November 24, 2016

Briefly

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  • “The problem scientists have to face here isn’t whether the data is real, but whether this is an appropriate way to represent it.” On the sea-ice graphic that’s going around.
  • “Using the language of economics, judgment is a complement to prediction and therefore when the cost of prediction falls demand for judgment rises. We’ll want more human judgment.” Harvard Business Review
  • Apps blamed for rise in road deaths (NY Times)
  • The sort of basic search skills Tim O’Reilly describes can also be applied to non-political fake news. If you start with “Ice cream for breakfast makes you smarter, claims scientist” from the Herald you can easily find the Japanese story that’s the source. If you look a little harder, as my brother did, you can find the 2013 story on the same Japanese site, which has a little more detail. Using Google Translate, the research was sponsored by an ice-cream company and the source for the story is the company website. The researcher is real, but the research appears not to have been published — and there has been plenty of time since 2013.   Ice-cream doesn’t really matter, but the question of which stories in the newspaper we’re supposed to take seriously does matter.
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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 »