January 6, 2020

Briefly

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  • Self-selected responses: this Twitter thread by Patrick Tomlinson is about the large number of negative reviews his book has on Goodreads. The book is still being edited. It won’t be available for months.
  • From the Washington Post: “Our privacy experiment found that automakers collect data through hundreds of sensors and an always-on Internet connection. Driving surveillance is becoming hard to avoid”.
  • Via the Herald: surprising no-one, a study by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology has found that US facial-recognition algorithms are better at recognising white people.  (Algorithms developed in east Asia seem to be ok at east Asian faces.)
  • Last year I mentioned investigations at newsroom.co.nz by Eloise Gibson and others of Sir Ray Avery. Sir Ray filed a Media Council complaint about a story that alleged he had threatened a researcher with legal action. The Media Council has found in favour of newsroom
  • From Radio NZ “Plans to collect data by putting sensors in thousands of state houses could result in the information being used to cut benefit payments or even evict tenants, a charity familiar with the project says.” The goal of the sensors is to find out what the actual heating/ventilation/damp problems are with state houses, information that would generalise to many other NZ houses. That’s a valuable goal. And Kāinga Ora say they don’t want to do anything else with the data, such as identify overcrowding or check who regularly has visitors staying the night,  or other potentially creepy possibilities.  But there doesn’t seem to be any clear mechanism to stop Kāinga Ora changing their minds.   Given the potential public benefits from suitable analyses of the data, it would be worth setting up a mechanism that people could see was trustworthy, rather than ending up with crap data when too many people opt out.
  • Interpreting survey responses: The New York Times had an interactive clicky thing asking people to identify celebrities from their photographs.  Pete Buttigieg’s name was spelt in 268 different ways (click to embiggen). Presumably these weren’t all serious, but that doesn’t actually make life any easier for the survey analyst.
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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 »

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