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Q: Did you hear that pizza boxes are going to stop the Covid vaccine working?

A: You mean people will mistakenly store the vaccine in pizza boxes instead of ultracold deep freeze?

Q: No, research shows that pizza boxes and lots of other things contain chemicals that stop vaccines working. According to the Guardian.

A: Even the Guardian says “At this stage we don’t know if it will impact a corona vaccination”

Q: And is that true?

A: No.

Q: What?

A: The story says these chemicals are ubiquitous, with the majority of people being exposed.

Q: Yes, that’s the scary part

A: So people in the Covid vaccine trials will also have been exposed.

Q: I suppose so?

A: The trials estimate the effect of the vaccines in a reasonably diverse group of people from the US population.  If polybathroomfloorine, or anything else widespread, has an adverse effect on the vaccines, that’s already baked in to the trial results.

Q: So without the chemicals, the vaccines might have been, say, 95% effective?

A: If you believe there’s a relationship, yes, that’s what you’d think.

Team Ratings for Postponed Games

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 53 matches played, 37 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 69.8%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Postponed Games

Here are the predictions for Postponed Games. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 7

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 16 matches played, 12 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 75%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 7

Here are the predictions for Round 7. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 1

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Predictions for Round 1

Here are the predictions for Round 1. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 7

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 32 matches played, 23 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 71.9%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 7

Here are the predictions for Round 7. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for the Mitre 10 Cup Semi-Finals

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 70 matches played, 46 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 65.7%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for the Mitre 10 Cup Semi-Finals

Here are the predictions for the Mitre 10 Cup Semi-Finals. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

We have data on a second Covid vaccine candidate, and it’s similar to the first one.  Moderna  released their first analysis results today: out of 95 cases of Covid, 90 were in the placebo group and 5 in the vaccine group . Even better, they had enough cases of serious disease to analyse, and these split 11:0.

Both of the vaccines use the same new technology, where little bits of messenger RNA, coding for the virus spike protein are introduced into your cells. Your cells make the protein just as if they’d been infected and your immune system reacts.  At least, that was the theory, and it does seem to have worked.   We haven’t heard from any of the trials using more traditional technologies, which would produce vaccines that are easier to distribute and may be easier to manufacture by the truckload.

The next important step, fairly soon, is an FDA external advisory committee meeting.  This should be more informative than peer-reviewed publication: it’s peer review, but involving a lot more information than goes into a published paper, and a wider range of reviewers — and it’s done in public.

There are still problems to be considered:

1. The vaccines have not been tested in children or pregnant women. That’s standard, except for treatments specifically aimed at children or pregnant women, but it’s an important gap.  The pregnancy exclusion is probably less important from a public health point of view, since a very small fraction of the population is pregnant at any given time. Kids, though.
2. We don’t know yet how long protection lasts — if it’s only a few months, that’s a problem
3. We don’t know yet how much asymptomatic infection is prevented
4. NZ doesn’t seem to have bought any of the Moderna vaccine yet — the Minister says we’re in negotiations

Also, these vaccines are going to have more short-term side effects than we may be used to: a lot of people will feel a bit average the day after a dose, and a decent chunk will feel pretty average. That’s going to help the vaccine misinformation pushers, especially if health authorities aren’t honest about it.

Simon Collins (and Chris Knox) at the NZ$ Herald have an interesting piece about the relative incomes of university graduates and other people. It’s definitely worth reading (even though you can’t look up Statistics or Data Science or Journalism).  However, there’s a built-in assumption of causation that is not entirely justified

Getting a degree can earn you a cool $1.3 million more over your lifetime than leaving school and going straight into work – but the gains vary wildly depending on what subject you study.

One of the irritating features of Graduation at the University of Auckland is that the Chancellor’s speech always includes a similar claim

We know that, compared to those whose formal education ends in high school, graduates have lower unemployment rates, higher salaries, better career prospects, and better health outcomes.

I actually used this as the topic for an exam question on causal inference in first semester.  The preamble to the question says

Team Ratings for Round 9

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 47 matches played, 34 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 72.3%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 9

Here are the predictions for Round 9. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 6

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 27 matches played, 19 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 70.4%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 6

Here are the predictions for Round 6. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.