October 25, 2013
Briefly
- The long list from the 2013 Information is Beautiful awards. Some are beautiful; some are only beautiful; but many are interesting.
- Some people will be prosecuted for not filling in census forms, but only on the order of 1% of those who didn’t. That’s about the same as the proportion of pot smokers who get caught and prosecuted.
- Despite all the talk about Auckland’s house prices, there’s plenty of room for things to get worse. Median house prices in Sydney just passed A$700000, well over NZ$800000.
- ‘Chasing the noise’ in quality improvement, from Andrew Gelman
- From journalism blog ‘Heads Up’: As a general rule, if you take newspaper headlines about survey results at face value, you should stay away from those friendly games of chance at the county fair.
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 »