June 26, 2018

Briefly

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  • “Bias detectives: the researchers striving to make algorithms fair” from Nature News.  Featuring Auckland (AUT) researcher Rhema Vaithianathan.
  • In the UK, the Ada Lovelace Institute is being established, looking at these and related issues.
  • There were a bunch of headlines in the UK saying that life expectancy was falling (and often attributing the fall to ‘austerity’ policies).  Our World In Data looks at the issue: what is actually happening is that expected increases in life expectancy had been scaled back slightly, and this was due mostly to changes in projections for the increase in life expectancy of one 15-year group of people (born 1923-1938).  Official statistics is complicated.
  • US researchers looked at the first digit after the decimal point in various numbers reported by companies listed on the stock exchange. For earnings per share, but not for other figures, there was a noticeable shortage of ‘4’s — about 8% rather than the expected 10% — suggesting that the numbers may have been manipulated a little so that this figure, which is published rounded to the nearest whole cent,  rounds up rather than rounding down.

    Interestingly, companies that didn’t post any .4s were more likely to “restate their financial statements, be named as defendants in SEC Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases, and be involved in class action securities fraud litigation” (via Matt Levine)
  • You may have seen in headlines that new research connects Alzheimer’s Disease to some very common viruses related to herpes. Derek Lowe writes about how this is better substantiated than a lot of previous alternative theories. But the take-home message is still that we don’t know what to do to treat or prevent AD.
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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 »