November 3, 2016

Briefly

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  • Story about startup company claiming to tailor wine advice to your genome. “Their motto of ‘A little science and a lot of fun’ would be more accurately put as ‘No science and a lot of fun,’”
  • “US Broadband Providers Will Need Permission to Collect Private Data” from the New York Times. Providers get to see exactly what websites you visit and how many pages you read there.  And they know where you live and where you internet. Selling that information will now be opt-in.
  • Insurance firm Swiss Re thinks health insurance rates will soon be targeted using social media. But the heart-disease research they mention only looked at predicting the heart disease for county of residence — and even before Big Data insurance companies have known where you live.
  • Along the same lines, car insurance firm Admiral was planning to set rates for young drivers based on social media data. Facebook is Not Happy. But actually, this  looks more like AMI’s current advertising pitch “We treat young drivers like good drivers”.  You get people to sign up, and raise their rates if you find out they aren’t good drivers.
  • SMBC comic on survivor bias: “Nobody wants to read about the hero who left the farm and immediately got stabbed by highwaymen”
  • Insider trading involves misuse of “material, non-public information.” With predictive analytics, it gets much harder to decide what’s material and what’s non-public
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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 »