March 16, 2014

Briefly

  • Both men and women think women are bad at math. “Men and women employers alike revealed their prejudice against women for a perceived lack of mathematical ability. When the only information that the employers had was a photograph of the candidate, men were twice as likely to be hired for the simple math job, no matter whether it was a man or woman doing the hiring”. Could do with a lot more scare quotes around words like `employer’, `candidate’, `hired’, but a good report.
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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
    megan pledger

    inBloom (mentioned in link 1) is pretty nasty. It’s a database that collects invasive information about American children from school records and parents can’t opt their kids out. So far only one state is participating (New York, 9 states have backed off) but they want to take it nationwide.

    It’s on the cloud and contains social security number (incredibly valuable) so it’s going to be a prime target for hacking. But that probably doesn’t matter as much as they are going to allow third party access for “educational purposes” – what’s the bet a whole lot of corporations start educational subsideries primarily to get their hands on the data.

    10 years ago

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      Yes, the article is a bit uneven. There’s some pretty scary things there, but also some that fall under Archie Cochrane’s

      I had considerable freedom of clinical choice of therapy: my trouble was that I did not know which to use and when. I would gladly have sacrificed my freedom for a little knowledge.

      10 years ago

  • avatar
    Ben Brooks

    On a completely unrelated topic – a case where the approach to uncertainty in measurement will be the difference between life and death – http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21598681-can-you-execute-man-whose-iq-71-death-mentally-disabled

    10 years ago

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      NZ has the right solution to that specific problem, but there would be a measurement issue even if you were deciding on fitness for, say, 14 years in prison.

      10 years ago