December 6, 2022

Briefly

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  • I’ve often complained about misleading bar graphs in reporting electoral opinion polls. 1News just punted on the whole issue with this:
  • The cost of the Meola Road rebuild, $47.5 million, has been inaccurately portrayed as the cost of the bike lane that’s a minor component of it. Twitter user @ArcCyclist got the actual breakdown from the Council:

    While I’m at it, I do want to note one way it’s a bad table: the cycleway number is given to whole dollars, with everything else given in cents, so it looks even smaller than it really is. You usually don’t want to delete trailing zeroes in a table.
  • The ESR Covid wastewater dashboard is now at poops.nz. Yes, really.
  • There’s a new “technical report for future UK Chief Medical Officers, Government Chief Scientific Advisers, National Medical Directors and public health leaders in a pandemic” from the UK. Even if you aren’t among that exalted company, some of the information may be useful to public citizens as well
  • The Ministry of Health is seeking public comment on something it wrote about ‘precision health’. There might be StatsChat readers who have reckons.
  • Eric Crampton notes that cost-benefit ratios for transport projects are defined in an idiosyncratic way that makes them hard to compare either with each other or with non-transport projects.
  • The first drug to convincingly delay Type I diabetes onset has been approved. The average benefit is about two years, and the treatment will be marketed at US$200,000.  Cost-effectiveness research suggests this is way more than it’s worth for most people, even in the US where insulin for Type I diabetes is very expensive.
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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 »

Comments

  • avatar
    Steve Curtis

    For the cycleway costs , apart from road surfacing, how much would be happening if they werent doing the cycleway and its associated footpaths, drainage, crossing point ( inc traffic lights), signs roadmarking etc.
    From what I can see of the plans it starts at Pt Chev shops and goes all the way via Meola Rd to Westmere shops

    Its like saying a hospital operation is only the
    specialist doctors and nurses and use of the theatre but exclude the ward stay , the tests, medication and the follow up.

    2 years ago