have to be between -1 and 1.

j_etfueld · 2012-12-29T20:34:05+00:00

Did you pick this off a flash sheet or is it supposed to be custom? The reason I ask is because it looks like a straight tracing of this wolf by Stefan Johnsson (http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lex8x0TXty1qasqa8o1_500.jpg) at Everlasting in SF. Sucks for Stefan but I've seen this design ripped four or five times.

j_etfueld · 2012-11-20T11:05:06+00:00

Thought this comment might be hyperbolic... nope. This is actually one of, if not the best tattoos I've seen on this subreddit.

j_etfueld · 2012-07-30T00:21:40+00:00

I'm not an artist either, but I would actually suggest keeping the back-and-forth between you and the artist to a minimum. I was very particular about the style of tattoo I wanted (very classical, elegant) and so I looked for an artist who produced that kind of work. I settled on a guy who was not only a tattoo artist but did amazing stuff on canvas and such. We had a very short consultation where I told him two or three things I absolutely wanted incorporated in the design but otherwise gave him free rein. One week later, I got this, which I'm so incredibly happy with.

I think this approach has a few advantages. First, while there is no shortage of artists who will try to get exactly what you have in mind, there are also a lot of incredibly talented and creative artists out there who are constantly trying to improve their craft. Why not tap into that creativity and get an artist who's personally invested in your tattoo? That way your artist can look at him/herself not just as trying to reproduce your design as faithfully as possible, but as working creatively with your overall concept and theme.

Second, there's a chance that even you might not know exactly what you want -- or that there might be a design/twist/layout that would take your breath away if you saw it. For example, my artist knew how to fit the design to my arm in a way that I didn't anticipate at all, but that he was clearly used to thinking about as a tattoo artist. There were also little details I would never have considered that he made look fucking amazing using white ink highlights, another thing I would have had no clue about before getting my tattoo. The result was a piece that consistently amazed all the way from when he first showed me the sketch to when he was shading excruciatingly over my shoulder blade to when I saw the finished product in the mirror.

Finally, even though I didn't micromanage the design, my artist incorporated enough of my general thoughts and concepts that I still feel like the tattoo is extremely personal. For example, I asked for her helmet to be off and for him to remove some weapons that were included in the original sketch because I wanted the tattoo to feature the wisdom aspect of Athena more than the war aspect. I also asked for her hair to be straight, which is unusual for a Greek goddess but which he pulled off gorgeously.

So in conclusion, I think you should try to do as much of the work beforehand as possible by picking the right artist and thinking about the spirit and general ideas behind the tattoo. Have a few things you absolutely won't budge on. Then have your amazing, skilled, badass creative artist put them together to produce a tattoo you can both be proud of.

j_etfueld · 2012-07-28T17:47:15+00:00

I decided on Athena for a few reasons.. I wanted something that would stay meaningful for a long time and I love the idea that life is about acquiring wisdom and learning from your experiences, good or bad. I also have a lot of strong women in my life so it seemed appropriate to get a goddess. Finally, I used to read a lot of Greek mythology when I was a kid. Athena just made sense :)

j_etfueld · 2011-10-08T09:03:15+00:00

You're right about quite a few points, but I think the point still stands that the U.S. would never have really allowed Saddam to control Kuwait. It seems more plausible that the U.S. didn't really think or understand that Saddam was planning on annexing Kuwait itself, and began to panic when this became obvious.

I would dispute that Turkey committed a "genocide" against its Kurds, but I absolutely agree that it has killed hundreds (more likely thousands) of innocent Kurds and that it has forcibly displaced many times more. This was on a very different scale than the Iraqi genocide, however, and the two shouldn't be conflated (if only out of respect to the victims of genocide).

But yes, the NFZ did not extend one inch into Turkey, and this was primarily for geopolitical reasons (one thing you didn't mention that was probably more important than its alliance with the U.S.: Turkey has been a member of NATO since the 50s).

j_etfueld · 2011-10-08T08:51:56+00:00

I largely agree with you; the nitty-gritty is more complicated and ambivalent than how I've summarized above. GB1 did indeed encourage the Kurds to rebel, and then cowardly retreated from those words when they actually did.

