July 19, 2015
Briefly
- Why sasquatches, yetis, and UFOs aren’t seen as often nowadays (via @juhasaarinen, but also see XKCD)
- Data journalism: Radio NZ interview with the Herald’s Harkanwal Singh
- “What physics (and other science) can learn from economics”, by physicist Chad Orzel
- In the interests of balance, a post at Public Address by Rob Salmond, who did the analysis in the ‘Chinese names’ real-estate leak. And a robust twitter discussion with him, Keith Ng, and Tze Ming Mok.
- Stats New Zealand has a new standard question about gender identity (as distinguished from sex), acknowledging that it isn’t as simple as some people would like it to be.
- The most important aspects of health seem to vary by age: “older raters gave significantly more weight to functional limitations and social functioning and less to morbidities and pain experience, compared to younger raters.” (via @hildabast)
- Priceonomics has a post on the most common and most distinctive ingredients in recipes from around the world. The list illustrates the problem with the ‘distinctiveness’ metric (as Kieran Healy pointed out: whiskey is really not the distinctive signature of Irish food). It also shows up other problems: for example, “African” and “Asian” are both listed as cuisines. Fundamentally, the limitation in is the recipe lists and the approximations made: galangal shows up as a reasonable candidate for most-distinctive Thai ingredient partly because there aren’t any substitutes; cayenne is the most widely used ingredient in the Mexican recipes because it’s being substituted for other chillis.
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 »