Briefly

• You’ve probably seen the ‘Big Mac’ index of purchasing power parity between countries. Kevin Buckland looked at whether you get similar results for other foods. You don’t.

• There’s a planned course at the University of Washington “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data”. Here’s the website with syllabus and readings, and the Twitter account.
• Via a tweet from ‘Calling Bullshit’, there’s a computer science preprint looking at distinguishing ‘criminals’ from ‘normal people’ using photographs.  I usually wouldn’t comment here on research papers that haven’t made it to the news, but this sentence was irresistible
  “Unlike a human examiner/judge, a computer vision algorithm or classifier has absolutely no subjective baggages, having no emotions, no biases whatsoever due to past experience, race, religion, political doctrine, gender, age, etc.”
  An aim of both the course and this blog is to increase the number of people who find this sort of claim ridiculous.

• For map nerds: a detailed cartographic comparison of Google Maps and Apple Maps.

• Related: “Out at the deep cultural level our system of certifying experts is badly busted; but this doesn’t mean we don’t need expertise. It just means that as a culture we’re listening to too many actors in white coats and con men selling colored water because we like what they say, instead of listening to oncologists and epidemologists because we need their knowledge.
  But the cure for that is not to show greater respect for white coats; it’s to understand the basis for expertise, which is hard work that a lot of people have been refusing to do for decades, in both mainstream & various alternatives”
  (from a series of tweets by John Barnes)

•  The US FDA is moving to close one of the loopholes that allowed Martin Shkreli to overcharge for decades-old medications: to market a new generic you have to show it’s close enough to the original drug, and he wouldn’t let other companies buy any of the original.

• Data journalism: the Guardian looks at the spatial concentration of gun violence in the US.

• There’s a quote circulating widely now on social media “Journalism is  printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” It’s being attributed to Orwell. He didn’t say it — which I think matters in this context.
  According to Quote Investigator, versions of it described as an ‘old saying’ were around in US journalism in the early 20th century. Later, in 1930, Walter Winchell attributed a version to William Randolph Hearst. More recently, it has been attributed to Lord Northcliffe, a UK pioneer of tabloid journalism. It wasn’t attributed to Orwell until the 1990s, decades after he died.

And finally: this is actually true

NZTA statistics confirm that in 2/3 of multiple vehicle accidents, the person in charge of the other vehicle is at fault.

— ∆ Richard Law (@alphabeta_soup) January 13, 2017