Athens-Clarke: Good Place to be Pregnant

Messing with data, here's a map below of the number of Ob/Gyns per 100,000 population in Georgia. Athens ranks high. Click on an individual county to see its rate and rank.



Data Source:GeorgiaStats

Who's On Twitter

There's a mini-tempest in a teeny tiny teapot about what The New York Times journalists are on, or not on, or who rarely use, Twitter.  As if anyone cares. 

Still, for fun, I applied the same question to my own Department of Journalism at Grady College (note, we've combined with broadcast journalism, so the list is long below, and I've bold/italicized those folks). Let's take a look, but I'm not about to create a jillion little screenshots. Instead, below I list the faculty members in alphabetical order and, if on Twitter, how many tweets that person has created as of Tuesday afternoon. Each name should link to their individual faculty bio in case you don't know who they are, what they teach, or what research they do (if any).

• Lee Becker (524 tweets)
• Valerie Boyd (not on Twitter, best I can tell)
• Dodi Cantrell-Bickley (not on Twitter)
• Michael Castengera (174 tweets)
• Charles Davis (our dean, 301 tweets as his new dean handle)
• John Greenman (not on Twitter)
• David Hazinski (2 tweets)
• Keith Herndon (730 tweets)
• Barry Hollander (um, me, 5,404 tweets)
• Ann Hollifield (not on Twitter)
• Tom Hudson (120 tweets)
• Janice Hume (department head, not on Twitter)
• Mark Johnson (5,449 tweets, our #1 Tweetmeister)
• Bill Lee (not on Twitter)
• Vicki Michaelis (838 tweets)
• Kent Middleton (not on Twitter)
• Ivanka Pjesivac (not on Twitter)
• Leara Rhodes (not on Twitter)
• Chris Shumway (1,831 tweets)
• John Soloski (18 tweets)
• Welch Suggs (3,019 tweets)
• Pat Thomas (1,202 tweets)
• Bart Wojdynski (985 tweets)

You'll notice our digital/broadcast folks aren't big Twitter users, which kinda fits as they tend to not be as digitally involved as some of us who have nothing better to do with their time. Several are not even on Twitter, or if they are I couldn't find them. A few are on Twitter but have sent either two (really?) or 18 (really?) tweets.

Now, in fairness, many people use Twitter not to send or interact but as radar to keep up with those they follow. Think of it as a news feed, a way to keep up with what's breaking. That's one of the weaknesses of the NYT criticism above. Not everyone uses Twitter as a platform. Some use it, instead, as a wire service, as a feed, as radar, not as a way to blather away as some of us tend to do. In all, 13 are on Twitter (some, barely), 10 are not.  Not sure what that means.

And it sucks that I'm second to Johnson in number of tweets.  

Sigh. Just 46 more tweets and I'm #1.

SLOPpy Journalism

A SLOP in surveys refers to a self-selected opinion poll.  Such a poll has no random sample, no systematic sampling at all. Basically, it's crap. But don't take my word for it. Here's the take of AAPOR, the leading group of polling professionals (bold face my own):

The Internet is awash with SLOP polls that invite people to answer a question and then view the results. In addition to attracting only those with an ax to grind on a particular issue, even the best Internet-derived convenience samples currently tend to include too few older people, minorities and less affluent, less well educated. In short, they tend to miss people who don’t have access to a computer or an Internet connection. These surveys also invite manipulation, as a number of news organizations have learned to their dismay.

Why am I writing about this? Because my j-school's student-run television newscast is "slopping." Here's the tweet out Monday morning:

UGA goes tobacco-free this Wednesday. We want your thoughts! Take our survey to give us your opinions for the show! https://t.co/NMMETN5t9I
— Grady Newsource (@GradyNewsource) September 29, 2014

This blog post followed shortly after. I figured someone in the newsroom would see it and they'd kill this idea. Nope. In fact, Tuesday morning this one came out:

Take our poll on UGA's new smoking ban. The ban goes in effect tomorrow http://t.co/8die5p3j7n
— Grady Newsource (@GradyNewsource) September 30, 2014

Argh.

