Posts from May 2014 (77)

Team Ratings for Round 15

The basic method is described on my Department home page. I have made some changes to the methodology this year, including shrinking the ratings between seasons.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 87 matches played, 56 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 64.4%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 15

Here are the predictions for Round 15. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 11

The basic method is described on my Department home page. I have made some changes to the methodology this year, including shrinking the ratings between seasons.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 80 matches played, 44 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 55%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 11

Here are the predictions for Round 11. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Following up on the “net tax” tangle, Keith Ng has a step by step explanation of how income tax and income distribution has changed over recent years in NZ.

You can also play with the visualisation yourself. Or, if you want to see the arguments about it, they’ll be on his Public Address post.

Maps are good because they take advantage of all the previous maps we’ve seen to provide background familiarity.  On the other hand, they use up both the available spatial dimensions before you’ve actually got any data, so you need to encode the information some other way. Colour is the obvious choice, but colour is much more limited than people appreciate.

Kieran Healy tweeted “It’s not like there’s a simple, tradeoff-free solution, but this is not a good map.”

And he’s right; it isn’t. There are too many categories, and some of them are ordered but not all of them, so colour isn’t enough. Even if you’re going to try, these aren’t the right colours: for example, orange should be between yellow and red.  About the most you could do clearly with a single map is the three-way split: Yes, same-sex couples can just roll up to the registry;  No, not this week; or It’s Complicated.

Jacob Harris pointed to an article at Source, describing the design of graphics for a story about marijuana legalisation. It does much better

They link to the classic piece “When maps shouldn’t be maps” by Matthew Ericson, which I’ve linked before. They also have a whole collection of articles on better maps, though it’s fairly programming-oriented.

A new map to let you see the impact of rises in sea levels on your area: this is Auckland with 13m sea rise

This doesn’t show the impact of storm surges, which are the big problem for a lot of eastern coastal Auckland (though not so much for Manukau Harbour).

(via everyone on twitter)

The Daily Mail (and the Telegraph) recently ran puff pieces advertising a new ‘drinkable sunscreen’

Those who make the product, which is available to buy, claim that once the elixir is ingested, molecules of the product vibrate on the skin to cancel out 97 per cent of UVA and UVB rays.

Actually, the Telegraph headline was “Could this be the first drinkable sunscreen?”, and, following Betteridge’s Law, the answer is “Fsck, no!” A blog at the Guardian has a good demolition of the stories, and the illuminating byline

Dean Burnett is acutely aware of how many ways he could be sued if he wrote his initial reactions to the articles about this sunscreen. He is on Twitter, @garwboy

British libel law has been modified after the notorious attack on Simon Singh, but it’s not surprising that no-one wants to be a test case for the new law.

After seeing the reaction, the Mail has at least modified their article to add a concluding warning

Hermoine Lawson, spokesman at the British Skin Foundation, said: ‘We would advise extreme caution of any product claiming UV protection using methods not supported by clinical research. 

‘When it comes to an issue as serious as preventing skin cancer, customer testimonials cannot take the place of scientific evidence, for which this particular product cannot provide.

The Telegraph has a story about the implausibility of the claim and the lack of supporting evidence, though it carefully doesn’t mention how you might have come to hear about the claim, and there certainly isn’t an apology or a retraction.

That’s all on the other side of the world.  Here, where we have one of the highest rates of melanoma, you’d expect a bit more of a clue about sunscreen. But, no, One News has the story. They don’t have the testimonial from someone who used it on a toddler, but they do have the inventor claiming it is effective for more than 99% of people.

Although One News just describes them as a US skincare company, they have a New Zealand distributor with a New Zealand company registration and .co.nz website, and a whole bunch of ‘harmonized water’ products with superficially implausible claims, and they do include the ‘sunscreen’ and the claims:

•Neutralizes UV radiation 
•Allows for increased sun exposure (30x more than normal) 
•Enhances tanning effect from the sun 

Perhaps someone might like to ask the Advertising Standards Authority to verify that the claims are indeed valid and substantiated?

Video from the Alltrials campaign. It’s fair to point out that this is well-designed propaganda, even though it’s absolutely right about the problem

You can also read what a drug-discovery chemist says about the results of the campaign to get all the Tamiflu trials analysed.

May 20 is International Clinical Trials Day, commemorating James Lind’s trial of treatments for scurvy in 1747.

We’ve seen animated pictures of mass transit routes before, but mta.me has the wonderful touch of lines that behave like plucked guitar strings when they cross. Not all that useful, but pretty and soothing. And a reminder that New York has a whole lot of trains, just like we don’t. By Alexander Chen

(via @_inundata)

Yes, it’s a simple swap of two numbers, but if anyone actually read the thing…

_{(via @WINDY_BUTT)}