March 17, 2013

Briefly

By
  • When data gets more important, there’s more incentive to fudge it.  From the Telegraph: ” senior NHS managers and hospital trusts will be held criminally liable if they manipulate figures on waiting times or death rates.”
  • A new registry for people with rare genetic diseases, emphasizing the ability to customise what information is revealed and to whom.
  • Wall St Journal piece on Big Data. Some concrete examples, not just the usual buzzwords
  • Interesting visualisations from RevDanCat
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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Steve Black

    In the Wall St Journal article there is a graphic which does an excellent example of showing why you have to be careful. I don’t know how to include it here but the address is

    black.net.nz/cym2013/futurespend.jpg

    So what we’re looking at is that 2011 and 2012 are real. All the rest are made up. And it looks like they made up the trend for 2014-2016 from the pattern of 2011-2013 (two about the same, next two higher) even though 2013 itself is not yet a quarter over. Less than a concrete example?

    Should I know how to embed my little jpg here? I speak HTML and BBCode, but I don’t know what works here.

    12 years ago

    • avatar
      Steve Black

      typo in my first comment — that’s a made up pattern of two about the same next ONE higher.

      12 years ago