Posts from December 2015 (30)

The most obvious thing in the StatsChat logs: the Rugby World Cup:

Also, back last January, there was a study on the relationship between cell divisions and cancer risk across human tissues. The popular misinterpretations of the research — “cancer is mostly bad luck” — led to our most popular post ever.

The question of what it means for something to be a Group I carcinogen gets us a lot of low-level traffic, but interest peaked after the IARC report on red meat and processed meat.

Posts on the risk posed by foreign drivers were popular early in the year. In July, though, they were displaced by foreign-sounding home buyers.

I wrote about the largest human randomised controlled trial of mānuka honey to prevent illness, when it was reported in June. It was done by kids at a London primary school. They didn’t find a benefit.

Finally, there’s a steady trickle of people interested in the mathematics of the lottery, presumably in the mistaken hope that we’ll tell them how to beat the martingale optional sampling theorem.

Q: Did you see there’s a designer Kiwi cider that makers claim could combat ageing?

A: <sigh> Yes.

Q: And do the makers claim that?

A: Pretty much: “I never feel guilty about the drinks I consume, but I know that’s not the case for everyone. Knowing I’ve played a part in unlocking the secret to eternal youth is a career highlight.”

Q: Wow.

A: I know, right?

Q: What is his secret to eternal youth?

A: Cascara

Q: I think I’ve heard of ….  wait,  isn’t that a laxative?

A: They’re probably hoping their customers are too young to think of that. This is a completely different plant, just the same Spanish word.

Q: Ah. I see. Coffee berry husks. They used to just throw it away?

A: Well, in Yemen it’s a traditional beverage, and they drink it in Bolivia, too. And everywhere it at least gets recycled as compost. But from the viewpoint of the superfood industry they threw it away.

Q: Are they more specific about the whole eternal youth thing?

A: The Herald didn’t quote them, but yes, the company blog says “brewers added the berry’s purported health benefits that include preventing premature aging, heart disease, high cholesterol, asthma and Alzheimer’s to the cider profile. ”

Q: What research do they cite supporting this?

A: Very droll.

Q: No, seriously, don’t they say anything?

A: No.

Q: Is there research?

A: Well, it’s got antioxidants.

Q: Doesn’t everything?

A: And it seems to stimulate the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor.

Q: In mice?

A: No, in people. Five of them.

Q: And is this brain-derived neuro-factor thing good?

A: With a name like that, how can it not be? Having some of it is important for lots of things.

Q: Some of it?

A: Doesn’t seem to be any real evidence that releasing more is good.

Q: But releasing it is unusual?

A: Caffeine does.

Q: Oh. Doesn’t sound like much support for the claims.

A: That’s what Dr Paul Jarrett, said — the expert the Herald asked.

Q: How about Yemen? Does this coffee berry stuff make them healthier there?

A: You couldn’t really tell, given what a mess the social and healthcare systems are in, not to mention the occasional drone bombings.

Q: Well, that was depressing

A: Ok. Back to the cider, then.

Q: Right. So, you’re not going drink it?

A: Well, not for the eternal youth. The flavour combination sounds attractive if I can hold my nose over the marketing.

Q: And maybe find a charity that does useful things in places like Yemen and Bolivia

A: Yeah.

• Di Cook on improving graphical displays of cricketers’ careers.

• Graphics actually: automatically drawing relationships between characters in Love Actually based on the scenes they occur in.

• Remake of a graph showing changes in global poverty.

• Quartz has a list of the most-misleading graphs of 2015

• Hyde Park (in London (the one in England)) was tracking visitors via their mobile phones. Not actually harmful, but maybe not a good look if you want people to trust you.

• The Herald (and to a lesser extent Stuff) has started reporting number of crashes as well as number of fatalities on the roads. Probably a good thing.

• Health News Review writes about spin in medical news reporting.

• “But now scientists may finally have the answer. They have found that if a food is labelled as a healthy option we tend to eat more of it” From the Mail via the Herald. In fact, the research did not compare the consumption of food with healthy labels to food without.

• The frequency of `positive’ words such as “favorable”, “encouraging”, “supportive” has been increasing in medical research abstracts. In less favourable reporting, Language Log points out that abstracts have gotten longer, and is not entirely supportive about deducing attitude from single words.

• Also from Language Log: the `traditional’ `grammar rule’ that “which” doesn’t occur in restrictive relative clauses first became popular roughly when The Beatles did.
  

For when stories we’ve commented on get recycled as ‘best of’

• Herald: Has an 8-year-old girl found a cancer cure?. StatsChat: Probably not.

