March 18, 2017

Briefly

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  • A guy tracked all the words his son learnt in the first 20 months, and made graphs.
  • Based on survey data, Peter Beinart argues in the Atlantic “those who don’t regularly attend church are more likely to suffer from divorce, addiction, and financial distress.” Fred Clark (who does regularly attend church) has a different suggestion “It’s also entirely possible — and quite likely once you allow yourself to think about it — that all of these things make church-going more difficult and less likely.” 
  • From the archive that noted.co.nz now has online, Mark Broatch interviews Eula Bliss about her book on vaccination.
  • Apps that use your phone to monitor your health or nudge you towards better behaviour have obvious potential.  One of the first evaluations of an app baseed on Apple’s ResearchKit shows that the potential isn’t matched by actual. “only 131 participants took at least a week’s worth of surveys and a six-month milestone survey. That’s 1.7 percent”. Story at Ars Technica, research paper
  • The new newsroom.co.nz has a good story on the history and uptake of a treatment for premature babies that came from New Zealand research on sheep.
  • Mark Hanna has an interactive graphic comparing how often NZ Police use different tactical options for stopping people, by ethnicity.
  • Does it matter how long you’ve already waited for a bus? In New York, not really.
  • Nat Dudley talks about colour-blindness and accessibility of graphics.
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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 »