December 31, 2015

One of those end of year post thingies

The most obvious thing in the StatsChat logs: the Rugby World Cup:

rugby

Also, back last January, there was a study on the relationship between cell divisions and cancer risk across human tissues. The popular misinterpretations of the research — “cancer is mostly bad luck” — led to our most popular post ever.

The question of what it means for something to be a Group I carcinogen gets us a lot of low-level traffic, but interest peaked after the IARC report on red meat and processed meat.

Posts on the risk posed by foreign drivers were popular early in the year. In July, though, they were displaced by foreign-sounding home buyers.

I wrote about the largest human randomised controlled trial of mānuka honey to prevent illness, when it was reported in June. It was done by kids at a London primary school. They didn’t find a benefit.

Finally, there’s a steady trickle of people interested in the mathematics of the lottery, presumably in the mistaken hope that we’ll tell them how to beat the martingale optional sampling theorem.

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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 »