May 4, 2015
Briefly
- From the Guardian, in an otherwise-sensible piece talking about decreases in infant mortality “So things are getting better. The small wrinkly proto-Royal that just emerged from the national womb will have thrice the chance of surviving that her father and I did, just through the privilege of being born in 2015.” It’s pretty obvious this is wrong. If you use the numbers in the previous paragraph, the change is from 98.9% to 99.6%, which isn’t a threefold increase.
- From Mashable: “Facebook turns the London Eye into big UK election pie chart”. Not only is it a pie chart, it’s a pie chart of Facebook mentions, positive or negative, for each party
- Terry Burnham writes about a neat cognitive hack: using fonts that are too small, in order to make people concentrate and learn more. There’s even evidence that it works; it’s just there’s a whole lot more evidence that it doesn’t. Dramatic small-sample experimental findings really can be misleading, it isn’t just statisticians being gratuitously cynical
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 »
The chance of not surviving has changed from 1.1% to 0.4%, which with rounding is about a threefold difference.
9 years ago
Well, yes. I’m not claiming he just made up the number. But it says “thrice the chance of surviving” not “a third the chance of dying” and they aren’t the same thing.
9 years ago