June 14, 2016
Why everyone trusts us
- In the UK, there’s been a big increase in the use of National Health Service data to track illegal immigrants — this was previously just done for serious criminals. (Buzzfeed)
- CHICAGO — In this city’s urgent push to rein in gun and gang violence, the Police Department is keeping a list. Derived from a computer algorithm that assigns scores based on arrests, shootings, affiliations with gang members and other variables, the list aims to predict who is most likely to be shot soon or to shoot someone. New York Times
- There’s a new UK website that does detailed analysis of your social media to tell your landlord whether you’ll be able to pay your rent. “If you’re living a normal life,” Thornhill reassures me, “then, frankly, you have nothing to worry about.” (Washington Post)
- Facebook won’t change your privacy-related settings without notifying you. But it might introduce new ones. (David Carroll, at Medium)
- “We don’t turn people away,” Might said, but the cable company’s technicians aren’t going to “spend 15 minutes setting up an iPhone app” for a customer who has a low FICO score. (fiercecable, via mathbabe.org)
- Another startup “claims it can “reveal” your personality “with a high level of accuracy” just by analyzing your face, be that facial image captured via photo, live-streamed video, or stored in a database. It then sorts people into categories; with some labels as potentially dangerous such as terrorist or pedophile,” (also via mathbabe.org)
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 »