July 18, 2022
Briefly
- Training data for emotions/sentiment from Google appears to be badly wrong (Inconceivable!)
- About 12% of people surveyed in the UK said they knew “a great deal” or “a fair amount” about a non-existent candidate for leader of the Conservative Party. More reassuringly, the proportion who had ‘never heard of’ this candidate was much higher than for the real candidates.
- The New York Times asks what’s the chance that Trump adversaries McCabe and Comey got tax audits — and, much more usefully, shows how the answer to this question depends on how you define the comparison
- Hilda Bastian looks at the evidence on whether female national leaders handled the pandemic better, now that we have more follow-up
- From the President of the Royal Society (of London), the need for data literacy, but also the need to “avoid shoehorning everything to do with numbers into a box labelled “Maths”, which has negative connotations for many. If you use that box as a place to pigeonhole quantitative literacy, you are shooting yourself in the foot.” (disclaimer: he’s a statistician)
- A re-analysis suggests that the vaccine effectiveness data for the Sputnik coronavirus vaccine cannot possibly be correct. Among other red flags, the estimated effectiveness in different age groups was far more similar than would be expected even if the true effectiveness was identical in the groups.
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 »