Briefly

• Do we need more blood tests? (prompted by, but not really about, Theranos)

• A graph of global temperature as a spiral (“spiralling out of control”)

• More graphs, redesigns of the previous one, as part of an online MakoverMonday design challenge.

• You’ve probably seen this, but Facebook’s news feed editing wasn’t as algorithmic as they were suggesting. Of course, that tells you nothing one way or the other about bias, as people including Cathy O’Neil point out.

• The difficulties of turning data science into gobs and gobs of money, as illustrated by Palantir. From Roger Peng at Simply Statistics.

• Damian Christie on science journalism, at Public Address

• Siouxsie Wiles on a quite different sort of science journalism: the Radio NZ Morning Report giving time to the thoroughly debunked notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism. (Here’s a post from two years ago, describing a study of 9920 cases in 1.25 million kids, with no detectable correlation).

• Finally for stats/literature dual nerds, an excerpt from the new book by historian of statistics Stephen Stigler

Funes the Memorious, the character from Borges’s story, “is Big Data without Statistics” cc @DiegoKuonen pic.twitter.com/aABjuPDtO7

— Alberto Cairo (@albertocairo) May 13, 2016