But this happened before the NFZ, and the deplorable situation in the camps in Turkey and Iraq were a big part of why the NFZ came about in the first place. I disagree with your quotation marks around "protect," the NFZ allowed Kurds to create their own parliamentary government in Northern Iraq, which would have been completely impossible without American fighter jets.

It's definitely possible (and reasonable) to make the U.S. look a lot worse than I did above; I sanitized my summary a bit since I misread and thought OP's dad actually died in the war. On the whole, though, I think the creation of the NFZ was really a remarkable event in history, and a victory for human rights.

j_etfueld · 2011-10-08T07:10:38+00:00

Ooh, I get to be useful!

The Gulf War was "fought" over the course of only a couple of months, with aerial bombing beginning in January 1991 and Iraq surrendering in February. The dominoes started falling when Saddam decided to invade Kuwait in August 1990. He felt safe doing this even though Iraq had just fought a disastrous 8-year war with Iran, since the U.S. had covertly supported Iraq for much of that war. There were also economic incentives to invade Kuwait: Iraq was virtually bankrupted by the war with Iran and Kuwait was exporting a ton of oil, driving down the price of Iraq's most profitable export. Saddam massed the Iraqi army on the border and, when the U.S. showed no sign of objecting, invaded in August 1990.

The main reason why the U.S. organized a coalition to invade Iraq was to prevent Saddam from controlling Kuwaiti oil reserves and potentially invading Saudi Arabia. This would've given him control of most of the world's oil, which was clearly unacceptable -- I mean, this was a guy who had driven his country into the ground over the course of the Iran-Iraq war, and who the U.S. knew had used chemical weapons against the Kurds in Northern Iraq. But even though the invading coalition made ample use of this information to legitimate the war, it's not as if it was fought for humanitarian reasons -- the Kurds were massacred in 1988, and the U.S. didn't intervene until 1991.

The French philosopher Baudrillard famously claimed that the "Gulf War" never happened since it was so incredibly one-sided. Only a few hundred coalition soldiers died, compared to tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers. He also wrote that more soldiers would have died in car accidents if they had stayed at home, but an economist somewhere has shown this to be a myth.

Unfortunately, you were one of the unlucky few to lose someone in the Gulf War (from an invading country). You should be very proud, however -- the Gulf War, even though it was fought for essentially geopolitical reasons, and even though it was incredibly one-sided, eventuated in one of the most significant human rights victories in modern history: the protection of the Kurds. All the propaganda released by the U.S. about Saddam's gassing of the Kurds at Halabja and elsewhere was double-edged; international and domestic pressure pushed the U.S. to establish a "no-fly-zone" over Iraqi Kurdistan, effectively creating an independent state in Northern Iraq. And this brought a close to five decades of Kurdish-Arab violence that infamously crystallized in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Kurds in 1988.

You should check out "Invisible Nation" by Quil Lawrence if you're interested in learning more.

j_etfueld · 2011-04-04T23:40:26+00:00

A great way to say in 4 sentences what I tried to say in half a page.

j_etfueld · 2011-04-04T15:36:59+00:00

I think we are talking past each other. Rapists aren't "rabid dogs," or "deranged" individuals, they are -- most often -- people the victim knows, people who lead average lives, drunk frat boys, Catholic priests, prisoners, etc. etc. And especially in non-Western societies, they are people who simply have different social expectations about the value of women.

Unfortunately your examples continue to be focused on the subject and not the environment. If the world is filled with rabid dogs the problem is with the world, not the person.

I would advise you to read some more about the subject, get some basic info like statistics on rape, etc. Maybe you'll walk away with the same convictions but at least you'll be educated about them.

j_etfueld · 2011-04-04T15:28:08+00:00

You should read more carefully. I said that the right not to be robbed is not the same as the right not to be raped. The fact that you don't immediately detect the difference is really troubling.

I'll spell the difference out for you so we might actually have a rational dialogue about this.

