March 5, 2018
Briefly
- The gender gap: JP Morgan claims to pay its women employees 99% of what the men get. Felix Salmon and Matt Levine both take on this statistic: it doesn’t show women are paid the same (they aren’t), it just argues against one particular mechanism for the pay gap.
- “Starting with no knowledge at all of what it was seeing, the neural network had to make up rules about which images should be labeled “sheep”. And it looks like it hasn’t realized that “sheep” means the actual animal, not just a sort of treeless grassiness.” Janelle Shane.
- Translation is another example of the amazingly-good results networks can get, but with no grip on what’s actually going on. Douglas Hofstatder writes at the Atlantic about “The Shallowness of Google Translate“, and Mark Liberman at Language Log shows how it will translate random sequences of vowels into Hawaiian gibberish.
- David Spiegelhalter on how to stop being so easily manipulated by misleading statistics
- Tickets bought online for NZ Lotto are more likely to win. It’s obvious that there has to be a boring explanation for this. I suggested one that fitted the data.
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 »