April 7, 2015
Briefly
- NPR’s Science Friday covers BAHfest, a competition to produce what look like scientific arguments for nutty conclusions. Hilarious, but also important: serious and scammy pseudoscience uses the same tricks.
- Emma Pierson, a scientist who studies dating analyses a year of emails with her boyfriend
Him: You’re going to find some weird pattern and break up with me.Me: Either that will be warranted by the data, in which case it’s a good thing, or it won’t, in which case I’m a bad statistician. Are you saying I’m a bad statistician?
- And a post by Emma Pierson at 538.com: “people just want to date themselves”
- Another story about changes in cancer risk that just uses number of diagnoses, without even gesturing in the direction of screening bias.
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 »