A life-and-death problem in statistics

Drugs are accepted or denied by the FDA on the basis of their efficacy. Efficacy is defined as the excess of "success" over what might occur by chance. A drug which, for instance, resulted in no change in the average outcome for the disorder at which it was aimed could never be passed because it appears to be no better than a placebo.

However, basing success or failure on averages is a flawed procedure, as it assumes that the results lie on the normal, "bell-shaped" curve. Sometimes, however, they don't. Here's an example: Bill is dying of cancer, with a relatively short and painful time-span ahead of him. But suppose there is a drug which, in X percent of the cases, results in death immediately, but in the remaining percentage the patient is cured. Let us suppose that the drug, on average, does not change the average outcome, so it is not and will not be approved.

But for Bill, if he takes the drug, he will either die immediately or be greatly improved or cured. For Bill, taking the drug is a no-brainer. Of course he will chance dying, since he's dying painfully anyway and there is no escape. But if he takes the drug, he may be improved or cured. The flaw in FDA thinking is that there may be bi-modal or even trimodal results, and "averages" do not reflect the importance of this distribution of data.

I would appreciate any comments by someone knowledgeable about statistical analysis.

War Economics

I'm puzzled about comments I've read from discussions on the topic of the costs of war. The implication is usually that war is expensive, that the money is "thrown away" in bullets and planes and materiel in general.

What puzzles me is this question: Where is the money spent? Is it not spent mostly in the US in factories that make the equipment soldiers use? The money doesn't leave the country. The products do, but they're paid for in the US, paid to workers and companies that produce things. When a bomb drops on Afghanistan, it doesn't cost us anything. It's already cost us the price of production, but that money went to US citizens for the most part.

So is it possible that one of the things that keeps our economy going at all is the artificial market caused by warfare? If we stopped buying munitions from our factories and planes and tanks and .. our economy would probably slump much further. A lot of people would be out of work. When we don't have a war to consume goods we can produce, the economy does poorly. I'm wondering if it's possible that wars are at times manufactured by our government to keep our economy going.

I recall reading, for instance, that the war with Japan in 1941 was deliberately provoked by our cutting their ocean supply lines for oil and gasoline. It appears we put them in an unsurvivable position and waited for them to take action against us, so that they were identified as the aggressors, even though we gave them no choices. Our economy at the time was terrible; we had just recovered from a depression caused by stock market gambling. WW II ramped us up big time, severely damaged our asian competition, and gave us control of the Pacific as well as a huge demand for military products, built in the US, of course.

I would appreciate comments or arguments. I wonder if my view is too simplistic or even naive.

Photographs as art

I've been reading a book about entering photos in contests. While it is useful for that topic, it has increased my awareness of the difference between pictures that can win contests and those that are "wall-hangers", genuinely artistically interesting. (For the moment I'm setting entirely aside the category of photos that are "newsworthy".)

Some years ago I was browsing through a very large rental/sale art gallery, considering art I might want to own. The manager of the gallery gave me a piece of advice that was excellent at the time, but over the years has come to carry a deeper meaning. He said that I should not buy a picture that I found immediately attractive or interesting; those pictures, he said, don't always "wear well". He strongly suggested that I rent a picture I was considering purchasing, hang it in a prominent place in my house, and keep it for one or more months. His final comment was that the most satisfactory pictures were not necessarily those that grabbed you, but those that somehow got your interest and increased it over time.

It has been said that an "art" photograph takes an everyday object or view and makes us see, as if for the first time, how interesting/beautiful it is. Changing the scale to a larger size, as in Georgia O'Keefe's paintings, is an effective way to accomplish this. Or a dozen other "darkroom tricks" such as changing the color, can have the same effect. I recently saw a painting of a pear, easily 4 feet tall, which was quite good. Every subtle gradation of color and shape were brought out. I stayed interested in that painting for several days, but it falls short of the ideal in that it failed to draw me into it more deeply over time.

That really sums up my thoughts about photos as genuine art. They have to be more than pretty, more than interest grabbers. Somehow they must pull you deeper into the image and sustain your interest. Now, however, we get into the question of what it is that constitutes real art. Of course, there's no answer to that other than the cliche about knowing what we like. We want to make people like our photos, but more than that, we want their interest to continue and deepen. Just being able to win a contest isn't even in the ball park.

I would welcome any comments on this topic.

Discipline in schools

We all know that disciplining children in schools largely stopped with the start of integration. As schools began mixing children from more economically different groups, the children themselves had come from more disparate backgrounds. Some came from homes with rules and discipline; others did not. At that time many of the non-white children admitted to middle-class public schools were from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and families. A higher percentage of these children were from single-parent families and had been "on their own" to a much greater extent than the average middle-class child of that time. These students, the majority of whom were non-white, presented a higher degree of disciplinary problems. School administrators did not want to be accused of being racially biased. They bent over backwards to avoid this eventuality; as a result, the standards of behavior were lowered for all students.

Teachers facing serious disciplinary problems were given less and less support in their attempts to impose behavioral limits, especially when the trouble-makers were non-white. School administrators feared the legion of lawyers eager to make bucks on racial conflicts, so they effectively disappeared. The teachers, left without adminstrative backup and fearing lawsuits or disciplinary actions themselves, adopted a "hands-off" policy toward all the students, irrespective of racial background.

Walk through any school hallway filled with 7th grade or higher grade students. The level of verbal and physical assault and sexual harassment is astonishing. If adults were to behave in this manner, criminal charges would be filed. But the young people in the hallways of these schools get no protection from frightened "authorities". There are few or no guardians to limit antisocial behavior. As a result, the kids live in a largely unpoliced jungle, where the bigger animals make their own rules. They turn to each other and form gangs. They lose any faith in the legal system or in the police. They are alienated from the system which does not, will not support and protect them. As adults they have learned that the only person who will look after them is themselves, and so they have no loyalty to the legal and political system.

Why should they? They depended on the adults to protect them, and we abandoned them to the lawyers and the gangs. We would never allow others to treat us in this fashion, but we do absolutely nothing to protect the children from their peers.

I want to be clear about this so that any argument is not based on irrelevant considerations: I favor school integration. I favored it when it happened and still do. This is not about race. I want all students of any color or background to be treated equally and equally required to obey the school regulations and society's laws. The disciplinary problem results from the sudden mixing of children from very different socio-economic backgrounds and not providing them with the protection from each other to which they were entitled. We have sowed the wind and we are reaping the whirlwind.