October 30, 2017

Briefly

  • From Politico“Is Washington Bungling the Census?”
  • From Wired: China’s planned ‘Social Credit’ score
  • A McDonalds promotion in Canada advertises some high-level prizes and a 1 in 5 chance of winning. Some guy bought 100 orders of large fries, thinking he’d get forty prizes (2 tickets per order).  It’s actually two half-tickets per order, so he won 23 prizes. Mostly cheeseburgers. The moral: (a) read the instructions, and (b) most of the prizes are always just cheeseburgers (or the moral equivalent in other lotteries).
  • rawgraphs.io is a new tool for producing fairly attractive graphs quickly from spreadsheet data
  • [update] I nearly forgot Chris McDowall’s graphs of electorate vs party vote in the NZ election, from the Spinoff
  • Computer maps: then

 


and now (from Wikipedia)

814px-LACountyPopDensity

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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 »