May 7, 2018
Briefly
- Creative arithmetic in some official statistics “an incident in the Rio Grande Valley Sector on February 14, 2017, involved seven U.S. Border Patrol Agents assaulted by six subjects utilizing three different types of projectiles (rocks, bottles, and tree branches), totaling 126 assaults.”
- Interesting, slightly-nerdy post on fake news, network structure, and Cambridge Analytica
- Also on Cambridge Analytica: “The psychology ethics committee refused permission, and when he appealed to the [Cambridge] University Ethics Committee this refusal was upheld”
- “Seven Visualization Talks That Terrified Me At CHI”: Michael Correll on this year’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Abstract art to a human; representational art to a neural network
- The success of statistical models in horse-racing (Bloomberg: limited free articles)
- The UK’s opt-out internet porn filter has lots of completely stupid false positives because of course it does (BoingBoing). There’s a site where you can search or browse them. I think my favourite so far is Utopia Palms and Cycads, a nice ecologically-responsible tropical-plant supplier in Queensland, Australia.
- And in other UK computerised false-positives news “However, when ETS’s automated voice analysis was checked against human analysis, its computer programme was found to be wrong in 20 per cent of cases, meaning that more than 7,000 students were likely to have been wrongly accused of cheating.” Sometimes 80% is a fail, not an A-
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 »