So I got this strange piece of mail the other day from PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Now, I'm all about animals. Animals are some of my best friends.
What struck me as odd about the mail was that it had a nickel attached and under the nickel a caption read, "You may keep this nickel as a reminder that animals need our help everyday."
I imagined going through my wallet one day, taking out change to give to the Starbucks' cashier, and being moved to say as I opened my change purse, "oh, I can't give you this nickel, this nickel right here that looks exactly like every other nickel in my wallet, because this is the nickel that
reminds me not to beat my cat."
Were they just not trying? What was the conversation at the PETA marketing division? "You know, we
could make little tokens that people can carry around with them, something with a cute animal on it and the PETA logo so that it reminds them every time they look at it that animals are living creatures that need respect and love, just like humans. Or we could, you know, just stick a nickel in there, because that's about how much it'll cost to make those anyway."
I'm thinking of sending a note to PETA: "Thanks! Now I have something small and metallic to throw at my cat when she pisses me off."
I came across a batch of really neat stastistical data recently that is very important to what I do for a living, which is get paid to know a lot about online gamers, especially the hardcore gamers that play mostly first person shooters.
This survey was massive and I won't go into it in great detail, but suffice it to say that it was packed full of really interesting data about the habits of FPS gamers, both PC and console. But there seemed to be one glaring problem I had with it. The first thing the survey said (crap, here comes Richard Dawson) was that it polled X male gamers.
Now I want to say right off the bat that I am not calling "gender bias!!" At least not accusatorially (Mirriam-Webster is failing to tell me if this is actually a word or not). It's a well-known fact that most women just don't play first-person shooters.
Or is it?
See, this is the problem I have with this survey. That "fact" is the first thing to pop into my head as justification for surveying only male gamers. But is it a fact? The truth is, I can't remember when I last saw a survey that polled gamers, male and female, and showed the breakdown of male and female FPS gamers. It's a commonly accepted belief in the gaming industry that we don't play them (with a few exceptions, of course, like myself), but when has the industry last proved this to be true?
This survey went into disgustingly beautiful detail about the breakdown and demographics of FPS gamers, telling me everything but how often they go to the bathroom each day. And yet right from the starting line, it failed to start at the broadest scale it could have possible started with by including female gamers.
This bothered the statistician in me. It was like hearing someone say, "I'm going to learn about what cows like to eat. But since everyone knows that only brown cows eat, I'll only ask brown cows the questions." Admittedly it's more commonly known that few women play FPS games than it is non-brown cows that don't eat, but the principle is the same. In recent years, it seems that more and more women are getting into FPS games. Halo seems to have done the most when it comes to attracting female gamers; so many guys are talking about how it's one of the few games their girlfriend enjoys playing with them in co-op mode. That doesn't mean that the numbers have risen significantly, but when was the last time we actually saw those numbers? Who has done a survey on it? I haven't seen it, and I feel pretty sure I would have seen one had it been done.
This survey could have very easily set out to show that this basic assumption was true (or maybe even not true), and thus set itself on the proper scientific path toward breaking down a demographic. They could have even possibly done interesting analysis with the data, but even if they weren't interested in that, the survey's data would have been far more grounded to me if I'd seen it start with "X gamers polled -> 98% male, 2% female -> Of the 98% male..."
So in the end, I'm not really bothered by the obvious bias against female gamers — even though I haven't seen a survey taken looking for the data I want to see, I'd bet money that the numbers aren't significant enough to have affected this survey much at all. But it bothered the scientist in me. Scientists do employ first-order assumptions; it's common in astronomy and astrophysics to make an assumption when doing models, for instance, in order to simply your first approximations toward a solution. Then you refine your model from there in order to get rid of the simplified situations and get closer to a real-world situation.
But this is a case where this first approximation just wasn't needed. I would have loved to have seen the data on how many female gamers participated in the survey had they included them in it. So next time, survey people, no assumptions. Start with the cleanest knowledge slate you can and go from there.
The new year is here, and now I can expect to keep mistakenly writing 2003 on all my checks. (Thank God I write fewer checks now that most bills can be paid online.)
We had a terrific Christmas. We went up to Washington state and spent about a week with my dad, his girlfriend Molly, and my sister and everyone else in the family and friends circle. Christmas Eve itself was a wild ride — there were about eight kids and thirty or so adults. This year we knew would be a little trying because it's the first Christmas after my brother's death in June. While Leif had never really been one for the holidays and hadn't always been involved when we celebrated, the shadow of his memory still hovered in the background. To compound it, his three baby girls were going to be coming over Christmas Eve with everyone else to celebrate.
Len and I had only met Chawndra (age ~2) and Iahna (age ~3) once before, and that was when Leif, their 22-year-old father, had died in June. We'd met them on less than happy circumstances as they'd come over to the house after the memorial service ended. It was bittersweet, since we were not only seeing them for the first time, but we were meeting the family who was taking care of them for the first time. This family was the aunt and uncle of the girls' mother, my brother's girlfriend.
At the time, we didn't get to meet Maryanne, the baby, who was only a few weeks old then. But the family taking care of her — the other uncle of the girls' mother and his wife — came over with their eight year old daughter and Maryanne on Christmas Eve, along with Chawndra and Iahna and the couple taking care of them and
their twin six years olds, a boy and a girl. And we had Molly's granddaughters over (six years old and 1.5 years old) along with tons of friends and family.
As soon as I was introduced to Gary and Nicki, who have Maryanne, she asked if I'd like to hold her, so I did, and she encouraged me hold her for pretty much the rest of the night if I wanted to. That gesture right there took away an awkwardness I felt about meeting them for the first time. And so I took Maryanne over to the tree and sat on the floor with her, and all the kids gathered around to open up their presents.
It was at this point that I sat back and really looked at what was happening. Gary and Nicki's eight year old daughter was happily helping me open the baby's gifts. Bob and Becky's twin kids were opening a gift my dad and Molly had given them. Becky was looking for Chawndra and turned around to see my dad holding her and said, "oh, she's with Grampa," as if it was perfectly natural for her to call him that. Little Molly, Molly's granddaughter, was playing with Iahna. And hanging on the tree was a Christmas ornament that Becky had given my dad that had the names of the four kids on it: my brother's two girls Iahna and Chawndra, and Brandon and Ashleigh, Becky and Bob's twins.
It was an amazing moment that really clarified for me, in that one snapshot, how our families, who hadn't known each other until a few months ago, have gelled and come together after a terrible set of circumstances had affected us all. Somehow we've become one big family and it feels like the way it should be given what's happened. After a rough year for our families, this one moment that seemed like forever as I sat and watched it, made the best end to the year we could have hoped for.
