April 29, 2014

Briefly

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Justice edition

  • From the BBC, a historical story about DNA evidence incriminating someone who had been dead for three weeks at the time of the crime.  Even with modern techniques, the upper bound on the strength of DNA evidence is incompetence or fraud (which has happened) rather than random false matches (which may not ever have happened with good samples)

 

  • A new research paper argues that 4% of those sentenced to death in the US would have their convictions overturned if they waited long enough.  That’s not the same as 4% of them being innocent, but it’s still a problem.

 

  • It’s hard to estimate the role of luck in success, because luck isn’t controllable. Ed Yong writes about a new paper where researchers experimentally randomised people to be lucky, and how much it mattered.
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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 »