April 10, 2015

Briefly

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  • A properly-conducted opinion poll in Cuba, done in secret. Impressive.
  • As the Herald reports, New Zealand moved from 1st to 5th on the index reported by Social Progress Imperative. The story also points out, helpfully, that a lot of this is changes in how things are measured.  It turns out this goes further:  a 2014 version of the index is available using the new measurements. When the same definitions are used for the two years, NZ stays at the same ranking (5th) and improves on the actual values (from 86.93 to 87.08).
  • JPMorgan is using workplace data to predict which employees are likely to ‘go rogue’. Matt Levine doesn’t really worry. The Bloomberg News story worries a bit, but only “Policing intentions can be a slippery slope. Do people get a scarlet letter for something they have yet to do?” They don’t seem to consider false positives: people who weren’t going to do anything wrong (or more wrong than is necessary if you work for an investment bank).
  • The NZ Association of Scientists is having a conference titled “Speaking Out: Going public on difficult issues”. There will probably be more stuff on line soon, but currently you can read an expanded version of Peter Gluckman’s talk, and listen to (NZAS President) Nicola Gaston on Radio NZ; the Twitter hashtag is 
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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 »