October 19, 2015

Briefly

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  • The Guardian says “‘We have to start talking about it’: New Zealand suicide rates hit record high.” The first bit is true. The second, as I explained a couple of weeks ago, isn’t. The rate isn’t at a record high (the count is), and more generally the tragedy (or scandal) is that the rate has been basically this high for a long time. This graph is on the front page of the report from the Chief Coroner
    suicide
  • No, I don’t know why moles on your  right arm are particularly relevant to melanoma.  I don’t know because the British Journal of Dermatology told the media to print the story before they released the scientific paper. Yes, there’s a lot of this around.
  • I am pretty sure, though, that customising a UK story about melanoma with “In New Zealand, new skin cancers total about 67,000 per year” isn’t helpful. That’s all skin cancers. For melanoma the figure is about 2500 (from the Ministry of Health) or about 4000 (from Melanoma NZ). I think the difference between the two figures may be that the Ministry of Health don’t count melanoma in situ. Either way, not 67,000.
  • Experimental evidence that decorating your barcharts with round bits or pointy bits really makes them less readable. (via @albertocairo)
  • Nicholas Felton has been collecting data about himself and making art in the form of Personal Annual Reports for ten years. His latest and last is out now.
  • New factsheets from the (UK) Patient Information Forum, on communicating risk (via David Spiegelhalter)
  • People are more afraid of shark attacks than car accidents despite the fact that car accidents are much more likely. SMBC has a solution to this problem. It involves marine biology. (via @scicomguy)
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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 »