Posts from February 2013 (44)

February 10, 2013

Netflix owns your brains

Netflix has commissioned an American remake of the brilliant UK television series House of Cards. That’s not especially relevant to StatsChat, but apparently they did it with Big Data and Data Science, so it must be right.

Andrew Leonard at Salon bemoans how this is turning us into puppets

Netflix’s data indicated that the same subscribers who loved the original BBC production also gobbled down movies starring Kevin Spacey or directed by David Fincher. Therefore, concluded Netflix executives, a remake of the BBC drama with Spacey and Fincher attached was a no-brainer, to the point that the company committed $100 million for two 13-episode seasons.

“We know what people watch on Netflix and we’re able with a high degree of confidence to understand how big a likely audience is for a given show based on people’s viewing habits,” Netflix communications director Jonathan Friedland told Wired in November. “We want to continue to have something for everybody. But as time goes on, we get better at selecting what that something for everybody is that gets high engagement.”

The strategy has advantages that go beyond the assumption of built-in popularity. Netflix also believes it can save big on marketing costs because Netflix’s recommendation engine will do all the heavy lifting. Already, Netflix claims that 75 percent of its subscribers are influenced by what Netflix suggests to subscribers that they will like.

Felix Salmon (who is generally a believer in data) is not impressed

 

It should go without saying, of course, that dropping $100 million on a 26-episode remake of a great TV show is never a no-brainer. For one thing, for all that the original series is extremely good, it was also very timely, coming as it did at the end of Margaret Thatcher’s transformation of the Prime Minister’s office into something much more powerful and Presidential than the UK had ever seen. The BBC series tapped into Britain’s fear of the possible implications of that power, as well as the fact that Richard III and Macbeth are deeply rooted in the national psyche.

More generally, remakes are inherently dangerous things: what producers think of as a “proven formula” more often turns out to have been a unique and inimitable confluence of creative electricity. And it goes without saying that the better the original was, the less likely it is that the remake will surpass it.

Note that $100 million for 26 episodes is about 30% more than ‘Glee‘ costs, which in turn is about 50% more than the average prime-time drama.  Will this be an investment no-brainer in the same sense as Florida real-estate? You might very well think so. I couldn’t possibly comment.

February 6, 2013

The checklist: a worked example

The Herald has a story about increased stroke risk in young adults using cannabis.  Let’s run it past the JOHN HUMPHRYS checklist:

  • Just observing people:  X
  • Original information unavailable:  ?. The abstract should be available, but I can’t find it on the conference website — it will probably be out soon.  It looks as if this story may have leaked early.
  • Headline exaggerated:  The headline is fine.
  • No independent comment: X.
  • Higher risk: X.  Absolute risks are not given, and are extremely low in “young adults”
  • Unjustified advice:? The advice that cannabis smoking is probably bad for your health is justified, but not by this study.
  • Might be explained by something else: X.  Tobacco, for example, which is mentioned in the story but dismissed without justification.
  • Public relations puff: no real problem here.
  • Half the picture: this one’s ok, though the publication bias issue could have been mentioned — this is the first study to find a link, but was it the first to look for one?
  • Relevance unclear: this isn’t a problem
  • Yet another single study: X
  • Small: X only 160 strokes, only 12 or 13 in cannabis users.

It’s not that all stories should pass all checks on the list — sometimes small observational studies can be important or at least interesting.  The problem (as with the Bechdel test) is that such a small fraction of stories pass the checks.

 

[Update: forgot the link originally]

February 5, 2013

A quick tongue-in-cheek checklist for assessing usefulness of media stories on risk

Do you shout at the morning radio when a story about a medical “risk” is distorted, exaggerated, mangled out of all recognition? You are not alone. Kevin McConway and David Spiegelhalter, writing in Significance, a quarterly magazine published by the Royal Statistical Society, have come up with a checklist for scoring media stories about medical risks. Their mnemonic checklist comprises 12 items and is called the ‘John Humphrys’ scale, said Mr Humphrys being a well-known UK radio and television presenter.

Capture

They assign one point for every ‘yes’ and do a test on a story about magnetic fields and asthma, and another about TV and length of life. The article, called Score and Ignore: A radio listener’s guide to ignoring health stories, is here.

Could form the basis of a useful classroom resource.

February 3, 2013

What do Kiwis die of?

University of Auckland research scientist Dr Siouxsie Wiles (she’s the one who makes bacteria glow in the dark) has teamed up with data visualisation expert Mike Dickison to create a series of infographics looking at the morbidly fascinating topic of what New Zealanders die from.

Here’s one (click to enlarge). See the whole post on Siouxsie’s blog Infectious Thoughts  here.

battle-of-the-sexes-infographic1