April 19, 2019
Briefly
- How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care. IEEE Spectrum
- “In a major ethical leap for the tech world, Chinese start-ups have built algorithms that the government uses to track members of a largely Muslim minority group”. New York Times
- A description of the process behind a major data visualisation “The Design Process of “Why Do Cats & Dogs …?”
- I’ve written about the University of Washington course “Calling Bullshit” before, but it’s worth reading the writeups in Pacific Standard and the Guardian
- Following the stories about identifying a serial killer using data from recreational genotyping, BuzzFeed reporter Peter Aldhous tried to track down ten of his colleagues from DNA reports. He got six of them. Of course, this is a more limited frame of candidates than in the forensic case.
- With better measurement of teens’ “screen time” you find less evidence that it’s associated with mental health.
- The Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award from the American Statistical Association goes to Hansi Lo Wang from NPR for his reporting on next year’s US Census.
- Ongoing note: I’m on the External Data Quality Panel for the NZ 2018 census, so I won’t be commenting on the conduct or reliabilty of the census until we release our report.
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 »