March 12, 2017
Briefly
- False positives: many people who think they are allergic to penicillin actually aren’t, and so don’t need to be given broader-spectrum antibiotics (which have more impact on resistance). Ars Technica, the research paper.
- Cancer genomics researcher accused of data falsification. Long NY Times story, including very clever animation of Western blot duplication.
- A bill in the US House of Representatives wouldn’t quite let employers demand genetic data from employees, but it would let employers make employees pay not to give it. (STAT news)
- President Trump described good employment numbers under the previous government as ‘phony’. After the first month of his government, the White House press secretary said “They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now”. (via Vox)
- “Cause of death” is complicated: the BBC has a story “The biggest killer you may not know” about sepsis. The story says it “kills more people in the UK each year than bowel, breast and prostate cancer combined.” But it’s not either/or. A substantial number of sepsis deaths are due to cancer or cancer treatment.
- Cathy O’Neil on how looking harder for crimes by any group (such as immigrants) is bound to increase the crime rate — if a spurious increase wasn’t the aim, you’d need to be careful about interpreting the data.
- “There are no news stories about Obama not planning a coup, just as web pages about the Holocaust tend to take as a given that it happened.” NYmag on Google’s featured snippets
- An animated tour of data science at online clothes retailer StichFix
- Some lovely 1920s maps of Australia
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 »