EVERYDATA: data has a story to tell

Another interesting book I read when my internet was down, was EVERYDATA: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day.

You would think this book would be boring, but the authors managed to enliven the reading with lots of anecdotes of faulty data, misinformation, sleights of hand, and bad visuals. The book was written for the layperson – not for data scientists.

I did briefly read some reviews on the book at GoodReads and I was disappointed at the number of reviewers who thought the book was not “textbook” material or serious enough. They found the book to be lightweight. They even found fault with the examples as trite.

The reviewers came off as trying to be “learned” and “serious” and entertaining books to be beneath them. They didn’t get for whom the book was written.

Fine, go read a textbook if you want to be snob.

The intent of this book was to give the average person tools on how to evaluate information they are being fed, especially through digital media. In order to reach people who hated math when growing up, the authors had to provide entertaining examples and I thought they succeeded there.

Even the footnotes were chockfull of interesting tidbits.

The book covered: sampling, polls, data visualization, population, correlation and causation, averaging, confidence level, cherry picking, and forecasting, just to name a few topics.

But I was surprised that the authors did not catch one thing. It was in the chapter on data visualization and the story was centered around exercise and mortality risk. They went through the various ways that charting could deceive us, which was very interesting. But they didn’t make a comment about the data:

But WAIT!

Forty or more hours a week of exercise?!? Doesn’t that seem excessive? I mean 75 hours is basically almost twice the average working hours. I did think maybe a marathon runner or Olympics athlete, or some other professional athlete might account for up to 40 hours a week of exercise, but I thought there was a concept of recovery period after intense exercise.

I even thought maybe a bike messenger who does 40 hours a week on his bike delivering messages and then when he was off work, he played some type of sport. But even then, I don’t think he (or she) would do upwards of 75 hours total, including work.

Also, I thought, maybe housework and running after the kids.

Googling provided me 32 hours for Simone Biles and maybe max 42 hours for Michael Phelps. Even the superstar athletes don’t do much more than the average work week. They just have to allow their bodies to recover. (I think we need to do the same for mental work, such as that in the office.)

So, I looked to the footnotes to see if the notes provided me additional information on what was included in the exercises.

Leisure!?!

Okay, housework can’t be part of it, and I don’t think training for the marathon or Olympics would be leisure either.

So, I left the conundrum there and continued on with the book.

But later, I had this idea of Googling for the research paper. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it at first…oh, I had the internet down, that’s why. But anyway, I Googled and actually found the paper on the internet. If you are interested in digging into the paper, the link is here. Happy reading!

Upon digging through the medical science talk, I found lots of references to MET hours which is “metabolic equivalent task” hours which is arrived at by multiply hours by the metabolic activity number (which is different for each exercise activity). MET hours is actually greater than regular hours. Metabolic activity number is higher for more strenuous exercises, so metabolic activity for running would be greater than metabolic activity for leisurely walking.

But taking some specific sentences in the paper, I estimated that 75 MET hours/week could be between 12.5 to 25 hours per week, which sounded in line with my Googled research for average people.

I was surprised the authors didn’t catch that.

This was actually an exercise of being skeptical, noticing those details and applying critical thinking skills. Maybe I learned something from that book!

I’m attaching my slides that went over, at a high level, the discussion about the exercise and mortality risk strange data.