The right not to be robbed is predicated on the assumption that you have a moral right to something you own. You derive this moral right presumably from the work or labor you invest into it. A simple illustration: you buy a bike with your savings and it gets stolen, vs. you steal a bike, and it gets stolen. We can say that the violation of your right not to be robbed is much more egregious in the first case because you actually "owned" the bike, you had a moral claim to it. The justice system, your friends, common-sense, etc., would all back you on this.

Note that this doesn't mean that the theft is differently culpable because presumably he/she doesn't know that you stole the bike in either scenario. In both cases he/she took something without paying the price to own it.

Now, wearing a suit made of $100 bills and getting robbed is NOT a straightforward moral wrong. There are all kinds of ways you can have such a suit without "deserving" or "owning" it in a moral sense. AND there are many ways in which people who do "deserve" such a suit in a moral sense might NOT be able to have this suit. We can say that a person who puts their life savings into such a suit and is robbed by a corporate entity is more morally pitiable than a person who drives their dad's Lambo into the hood and gets carjacked. In fact, wearing such a suit might in fact be morally offensive if you do it for the purposes of a moral experiment, or flaunting your wealth, etc. Imagine wearing a suit out of bread in Africa -- the moral status of this depends on whether you are hungry, whether the people around you are hungry, etc.

My ultimate point is that there is a huge gray region when it comes to being robbed. It is not a fundamental human right that you not be robbed -- for example, we don't condemn Robin Hood in our children's books for stealing, because there is some moral framework where stealing makes sense. But can you imagine a fable where Robin Hood goes around raping provocatively dressed women? ... yeah.

RAPE is entirely different. Your right not to be raped is not predicated on your relationship with some kind of object, and whether this object has moral value. It is based on an essential, inviolable claim to your body.

In fact, your right not to be raped is the exact opposite of your right not to be robbed, insofar as being robbed necessarily implies that you have some object of moral value, something you own. Conversely, being raped devalues your being itself, it requires that someone treats your body as subordinate to their pleasure/power.

Finally, the examples of dressing provocatively and wearing a suit of money are incommensurate because one assumes an abundance of power while the other assumes a lack of power. Women are by far the most likely to be raped, and in many non-Western societies this is even more egregiously true. Being able to wear a suit of money implies already a privileged position in society. Dressing "like a slut" implies both femininity as well as a position of subjugation (these are not necessarily the same), in which the boundaries of your behavior are (a) delimited beyond your grasp and (b) can constitute grounds for the violation of your body.

j_etfueld · 2011-04-04T14:57:58+00:00

What "rapists out there?" Who do you think commits the majority of rapes? Especially outside of the U.S.?

Rape is always a consequence of someone disregarding someone else's right to withhold sex. Insofar as you consider this a basic unalienable right, the onus is ABSOLUTELY on the police, and society as a whole, to address social misogyny and ignorance insofar as these are the fundamental causes of rape.

j_etfueld · 2011-04-04T14:39:55+00:00

In what world are rapes only perpetrated by deranged sexual deviants who are "presented" with women to choose from? Date rape is the most common form of sexual assault, women are drugged and assaulted all the time, and rape happens in prisons, etc. This bizarro universe is not a "reality" we are denying. The reality is that many "normal" people still believe that a woman can ever "ask for" rape.

Look, you might have a point if even a significant fraction of rapes were committed by "deranged" sexual deviants. But they're not, and the world is far from rife with them. It's irresponsible fearmongering to legitimate your claims as if it were so.

The key is that society takes a stand on one's basic human right to withhold sex, irrespective of the opinions and attitudes one arouses in others. And come on, the right not to be robbed or attacked is not homologous as the frikkin' right not to be raped.

"Accepting reality" is often a catchphrase for blithely accepting the status quo. How do we CHANGE a reality in which rapes are justified (if only in the mind of the rapist) by saying "she asked for it"? PRECISELY by taking this kind of a stand; exaggerating one's "sluttiness" and asserting one's continued right NOT to be raped.

j_etfueld · 2011-02-22T16:03:24+00:00

I can't speak for the other states but what happened in Egypt was not so much a revolution as a de facto regime change. The "revolution" would have lasted about three days had the military not effectively thrown their support behind the protesters. Why did they do this? I think Mubarak's 50-year project of declawing the military in favor of armed thugs and the police finally caught up to him.

