July 25, 2017

Briefly

By
  • “Algorithms can dictate whether you get a mortgage or how much you pay for insurance. But sometimes they’re wrong – and sometimes they are designed to deceive” Cathy O’Neil, for Observer.
  • A talk about human factors research and what it says about data visualisation
  • “Point your phone at any mushroom and take a pic, our tech will instantly identify any mushrooms while giving you an article you can read or listen to.” This app seems to be intended as educational ‘augmented reality’, but one reason people want to identify mushrooms is to decide whether it’s safe to eat them. That’s not possible from just a photo, and the costs of some of the possible classification errors are very, very high.
  • A new trend in graphics: ‘joyplots’, named for the famous cover art of a Joy Division album. Here’s a history of the album cover, from Jen Christiansen. And now some examples:

 

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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 »