January 3, 2019
Briefly
- Dumb extrapolation watch: An opinion piece in the NY Times says that if you gave up your smartphone for a year “you would have time to make love about 16,000 times”. As various people including Elle Hunt worked out, that’s about 44 times per day. There are also some assumptions in there about priorities — has “sorry dear, I need to check Twitter” really replaced the canonical headache? And assumptions about definitions — “not counting foreplay“.
- From Justin Falcone on Twitter: Google Trends shows how the spelling of ‘impostor syndrome’ has changed over the past few years
- Bad data watch: Katie Langin writes “It’s not every day that you realize you’re a data point in a scientific study—and a misrepresented data point at that. But that’s what happened to a number of current and former scientists—including me—while reading a study reporting that scientific careers have become significantly shorter in the past 50 years”
- Interesting piece in Stuff by Charlie Mitchell: “The ark, the algorithm, and our conservation conundrum” on how species are prioritised for conservation efforts. In particular, there’s more acknowledgement than usual that rejecting ‘algorithms’ doesn’t actually make anything better.
- Chris Knox at Herald Insights has a visualisation of holiday road deaths — in particular, the problem of New Year’s Day morning.
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 »