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Re: Breast Size (Was: Re: Homosexuality and genetic determinism)
Eric Bohlman (ebohlman@netcom.com)
Fri, 2 Jun 1995 23:22:35 GMT
James G. Acker (jgacker@news.gsfc.nasa.gov) wrote:
: I'm not advocating this as a social practice, but the
: average length of marriages (mean time to divorce is approximately
: 4 years) shows this to be a social pattern. (Cited in _Discover_,
: and there are books about this topic.)
Something about this figure strikes me as fishy. How was it derived? By
looking at divorce records? If so, than it doesn't take into account the
marriages that never ended in divorce. Or was it derived by following a
random sample of married couples over a period of time, using proper
techniques for dealing with what statisticians call "censored data" (data
where you know that, for example, a marriage lasted at least ten years,
but not how much longer, because, for example, the couple was still
married at the end of the study. This sort of thing happens all the time
in longevity and survival studies)?
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