December 9, 2016

Briefly

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  • Has serious crime in the UK increased sharply? Some UK papers think so; David Spiegelhalter is less convinced.
  • The Guardian explains the five most common dreams. In addition to the unconvincing explanations, there’s a problem with the most common dream type “Being attacked or pursued”, which they say has been experienced by 83% of people, but only 77% of men and 78% of women.
  • New Zealand has launched its component of the “Choosing Wisely” medical campaign, trying to get patients as well as health professionals asking whether tests or treatments are actually useful.
  • According to Pew Research, the majority of US people aren’t actually confused by all the poorly-substantiated and divergent diet news they see.  I think Pew are being too optimistic here: what their data say is that people don’t think they are confused by it, just as they don’t think they are influenced much by advertising.
  • A long story with good use of maps and visualisation, about Houston’s flooding problem. From Pro Publica.
  • Why the amazing new cancer immunotherapies might not fix everything: the immune system is terrifyingly powerful and we’re starting to get close to where it gets dangerous. (New York Times)
  • Visualisations of bird songs, by Google and the Cornell Ornithology Lab (via Susan Holmes)
  • The basic skill of mathematical modelling, in any applied field, is to decide what you don’t need to include in the model — “assume a spherical cow of uniform density”.  But sometimes, as in this simple chemistry example, you may need to include EVERYTHING.
  • Sometimes, on the other hand, it’s easy to see the important features:

 

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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 »