December 9, 2015
Briefly
- “Clearly, they had to train the model against some existing data set, and the one they chose was Nazi Germany in the run-up to Operation BARBAROSSA.” There are newly declassified documents about the USSR’s computer model for the risk of a US surprise attack. As Alex Harrowell writes “The neural network that classifies cat photos must by definition contain enough information to make a random collection of pixels catlike, although uncannily not quite right. Similarly, RYAN picked up a lot of unrelated data and invariably made it vaguely Hitler-y.”
- The usually-reliable New York Times has an infographic saying luxury hotels spend $1200 per room per month on bathroom products. Felix Salmon doesn’t believe it. Neither do I.
- As I’ve pointed out from time to time, you don’t have to choose which of the AA and the petrol companies to believe about costs and prices: MBIE monitors the ‘importer margin’ on a weekly basis.
- A book recommendation list from people involved with the UK charity Sense about Science
- A description of how an infographic about bacteria in house dust was designed, at Scientific American
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 »