April 13, 2025
Briefly
- Jessica Mackenzie on the “dire” wolf story, and how it got that way: “It’s important to consider how sausage like this is made, and I mean the stories—not the actual wolves.”
- Visualisation of the “demise of the love song” from pudding.cool
- Proportions and totals: is the individual risk of Alzheimer’s going down over time? (apparently, yes, even though the total number of cases goes up with the number of older people)
- Australian Associated Press fact check: Claim – 710,000 new voters on the electoral roll include migrants who arrived under Labor. False: Migrants who arrived under Labor are not eligible to vote in the 2025 election.
- Stuff headline: Traffic ‘worse than Auckland’: Is this New Zealand’s most ‘anti-car’ city? We’re seeing proper use of headline single quotes here — ‘worse than Auckland’ is an attributed quotation in the text. It is, however, attributed to a single motorist. Headlines about traffic density/slowness really shouldn’t just be one person’s opinion — traffic is measurable, and measured.
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 »