January 2, 2015
Meaningless bignums
From the science journal Nature, who should know better than to quote big-sounding numbers without context.
That’s roughly the same number of person-hours as the world spent watching the China Central Television news program Xīnwén Liánbō: estimated at 135 million people for half an hour a day. Or about 1/3 as much time as spent watching YouTube.
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 »