October 31, 2018
Briefly
- “even though men [in China] were responsible for 4.6 times more traffic incidents, news reports about accidents caused by women were 3.8 times more common in Chinese publications than articles about accidents caused by men” from Sixth Tone
- You have about one week left to submit comments to the review of the Statistics Act (if you are NZ or otherwise care about NZ official statistics)
- “Simple questions such as: “I wonder how they know that?”; “Is that better or worse than I might have expected?”; “What exactly do they mean?” often unlock far more insight than narrow technical queries.” Tim Harford
- Halloween costume names generated by a neural network, as an illustration of how they work. By Janelle Shane, in the New York Times
- Nice detailed description of a election forecasting model from Montgomery Blair High School, nearly in Washington DC.
- Worthwhile Canadian Institution (or, the value of trusted official statistics in the ‘truth decay’ era)
- From Reddit, a map of recorded meteorite impacts in the last century in the US.
“Recorded” is doing a lot of the work here. Meteorite impacts have no preference as to longitude and a relatively weak preference for being closer to the equator. The map also over-represents areas further from the equator, making the density look lower, but these factors must be relatively weak compared to the likelihood of an impact being recorded
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 »