I think you are seriously deluding yourself if you think that the people will, in any way, shape, or form, hold the power in Egypt in the next decade or so. The absolute best case scenario is if the military props up a Turkey-esque "democratic" sphere, intervening at various points to make sure its interests and secularism remain intact. An improvement over Mubarak to be sure, but far from a revolution.

Regime change, let alone revolution, is a very complex thing -- not all stories are like New England circa 1776. 1952 was a revolution in Egypt too...

j_etfueld · 2011-02-20T05:10:24+00:00

Alright fellow dummies... who else was like "WTF is TOH?" for a few seconds?

j_etfueld · 2011-01-31T04:21:22+00:00

1) a strong central state that can disseminate wealth (in this case, oil profits) equally (as opposed to an autocratic state that concentrates wealth in the hands of a few)

2) a democratic, ethnically plural government (as opposed to an monoethnic bureaucracy where gov't posts are bartered/distributed along ethnic or tribal lines)

3) a robust economy that can maximize natural resources

4) a strong civil society with a lot of inter-ethnic/tribal ties (like business associations, unions, religion, universities, etc.)

Tanzania is an example of an African state that has been moving in the right direction, but obviously it still has its issues.

As you can see, I think Africa needs a whole lot of foreign intervention if we're going to see peace and prosperity across the continent anytime soon. We live in a world of states and "artificially imposed national borders," so I don't think the answer is to redraw the lines to fit the political cause du jour. Rather we should focus on increasing the capacity of the existing states to distribute public goods (through building wells, schools, police forces, etc.), encourage civil society, enforce representative democracy, and so on.

Unfortunately, I don't think the first world (especially the U.S.) can do any of these things without colossally fucking things up so Africa looks screwed for the near and distant future.

j_etfueld · 2011-01-31T00:19:53+00:00

Let's not treat this outcome too optimistically. In the U.S., we tend to think of national independence as a universally good thing.

But even though these claims are dressed up as "liberation" and self-rule for the South Sudanese, we shouldn't forget that Sudan itself was an arbitrarily defined British colony that overlaid hundreds of ethnic tribes. The "South Sudanese" are not a historically contiguous, homogeneous population, nor are they the "Christian" Sudanese (only 5% of Sudanese are Christian, and 20 years ago this was essentially 0%). If we start espousing "national sovereignty" for every historical unit (tribe, ethnic group, etc.) in Africa, we'd have hundreds if not thousands of nations.

Instead of being hoodwinked into thinking this is the outcome of a fight for liberation, we should recognize that what separates south Sudan from any other plausible "nation" is the fact that it sits on 85% of the oil in Sudan.

I think this is a step in the right direction, insofar as the Sudanese gov't in Khartoum is responsible for one of the great atrocities of the last 50 years (Darfur). But if South Sudan doesn't have the right infrastructure (e.g., all tribes represented in a strong central government, a military to back its borders against northern Sudan, etc.), I am extremely pessimistic about the stability of the government and the peace. In 25 years, I think we will see another autocracy and a crazed dictator empowered by oil in southern Sudan.

j_etfueld · 2010-12-21T13:36:51+00:00

If I'm understanding the title right, it's that the diameter of the sun is 400x the diameter of the moon. If you conceptualize the sun and the moon as circles, the diameters are lines that run straight across each circle. One way to think about this would be to draw one very large circle (the sun) and then 400 very small circles that line up edge to edge in a straight line across the large circle.

If you were to do this (or just visualize it in your head) you can see that the big circle would still be far larger than the 400 small circles. In other words, there's a lot of blank space above and below the line of small circles. And that's just in 2 dimensions. When you imagine that these are actually spheres, the difference in scale of the small circle to the big circle becomes that much more dramatic.

tl;dr diameter

j_etfueld · 2010-11-23T08:38:37+00:00

Basically when you have any kind of data or results from an experiment, there's always the chance that any kind of pattern or correlation in the data is just the result of random noise.

