December 2, 2016

Briefly

  • Beautiful pictures of food popularity over season and year, based on Google Trends data (via @kamal_hothi)
  • Despite the Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney high-school kids did not synthesise Daraprim. They synthesised pyrimethamine, and the difference is what matters. First, there’s the manufacturing quality control criteria that they don’t come close to meeting. More importantly, though, there’s the whole regulatory failure that let Shkreli overprice his brand of the drug in the US. In New Zealand, for comparison, Pharmac buys pyrimethamine for less than a dollar a pill, and in Australia it’s about the same (maybe cheaper).
  • Figure.NZ has a ‘festive data calendar’ with one NZ fact each day
  • In the past few months, global mean temperatures have decreased. Or even “plummeted”
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    That’s because it’s winter in the northern hemisphere, and the northern hemisphere has more land than the southern hemisphere, and land temperatures vary more with season than ocean temperatures. It happens every year, and no-one would take this year’s fall as special evidence against climate change. Except, apparently, the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (or at least their Twitter account)
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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 »