February 23, 2018
Briefly
- Data visibility as a political act: Ben Goldacre and co-conspirators have set up a webpage tracking clinical trials that are violating the FDA Amendment Act (2007) by not having reported any results. It only became possible to violate the Act this Monday, so the compliance is fairly high so far, nearly 90%.
- Politician Sam is an expert system from Victoria University Wellington that’s trying to learn NZ political views. That’s not an unreasonable thing to try, but reading “Unlike a human politician, I consider everyone’s position, without bias, when making decisions” doesn’t make me more optimistic about the project.
- Which NZ songs get streamed the most here and overseas? Gareth Shute at the Spinoff
- “Count on Stats” is an effort by the American Statistical Association to rebuild public confidence in US official statistics.
- Alice Zhao analysed text messages with her (now) husband from the year they married and the year they started dating — a nice illustration of what you can miss by looking at just one source of information.
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 »