February 25, 2015
Briefly
- NZ papers have sensible coverage of the new peanuts/kids research (Herald, Stuff). NHS Behind The Headlines has a summary and takes some UK papers to task.
- “Rich Data, Poor Data”: Nate Silver writes about why sports statistics works. Unfair summary: it’s an artificial problem in a controlled environment that people care about more than they should.
- “the vast majority of health sites, from the for-profit WebMD.com to the government-run CDC.gov, are loaded with tracking elements that are sending records of your health inquiries to the likes of web giants like Google, Facebook, and Pinterest, and data brokers like Experian and Acxiom.” Story at vice.com, video summary from the researcher:
- “A memo to the American people from US Chief Data Scientist Dr DJ Patil”. More informative than you might expect given the source.
- “the biggest problem facing the world of public opinion research isn’t that online opt-in polls, but rather the temptation to troll twitter to “see what people are thinking” and other thoughts from Cathy O’Neil, based on the new report on Big Data from the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
- Openweathermap.org: another part of the increasing supply of open data
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 »