See who salutes

There’s been a whole lotta verbiage flying around the country about what’s loosely referred to as “the Confederate flag”, and whether it should be flown…well, anywhere.

Here’s what I have to say about that: The battle flag of the Confederacy does not belong on any governmental property within the United States in an official capacity. (If, at some time or in some parallel universe, there is a sovereign entity that chooses that banner as its official standard, they are free to stick it up any flagpole they so desire.)

On private property, I say do as you damn well please. Freedom of expression is enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which applies to everyone, even those who wish that the particular war represented by that flag had turned out differently. Men and women for the last two hundred or so years have died for your right to do exactly that, so you’re welcome. And I don’t expect you to pick up on the irony of this situation.

I do think everyone should step back from the blizzard of metaphoric flag-waving and -burning and take a few deep breaths. We need to get our focus off the symbol and pay attention to the issues beneath it. You know—treat the disease rather than dab at the symptoms. Racism, fear, injustice, inequality…and like that. Wrapping yourself in any piece of colored cloth doesn’t actually cover up the fact that you’re stitch stark naked when it comes to dealing with very real social problems.

Meanwhile—here’s a flag that should insult everyone.

Sign of the time

Since my sole-practitioner internist closed up shop a couple of years ago, I’ve used the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF) as my primary healthcare providers. They’re part of Sutter Health, they sport huge facilities all over the Bay Area and they have more physicians of every stripe than the entire state of Iowa.

To tell you the truth, it’s medicine on an industrial scale, and reminds me a lot of the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, except they’re slightly more flexible, and I trust the state of their knowledge base more.

By “industrial”, I mean that even for a PCP—the physician who should be most familiar with a patient’s history and care—these guys swan in and out with the least amount of history-taking and person-understanding of any class of doctors I can recall. My PCP of record knows nothing more about me than any of the specialists to whom I might be referred. I have to introduce myself every time.

It’s kind of like the old Free Clinic. Or the Army. But at least with those institutions, you weren’t expecting to see the same person twice in a row. Here it doesn’t matter—every time you see someone, you’re introduced as though for the first time. Even if you saw her two weeks earlier.

They don’t even bother to look at your history until they’re actually in the exam room with you.

Well, but I’m not really here to complain about that—just to note it in passing. I use PAMF because if necessary I can get a referral to any type of medical specialist known to humankind; although getting an actual appointment to see one in a timely manner is a different matter altogether.

(Apparently orthopedic surgeons are in very high demand here in the Valley They Call Silicon.)

No, I’ve just been setting you up for my point today. I needed to get a fasting blood panel done, so since I had an appointment with the hand surgeon in their Mountain View facility at 0845 (finally seen around 0920; but I always go armed with some heavy history tome to read), I decided to get the blood drawn at that location’s lab when they opened at 0700.

Now, you’ll recall me using the term “industrial” before. Here’s one reason why. At 0700, when they opened for business, they had this sign on the wall behind their reception desk:

If they start out setting expectations for that kind of wait (when they got more phlebotomists than Montana) at start of business, you just know that there’s not a lot you can hope for.

As it happens, I was seen sooner than that, and it turns out that their little cafeteria serves amazing hash browns. I mean, absolutely first class. I have no photo of them, because I wouldn't delay eating long enough to pull out the camera.

Career advancement into hell

Okay, as long as I’m talking about Meetups, and specifically tech-focused Meetups here in the Valley They Call Silicon, a couple of weeks ago I went to one called “Career Advancement into Analytics” at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View.

It should have been the ultimate in bleeding edge trendiness.

But to cut to the chase, I left after the speaker—never introduced—had been talking for 50 minutes and hadn’t made a lick of sense to me. (And I was not the first to bail out; that started happening at the 30 minute mark.)

I understood the individual words fine. It was when he strung them together in formations approximating sentences that I couldn’t follow. He started out by asking (or possibly stating), “What isn’t analytics(?)” and it went downhill from there.

Here’s another example: “But, the process of finding applied value with self-communication comes in very handy with presentation and developing skills.”

Anybody? Bueller?

However, it became vaguely clear that the intention of this session—which had originally been slated to cost $20 to attend, but became free after they allegedly found a corporate sponsor—was supposed to attract the attendees to a two-day “training” course ($750 for early birds; $1500 for late ones) to be held in July.

Here’s what that’s supposed to cover

Day 1 / Part 1

Basic Statistics and Mathematical Concepts
descriptive and inferential statistics
populations and samples
parameters and statistics
uses of variables: independent and dependent
types of variables: quantitative, qualitative and categorical
scales of measurement (nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio)
Review of Basic Matrix Algebra and applications.

