July 18, 2016
Briefly
- The Guardian on spotting dodgy political statistics
- Pie are square: an experimental study finding square ‘pie’ charts better than round ones
- The difficulties of getting published papers corrected in science: New York Magazine on ‘psychoticism’ and political views
- How to draw a good map of droughts (severity/frequency)
- Are the political betting markets too stable?
- Lovely rant about Aloe vera gel and sunburn: “Listen, you antiscience monster: These people who sell aloe vera are stealing from you. As of 2004, the market for finished aloe products was worth $110 billion. The aloe barons are taking your money and building gigantic aloe palaces and not helping your sunburn at all. They are probably taking long soaks in great big hot tubs for which you helped pay. And they’re probably wearing lots of sunscreen, too, because they know nothing in their cabinets can heal sunburn.”
- When is AI (data mining/machine learning/etc) appropriate? from mathbabe.org
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 »
My take on betting markets and brexit…
People who bet on betting markets are not a random sample of the population. In the past that hasn’t mattered too much because those variables haven’t been factors in how the population outcome has been decided. (Or there was enough long-term knowledge to accommodate them.)
However, in the brexit, the variables that made people people decide to leave were also the variables that made people not interested to bet in the betting markets. Added in was the fact that geographic location played a big part in brexit, as it presumably does in the betting market – so London opinion was going out via the media but “country” opinion wasn’t coming back to influence bettors.
8 years ago
I am strongly of the opinion that square pie graphs should be referred to as cake graphs.
8 years ago
Some hastily written base R plotting square pie graph (cake graph!) making code here: https://thoughtfulbloke.wordpress.com/2016/07/18/a-quickly-made-cake-graph/
8 years ago
Isn’t this essentially what treemaps are? The treemap package (along with highchartr) do a great job of using rectangles to represent relative area.
8 years ago
This isn’t about relative area of two subsets, it’s about area of one subset relative to the total — the thing pie charts are actually kind of ok for.
8 years ago