January 14, 2020
Briefly
- Reuters graphics showing the size of the Australian bushfires
- From Jen Hay (linguist) on Twitter Karl du Fresne recently wrote: “The year just passed was notable for the supplanting of the letter T by D in spoken English, so that we got authoridy in place of authority, credibilidy instead of credibility, securidy for security, and so on”. Professor Hay goes on to point out that this is a long-standing trend in NZ English, and show that du Fresne himself was doing it as long ago as 2013!
- On cancer hype (via Derek Lowe) By email or through their press representatives, STAT asked 17 of the leaders who were quoted in that press release to reflect on what the moonshot has and hasn’t accomplished in the past four years. None of them agreed to comment.
- Also from Derek Lowe, about cancer trends. Some cancers are occurring at the same rate they used to, but people aren’t dying from them (good). Some are occurring less often than they used to (good). Some are occurring much more often than they used to, but no more people are dying from them. That sounds as though it might be good, but (at least in part) it will be overdiagnosis — the cancers aren’t really getting that much more common, we’re just diagnosing harmless cases.
- 538 are giving forecasts for the US primary elections — including uncertainty intervals, which are really wide still. In 80% of simulations, [Biden] wins between 5% and 45% of the vote. He has a 3 in 10 (30%) chance of winning the most votes, essentially tied with the second most likely winner, Sanders, who has a 3 in 10 (28%) chance.
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 »