March 9, 2014
Briefly
- Rafa, at Simply Statistics, shows that countries with higher GDP per capita also tend to have had women voting for longer. Yes, he does know about correlation and causation.
- Felix Salmon writes about, essentially, Bayesian updating given conflicting information… the probability that Dorian is Satoshi would seem to be very small, and the the probability that Dorian is not Satoshi would seem to be just as small — and yet, somehow, when you add the two probabilities together, the total needs to come to something close to 100%.
- Very loosely related: “24 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgement“, by Charlie Munger, the less famous half of Warren Buffet’s investing success.
- Viz for a cause, an new archive of for data visualisations advocating on various causes. The current examples come from Tableau Public, which might be worth a look for online displays.
- Andrew Gelman on “How much time (if any) should we spend criticizing research that’s fraudulent, crappy, or just plain pointless?” You can tell my answer from StatsChat. When it’s just consenting scientists in the journals, I’ve got better things to do. When there’s enough PR applied to get it into the NZ media, I try to respond. Sometimes it’s bad science; often it’s perfectly good underlying science and bad press releases. Remember, almost nothing from the scientific literature gets into the papers accidentally. Someone — the scientist, the journal, the university — has to push.
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 »