If you follow the link you can add your opinion on what's a pretty important story, the campus going tobacco free. Sure as hell newsworthy. But a SLOP is next to useless. Also ... if you fill it out, there's even a link if you'd like to fill it out again. In other words, you can fill it out again and again and again, even more biasing to the results.


Here's a screenshot of ending of poll (below). See? You can click to do it again via the "Submit another response" link. That's never ever a good idea. By the way, I've completed three surveys so far.

To report on such results is journalistically unsound, if not ethically challenged. About the only way to do it would be to preface the results like this:

"In a completely unscientific and useless self-selected poll on the Internet, we found most students ..."

Um, no. Apply the same rules to poll results you do to interviewing official sources or experts. I don't want to pick on the students too much. If the student newspaper did a SLOP I'd blast it too. I probably have in the past. And if our local daily paper did it, I'd hammer it. And finally, in fairness, SLOPs are okay if used only for entertainment purposes and are labeled as being complete bullshit on your site. But a SLOP's results should never go in a news story. Ever. Period.

Voting Libertarian in Georgia

Where's the hotbed of libertarianism in Georgia? Nowhere, really, but if you rank the counties, it's Athens-Clarke -- home of me (and UGA) that comes out #1. You can see the Top 10  below, with the percent of all votes in 2012 cast for a Libertarian candidate.

1 Clarke 2.4
2 Dade 2.2
3 Murray 2.0
4 Franklin 1.9
5 Catoosa 1.8
6 Lumpkin 1.8
7 Cherokee 1.8
8 Chattooga 1.8
9 Chattahoochee 1.7
10 Rabun 1.7

If you know your geography, you'll recognize many of the counties above tend to be in North Georgia. The map below ranks the counties, darker colors being, of course, more "Libertarian," though this isn't by much, by at best a percentage point or two.

Freshman Data = Popularity?

I was looking at this blog's stats today and, well, the image below will tell you all you need to know. It's of the most popular posts of all time on this blog. Most focus on my scribblings about the infamous Red & Black walkout from 2012. Indeed, five of the top seven most popular posts come from that time.

But look what's hit the Top 10, my post this week about the most popular UGA freshman names. That either says a lot about that post, or how deeply uninteresting everything else is that I've written over the last several years. You pick.

Child Abuse in Georgia

I'm at home recovering from a medical thing, so messing with local data. Below (hopefully) is a map of child abuse in Georgia per 1,000 kids. In other words, it's per capita, so it controls for small versus large counties. As you can see, not a lot of consistency here, except perhaps too many counties around Macon popping out. Click on the map and you can move around. Click on a county and you'll get its rank and rate per 1,000 kids.

What Super Power Do I Want

This the second time I've done this.

A bare, efficient room at Athens Regional Hospital. Someone walks in with a glass of water and a heavy lead container, and then they scurry safely away. I open the container, take out a pill. And swallow it.

Swallow the thing they're running away from. Great.

It's thyroid cancer. They removed the thyroid and cancer cells last year. Also a year ago (and again today) I'm undergoing what's called Radioactive Iodine Ablation. Before the ablation, you go off any iodine in your diet because thyroid cells suck up iodine. And then they give you an iodine pill laced with radioactivity. Any remaining thyroid cells, or potential cancer cells, soak up the iodine and the radioactivity, which kills the remaining cells but doesn't really harm much of anything else.

The super power thing? I'm hoping to get bitten by a spider. More likely it'll be a particularly ugly slug.

Anyway, I have to stay away from people for a few days. What itty bit doesn't get soaked up by thyroid cells has to go somewhere -- and basically that means drinking lots of fluids and getting rid of the excess exactly like you think you have to get rid of the excess. Oh, and flush 2-3 times after each, um, excess. Really it takes a coupla days to get rid of most of it, but you have to sleep alone for 4 days (my dosage) and not share plates or spoons or let people near you.

But ... tomorrow I can go off this stupid iodine-free diet. Again, I can have bread, or dairy, or eggs, or a burger for God's sake.

And if I'm very lucky, this will kill off the remaining cells that seem to be somewhere in my neck, but we can't find them by scanning.