• Violin plots are a useful way to show the whole distribution of a large set of data, or dot plots for a small set

• There’s a new movie out about at the effect of repeated minor brain injuries in US football; the same problem occurs in other sports.

• “The shipping container is one of those rare devices, like the light bulb or the telephone, that can be traced to a single inventor”  — from a review, now ten years old, of an fascinating book about container shipping. Yes, I do know how that sentence sounds.

• Will the new Stars Wars movie beat the original one in (real) ticket income? Will it go further and beat Gone With The Wind?

The northern hemisphere is warmer than usual this Christmas, as you may have heard. To be precise, it’s about 1 Fahrenheit degree above the 1979-2000 average after seasonal adjustment. (via)

Parts of the northern hemisphere are a lot warmer than that, including many parts that have a concentration of news media with a seasonal shortage of stuff to report. It’s hot in the eastern US, and this quite reasonably gets more reporting that it being cold in Siberia.

When the US northeast has unusually cold or snowy periods in winter, you see lots of people carefully explaining how this is weather or short-term variation and doesn’t tell you much about long-term climate patterns.

I’m one of those people, so this year I’m making the same point about warm weather.  The northern hemisphere as a whole is warm by about what the well-known trend suggests. The strong El Niño causing weird local weather in the eastern US could definitely be due in part to the global trend, but conclusions about regional variation are much less reliable than conclusions about this CO2 stuff being a bit of a worry.

Like the snow last year, the hot Christmas this year is consistent with climate change predictions but doesn’t add importantly to the evidence. It’s dramatic that Baltimore is as warm as Auckland this Christmas, but compared to the mass of accumulated evidence on the subject, a few days freak weather in a small part of the world just doesn’t mean much.

(from Wikipedia)

The University has closed until the New Year and we are on compulsory holiday, so from my point of view it’s the StatsChat Silly Season.

An important scientific issue in designing graphics is preattentive perception: for example, it’s easy to see the one different point in this plot

The circle vs triangle distinction is pre-attentively perceived: your visual system annotates it before you get to see the picture.  More complicated distinctions aren’t pre-attentive, and so don’t make as good plotting characters.

Here, as a Christmas card, is a picture from Hungarian cartoonist Gergely Dudás. One of the snowmen is a panda. Pandas are not pre-attentively perceived.

(update: yes, I saw the Herald has it too.)

From the person most likely to be the next President of those United States:

“Now, I wouldn’t keep any school open that wasn’t doing a better than average job. If a school’s not doing a good job, then you know it may not be good for the kids.”

This, as you’d expect, has occasioned some discussion on the internets.

There’s nothing mathematically impossible about the idea of nearly all schools being above average.  Nearly everyone has more than the average number of legs.  Darwin, Australia, has had better than average Christmas weather on 49 of the last 50 years — in 1974, Cyclone Tracy destroyed 80% of houses in the city, which tends to pull the average down.

In other settings, it’s not even an unreasonable idea that you’d routinely close a large fraction of establishments.  It’s roughly what happens to restaurants, for example: lots of them are started, most fail, the remaining ones tend to be pretty close to the optimal price:quality tradeoff line.

In this quote, though, neither explanation really flies: it’s not that nearly all schools are the same except for a few really bad ones, and it doesn’t really make sense to close half the schools in the country, because even if you’re in favour of free competition between schools, most schools are too far apart to compete effectively.

What we’re seeing here is the broadening of ‘average’ to mean ‘ok’, which is one of the reasons it’s less useful as a technical term than it used to be.  If you want to be precise, ‘mean’ is better.

• From a Press Council decision (via Matt Nippert)
  Press releases are a useful way for newspapers to receive information and comment from interested parties. However, as the senior editor concedes, using a release almost verbatim falls well below best practice. Newspapers risk losing the trust of their readership if they print material that is not independent and objective (or otherwise clearly labelled as comment).

• Redrawing a bad slide, by Kieran Healy

• On The Media has a “Consumer’s Handbook” for breaking news. Here’s the election polling edition

• Jeff Leek’s annual “non-comprehensive list of awesome things other people did”. Some of this is more technical, but a lot is of general interest

• Ed Yong writes about false positives in clinical genetics — not data errors, but mutations wrongly thought to be bad

• The Berkeley Earth project have real-time maps of air pollution in China (and, for comparison, Japan). There’s a lot of it, not just in the cities.

• Siouxsie Wiles and Kate Hannah have a crowdfunding appeal to send copies of Nicola Gaston’s book on sexism in science to people who need to read it.