January 8, 2018
Briefly
- “Every now and then a story appears in the media about how boffins (and it is always “boffins”) have worked out an equation for something: the perfect cup of tea, the most depressing day of the year, the best way to make pancakes, the perfect handshake, or in the most recent case, the perfect cheese on toast.” The equation for the perfect bullshit equation.
- The BBC’s statistics-in-the-media radio program More or Less has a special ‘statistics of the year’ episode
- Some interesting student projects from a data visualisation class
- How Spotify picks your music.
- “Average London”: averages of tourist photos of the same London attraction.
- Displaying uncertainty in the UK unemployment rate
- One of the problems in training modern neural network classifiers is that they will pick up on anything, sensible or not. Luke Oakden-Rayner writes about a popular set of data from chest x-rays and why it won’t teach the computers the right things.
- The American Academy of Family Physicians is not endorsing new blood pressure standards that would increase the proportion of US adults defined as having hypertension from about 1/3 to about 1/2.
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 »