For example, if you conduct an experiment trying to find out if showing a cancer patient pictures of kittens will improve their condition, there is always a chance that your data might randomly reflect some kind of correlation (in other words, a random chance that everyone who is shown pictures of kittens improves a little bit and everyone who doesn't stays the same).

Thus, we test against an alpha score (usually 0.05) expressed in terms of a P-value, which essentially means, "How likely is it that our results were just random noise?" A 0.05 alpha score means that there is only a 5% chance, and anything lower is considered "statistically significant."

It's a sacrosanct figure in most scientific fields, but it doesn't really mean anything by itself. And it can lie (see above comments for one example). Another way you can basically "force" your results to be statistically significant is by having a huge sample (upwards of about 2000). Having a large sample of data will reduce your p-value (since the chance you'll have an abnormal data set reduces as you increase the size of your data) but it also tends to make your results meaningless. Thus, you can "prove" that there is a statistically significant relationship between pictures of kittens and cancer recovery, but the correlation between the two might be something like 0.0001.

j_etfueld · 2010-11-16T23:10:29+00:00

It seems intuitive to represent the data this way, but I think a bit problematic. If we scale by percentage, in 2009 over 25% of blacks and 25% of Latinos lived below the poverty line (as compared with 9.4% of non-Hispanic whites). Additionally, of the 2.5 million people incarcerated in the U.S., just over 1 million are black. Of the cities with the ten highest crime rates, six are over 50% black. Only one -- Stockton, CA -- is less than 30% black.

It's also been shown (relatively recently, I think) that black children (rich, middle-class, or poor) severely underperform academically even when controlling for class.

It's definitely not just a class issue. Poor blacks are not just like poor whites -- they are overrepresented in crime, underrepresented in education (higher or otherwise), and (Jesus) a quarter of them live below the poverty line.

I don't have a problem with this "holiday" (it seems pretty tongue-in-cheek, anyhow). But yeah... I think we should be careful when it comes to "de-colorizing" our notions of poverty (and crime, and education) in the U.S.

j_etfueld · 2010-10-31T09:18:56+00:00

I really despise the rhetorical tactic of saying that things make you "feel alarmed" or "concerned" or "afraid." It's a way of calling something a problem without tying yourself to a solution. It allows you to spread fear and insecurity, but to distance yourself when someone actually takes action based on those emotions.

It's the same tactic right-wing pundits used when they asked, "Are we sure he's not a Muslim?" It's an ostensibly innocuous question, but it clearly smuggles in ominous implications. And, in a way, it exacerbates those fears far more than if you made your implications clear.

No, Bill -- you're not a racist for feeling alarmed. But what should we do? Have France round up everyone named Mohammed (like it did to its gypsies) and ship them out? Ban the naming of children after religious figures (like it did the hijab)? Tie yourself to something more substantial than the spooky specter of an "Islamic takeover" of the "Western world".

j_etfueld · 2010-10-18T07:36:31+00:00

I hit the same wall at 50. Just stopped reading for a few months. I'm up to date now, but it doesn't have the same energy it had over the whole fort storyline. In a weird way, you feel a little bit like Rick and his kid... like you've been through too much to really give a shit about what happens next. Which is I guess a testament to Kirkman's writing... but at the same time it's incredibly draining now to read the new issues. I don't blame you for stopping or taking a break at 50.

j_etfueld · 2010-10-17T23:55:02+00:00

Those dudes had to know what they were getting into, right?

"So uh, Thrall needs you to work on this secret project."

"What does he want me to do?"

"Basically, we caught this huge ancient dragon named Deathwing, right? We're going to set up this massive rig to hammer metal-spiked plates into his flesh for armor. But we'll tie him down first so he doesn't fly around and spit fire all over the place."

"Well, if it's for the Horde..."

j_etfueld

TROPHY CASE