January 8, 2017

Briefly

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  • Graphics, overquantified life: Andrew Elliott’s graph of his baby’s first six months of sleep
  • Graphics: Bird migrations in the Americas (click for animation)bird_map
  • Public policy: Graeme Edgeler has better numbers on the three-strikes law, and a new post
  • Graphics: Weather forecast around the British Isles, shipping
    from the people who tweet the Shipping Forecast
  • From the Washington Post: more people die between Christmas and New Year than you’d expect. It’s true in NZ, so it’s not the weather.
  • The alt-right movement finds more dumb things to do with genetic testing: the Atlantic
  • A (moderately technical) short course on Fairness and Transparency in Machine Learning.
  • “Missing Datasets”: a partial list of useful and important public datasets that don’t (and won’t) exist.
  • Surash Venkat explains why modern data-based ‘algorithms’ aren’t at all like recipes — which is why they need to be studied statistically, not just by looking at the code or asking if the developers were pure of heart.
  • “The Great AI Awakening”. From the NY Times, on Google, the revolution in machine translation, and big data.
  • “Companies Ponder a Rating of Workers’ Health”. From the Wall St Journal.  One one hand, having big companies report summaries of their employees’ health might give them better incentives.  On the other hand, they’d need to get the data, and if you think about what else they might do with it…
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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 »

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