August 9, 2014
Briefly
Limits of measurement edition
- “So you can either believe that Germany has no billionaires or that European statisticians aren’t very good at finding them.” Stories from Slate and Bloomberg on the difficulty of estimating wealth inequality
- “Big data really only has one unalloyed success on its track record, and it’s an old one: Google, specifically its Web search.” Another story from Slate, on Big Data and creepy experiments.
- Lionfish are a significant exotic invader in the US, but are easy to catch and taste good. Except that they often test positive for ciguatera toxin, which is no fun at all. Except that it might all be a false positive.
- Even for the best drink-driving propaganda, such as the famous ‘Ghost Chips’ ad, the evaluation is basically in terms of public perception, because it’s too hard to evaluate actual impact on drink driving. A nice piece from TheWireless
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 »
At abouit the same time the “ghost chips” ad campaign came on the police ramped down in a fairly major way the number of breath tests they were performing – so the number of convictions for drink driving plumeted amongst the young but their fatal and non-fatal accident rates still seem to be tracking upwards. Catching youth drink driving tends to be expensive as it happens at a time when labour costs are high.
10 years ago
that should have been their
‘alcohol related fatal and non-fatal accident rates still seem to be tracking upwards.”
10 years ago
That’s an interesting comment, but what data are you referring to? The NZTA motor vehicle crashes reports suggest that alcohol-related fatal crashes are trending downwards, if anything, for pretty much all age groups. I don’t think the cost of drink-driving enforcement has been estimated, but the social cost of fatal crashes is around the $3-4 million mark per crash or fatality.
10 years ago
I’ve seen an updated analysis based on this paper
http://img.scoop.co.nz/media/pdfs/0705/Minimum_Purchase_Age__T_Huckle_et_al.pdf
10 years ago