[ARC5] [Milsurplus] I Must Have Lost My Mind

[Bob]

Brian.  Good stuff.   I especially liked, agreed with and followed your
sage advice to have another beer!  Tasted great and numbed the sobering
effect that at 77 YOA I too am at the nadir (AKA, over the hill and picking
up speed)!

73 to all.
K5INW, Bob


On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 1:58 AM Brian Clarke <brianclarke01 at optusnet.com.au>
wrote:

> Hello Mike,
>
>
>
> I wouldn’t read anything of value into this study. It was of 2450
> residents of the USA. Say we take the population of the USA as 245 million,
> then the sample size is 0.1%. If we accept the population of the world is
> about 7.7 billion, this sample falls to 0.00003%. Further, the researchers
> have chosen equal size samples for each age cohort, except two – 80 to
> 84-year olds and 85 to 89-year olds. But any smart person knows that the
> age-specific distribution of population is not as per this sampling, nor
> was there any comment on age-specific population distribution. Further,
> there was no check on the a priori language skills of, or relevance of the
> cognitive tasks posed to the participants in the various age cohorts, or in
> samples A, B and C. Luckily, the study reported is only nosological and
> does not posit any causal variables. Though the graphs are presented in the
> classical independent variable along the horizontal axis and dependent
> variable along the vertical axis style, no scientist would consider age
> alone to be a causal variable.
>
>
>
> I clicked on the apparent link to find out about the authors – Nada!
>
>
>
> My conclusion is that the paper was part of the ‘publish-or-perish’
> economic mantra dogging American universities, and is not even worth using
> for hypothesis generation.
>
>
>
> Further, you have made the classic error so frequently found in 1st and 2
> nd-year psychology students of thinking that the results reported in the
> paper actually apply to you. Like you, I am also 78 years of age, and I’m
> quite certain this paper is not worth using in the smallest room in the
> house.
>
>
>
> In case you’re wondering about the source of my criticisms, I used to
> teach this kind of stuff at university, but at the same time I filled the
> students up with research methodology criteria so they could evaluative
> such stuff for themselves.
>
>
>
> My suggestion? Have another beer and ignore the paper.
>
>
>
> 73 de Brian, VK2GCE
>
>
>
> *On* Tuesday, 13 August 2019 10:37 PM, you said:
>
>
>
> <snip>
>
> I have to admit that I am not as careful as I once was.  I chalk it up to
> this curve I saw in an article by the National Institutes of Health,
> indirectly measuring memory and concentration throughout a person's
> lifetime, by means of mass vocabulary testing over decades.  I note that
> with this past birthday I have reached the nadir of the curve at age 78.
> The good news is that it appears to rise again through the mid-80s.
>
> <graph edited to save bandwidth>
>
>
> Unfortunately, this curve is simply raw data - no analysis is offered
> other than providing data for further development.  For those interested in
> details, the article (entitled *When does cognitive functioning peak? The
> asynchronous rise and fall of different cognitive abilities across the
> lifespan*), is at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4441622/
>
> - Mike  KC4TOS
>
>
>
>
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