February 27, 2025
Briefly
- Petrol price margins are up: RNZ. These, as we’ve discussed, are based on the difference between the import price and retail price, and include transport and vendor costs (like running petrol stations) as well as profits. The change from week to week in the margin is still a good indicator that either the efficiency of the system has gone down or the profits have gone up.
- The Trump administration has cited a statistic that only 6% of federal government workers are full-time in their offices. This is facially implausible when you consider how many federal jobs can’t possibly be done remotely. Pro Publica looked into the number, which came from a self-selected online survey of 6338 people claiming to be federal employees, run by a a small news organisation called Federal News Network in the suburbs of Washington. Say no to statistics from bogus polls!
- The UK is running a big (700,000 women) trial of “AI” to assist in reading mammograms. This isn’t ChatGPT, it’s from earlier generations of image-analysis software that actually works. The hope is that using software plus one radiologist is at least as good as the current standard of two radiologists, allowing more screening to be done without needing more scarce radiologists. The media coverage is nearly all positive and based on the government’s publicity release, eg, this from the BBC. There’s not a lot of information available about how they will measure success or exactly which “AI” platforms they will use. I couldn’t find a trial registration, though I did find one for a much smaller trial 15-20 years ago on the same question. One negative piece of media coverage from the New Statesman, for balance.
- A US trial of an oral Covid vaccine, hoping to provide both better protection and easier delivery, has been stopped by the US government just before it was due to start. At the moment this is being described as a ‘pause’ rather than permanent stoppage.
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 »