January 3, 2016
Briefly
- True-colour photos of Earth from space — why it’s not as simple as that, by Emily Lakadawalla
- “The ranks of the wealthy grew in 2013, with 1.38 million households making it into the Top 1%, up from 1.36 million a year earlier.” From CNN Money (who should understand percentages) via Felix Salmon
- Translation of international new reprints matters. The Herald had a headline “North Pole now 50 degrees above normal“, which was 50 Fahrenheit degrees. In NZ terms, just under 30 Celsius degrees.
- From the Christmas edition of BMJ, famous for its joke (but accurate) articles, a functional MRI imaging study comparing people who do and don’t celebrate Christmas, found differences in brain activation. These differences could be argued as a biological “Christmas Spirit” locus, plausible in terms of previous research. The point, obviously, is how easy it is to overinterpret such things.
- A group in the US did a randomised, blinded trial to see what effect faster internet speeds would have: they raised the bandwidth for 1500 people from 105Mbps to 250Mbps without telling them. People used the internet more, and it wasn’t primarily the heaviest users whose use increaseed.
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 »