December 17, 2012
Briefly
- A zombie story: Stuff has an opinion piece about chocolate and intelligence, based on the joke article in the New England Journal of Medicine back in October. We covered what was wrong with it then, and showed that you get better correlation with the number of letters in the country’s name than with chocolate consumption. [Update: the piece is really from an Australian publication, with a light makeover for the Kiwi audience.]
- A better joke. An article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal looks at the impact on clinical trials if the world ends on December 21, as the Mayan calendar does not give the slightest suggestion will happen.
- Language Log examines the inability of journalists around the world to get the basic numbers right in reporting a study on water chlorination and allergies (a story that the NZ media seem to have had the good sense not to pick up).
- “Good data-driven journalism both publishes as much data as possible, and uses the data to drive conclusions, rather than simply dropping numbers into a foreordained article.” Felix Salmon, complaining about a New York Times story.
- The American Statistical Association has a new prize for “Causality in Statistics Education”, aimed at encouraging the teaching of basic causal inference in introductory statistics courses.
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 »