December 22, 2015
Briefly
- 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.
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 »