March 13, 2013
Briefly
- Not-so-big data: Under current policies, the US will soon have no polar-orbit weather satellites. This will be a big setback for weather forecasting, especially of coastal storms
- Research on how journalists verify information:
“A small, easily checkable fact needs to be checked; a larger but greyer assertion, not so much — unless it is defamatory,” they write. “Thus, verification for a journalist is a rather different animal from verification in scientific method, which would hold every piece of data subject to a consistent standard of observation and replication.”
- It’s not just animal models that have problems in biology. A widely used bladder-cancer cell line turns out not to be.
- The New York Times bravely attempts to explain p-values. Bravely, but not successfully. Hilary Parker does better.
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 »
“This number (the p stands for probability) is arrived at through a complex calculation designed to quantify the probability that the results of an experiment were not due to chance.”
Argh! Thinking the p-value is the same thing as the posterior probability of H0 is possibly the most popular statistics error out there.
People really WANT the posterior probability of H0. Why do we give it to them so rarely?
11 years ago