Recently a group of midwives published a paper about birth outcomes for home births, which seemed to indicate home birth is as safe as hospital birth. A skeptic blog got a statistics professor to analyze the paper, and came up with very different results. Check them both out!
This is frightening: Look at how many people, in each state in the United States, are opting not to vaccinate their kids.
Here's a little anecdote that shows how hard it is to get accurate data on risk. Just to keep things spicy, the "risk" involved is the likelihood of dying from a fatal heart attack during sex. It's more complicated than it seems.
Here for spreading far and wide is a graphical reminder of the important distinction between correlation and causation.
Despite Geena Davis's simple, two-step process
Breast cancer researchers in the UK have noticed a troubling trend recently, which is that more women under the age of 50 are being diagnosed with breast cancer. A record number of women under 50, actually — according to Cancer Research UK, 10,068 women under the age of 50 in the UK were diagnosed with the disease in…
If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I'm a big fan of RuPaul's Drag Race. The transformation, the glamour, the sheer eleganza extravanga is something my life needs to interrupt the monotony of grad school. I was able to catch up on nearly four seasons in a little less than a month, and I've been watching the…
The next time some dick is all, "...but what about all those false rape accusations?" show him this excellent (albeit very sad) graph from The Enliven Project, which used data from Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey and FBI reports to show just how often rapes are reported (not often) and how…
Whenever a new fad takes over pop culture, social scientists take note. They host conferences, teach courses, and write popular pieces trying to tie the newest thing to their favorite area of research. Consider this post a humble attempt to take that trend to its epic, nerdtastic next level.
Conservatives may believe that this country is full of wanton teens running around getting knocked up for fun, but they will be pleased to know that is actually not the case, According to new data from the Guttmacher Institute, teen pregnancies are on the downswing. In 2008, the year the most recent data is from, 7…
"Approximately 92% of the 174 songs that made it into the [Billboard] Top 10 in 2009 contained reproductive messages," declares SUNY Albany psychology professor Dawn R. Hobbs in her recent study about the prevalence of sex in American pop music. Are we at all surprised?
There may be no new studies in the just-released White House Report on Women, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to learn from the report, which conveniently culls all relevant government data on women. That includes some breakdowns of things we've been hearing about for awhile — women's education attainment…
Says one British researcher, "Women's aspiration to marry up, if they can, to a man who is better-educated and higher-earning persists in most European countries...Women thereby continue to use marriage as an alternative or supplement to their employment careers."
Well, here's something lots of people will take credit for: The record fall in the teen birth rate. What's going on here?
Warner Bros. came up with this little stat after researching piracy trends for many months. Blame the lady pirates' weakness on those addictive Gossip Girl and vampire shows! Despite this, most pirates are men ages 18 to 24.
This graph, from a TED talk on Facebook visualizations, charts breakup cycles as monitored by Facebook. The good news? Christmas Day has the fewest breakups. Otherwise, it's grim — in a fascinating sort of way.
Have Britain's middle-aged women been turned into "an army of unpaid carers who suffer losses in income, job prospects and health?"
According to new census data, marriage rates in 2009 were the lowest they've been in a century. Why? It's the economy, stupid. Well, that, and the Wedding Channel.
The latest salvo in OkCupid's ingenious campaign to woo us with data is the discovery that iPhone users have the most sex. But these meticulous statistics, interesting as they may be, are probably falling on deaf ears.
The more we learn about marriage, the less we understand it. Awesome, right?
