August 9, 2017

Briefly

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  • From econ blog “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative”:  “The fraction of children earning more than their parents fell from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to around 50% for children entering the labor market today. Not children. Boys, perhaps, but not children. “
  • From North and South, a story on what direct-to-consumer genetic testing might be good for.
  • There are lots of websites with useful and interesting data out there, but you need to worry about what the data mean. Kaiser Fung has an example from a Kaggle challenge involving Hollywood movies “Huge alarm bells should be going off in the analyst’s head right around now. There were only eleven movies about vampires? Only eleven martial arts movies? Only twelve movies involving superheroes?” (via Andrew Gelman)
  • Wired magazine reprints a Harper’s story about that 1984 revolution in numerical computing, the spreadsheet. “It is not far-fetched to imagine that the introduction of the electronic spreadsheet will have an effect like that brought about by the development during the Renaissance of double-entry bookkeeping. ” If anything, an underestimate.
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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 »