July 28, 2013
Briefly
- “Drawing conclusions from data”: a lecture and examples from Jonathan Stray at a Science Immersion Workshop for journalists
- Why we believe stuff — in this case high-dose vitamins. Paul Offit in the Atlantic blames it mostly on Linus Pauling
- Using Big Data to oppress a subset of the population (vampires, via Keith Ng)
- A Herald story on meth-lab damage mentioned meth alarms, which are apparently a thing. The vendor’s website says “A silent alarm system guaranteed to detect the manufacture of methamphetamine (‘P’) in your property.” That could be valuable, but unfortunately there’s no information given on the false positive or false negative error rates, and if you read the detailed terms and conditions, the alarm system doesn’t actually seem to be guaranteed to do anything except bill you monthly.
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 »