Descriptive Statistics
describing your data
measures of location
percentiles
measures of variability
histogram
normal distribution
assessing normality
measures of shape: skewness
measures of shape: kurtosis
comparing distributions

Confidence Intervals for the Mean
point estimators, variability, and standard error
distribution of sample means
interval estimators
confidence intervals
normality and the central limit theorem

Data Science: Hypothesis Testing
decision-making process
steps in hypothesis testing
types of errors and power
the p-value, effect size, and sample size
statistical hypothesis test
the t statistic, t distribution, one and two-sided t-test

Introduction to Statistics and Data Science
examining data distributions
obtaining and interpreting sample statistics
evaluating data distributions
constructing confidence intervals
performing simple tests of hypothesis

Day 2 / Part 2

Prerequisite Basic Concepts
descriptive statistics
inferential statistics
steps for conducting a hypothesis test
basics of Matrix Algebra

t Tests and Analysis of Variance
performing tests of differences between two group means
performing one-way ANOVA with the General Linear Model (GLM)
performing post-hoc multiple comparisons tests in GLM
performing two-way ANOVA with and without interactions

Linear Regression
producing correlations
fitting a simple linear regression model
understanding the concepts of multiple regression
model selection techniques in Regression to choose from among several candidate models
interpreting models

Linear Regression Diagnostics
examining residuals
investigating influential observations
assessing collinearity

Categorical Data Analysis (CAD)
producing frequency tables for CAD
examining tests for general and linear association
understanding exact tests.

Forecasting
Forecasting exercise by moving averages.

(That's a cut and paste, so [sic] to it all.)

I lost the will to live just looking at that on their Meetup site. So no, I’m not spending a weekend in July with this crowd. If they couldn’t explain what analytics is, they aren’t going to be able to advance my career into it.

Or you're stupid

I don’t know whether it’s specifically the Valley They Call Silicon, or just the new world of social media, but it does seem to me that the social phenomenon somehow breeds snake-oil salesmen like nothing else I can think of. Everyone’s got the sure-fire guaranteed one way to driving sales through Twitter/Instagram/blogging/Facebook/whatever.

Last week I went to a Meetup that was supposed to be a lunch-and-learn on blogging. The person running it was actually recommended to me by someone who’s in the career coaching business. He turned out to be a self-important geezer, and I realized that I’d “seen” him around on Meetup before and ignored him because he has about 48 different things going, all with the sure-fire guaranteed schtick.

And indeed he did spend 90 minutes informing a collection of about 25-30 people that if you go about blogging exactly the way he tells you, you’re guaranteed success. And if you don’t, you’re stupid.

Yes, he said, “You’re stupid.”

According to Mr. Legend-in-his-Own-Mind, blogging (his area of thought leadership) is the only way to make money. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, everything else—waste of time. And—you’re stupid.

That’s the thing about Meetup—for the price of a soft drink at a self-serve eatery, you can hold forth about any crack-brained topic you like. You don’t have to rent a facility or put together a PowerPoint deck. It’s kind of like the early days of the NSDAP.

And, also like the incipient Nazi Party, what I found fascinating was that 25 or 30 people sat there round-eyed and slightly slack-jawed for 90 minutes. After the harangue was over I asked the guy sitting next to me if he’d learned anything. He nodded almost reverently. “Yes. I was planning to go a different way, but now I’m on the path.”

Okay, I learned a couple of things. But I mistrust any True Believer (whether it be religious, ideological, dietary or social media) on general principles, so it was a bit of a struggle to pull those couple of bits out of all the blather.

One of the nuggets: if I go to another of his Meetups, I’m stupid.

Gratitude Monday: Love over hate

First off let me just say that the notion of twelve people at a Bible study/prayer group being shot up is a desecration of the ideals upon which this nation was founded. I’m not going to go into the motives of the individual responsible; and I’m sure as hell not going to comment upon any remarks made by any politician of any party in the aftermath of last Wednesday’s horror.

Instead, I’m concentrating on the life- and hope-affirming response from the people of Charleston, and around the country.

The alleged murderer of nine of the twelve people who welcomed him into their midst even though he was manifestly a stranger has made statements to the effect that he wanted to spark a race-based civil war. And you’d think that Charleston—the scene of the opening shots of the War Between the States 154 years ago—would have been the ideal location for this.

Instead, the families of the victims have again and again expressed—amidst their sorrow—forgiveness and love.

To tell you the truth, I don’t quite know how they do it, so I stand in utter awe at this.

But beyond the specific, I am kind of amazed and deeply grateful to see that this despicable and monstrous crime has so far failed utterly at driving a wedge between people in this country on racial lines. In Charleston and elsewhere, folks of pretty much all colors have joined together in solidarity and solace.

Thank you, people of Emanuel AME, of Charleston, of the United States. Thank you for responding to hate with love. You are my heroes.