January 25, 2016
Briefly
- New progress in awful graphs, via Andrew Gelman
- Scientific American‘s predictions for the future, from 2005
- “Claims that forensic experts can match a bullet or shell casing found at a crime scene to a specific weapon lack a scientific basis and should be barred from criminal trials as misleading, a D.C. Court of Appeals judge wrote this week.” The judge objected to claims that the evidence proved a ‘unique’ match. And quite right, too.
- You can prove that a treatment works without knowing how it works, but it’s much harder to find treatments that way. Lithium for bipolar and other mood disorders is an excellent example
- You might have heard of CRISPR in the news and wondered what exactly it was. It’s a technique for cutting DNA at very easily customised locations, for example, to allow for new sequences to be inserted. Good references
- Wired
- Gizmodo (more comparison with other gene editing techniques)
- New York Times (more on implications)
- Wikipedia (more technical)
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 »
I would like to read James Curran’s comments on this.
8 years ago
Yep. I did get the link from him.
8 years ago