March 22, 2013

Briefly

  • A post at Scientific American about covering clinical trials, for journalists and readers.  It’s a summary from the Association of Health Care Journalists annual conference. Starts out “My message: Ask the hard questions.”
  • Asking the hard questions is also useful in covering surveys.  Stuff reports “Kiwi leaders amongst the world’s riskiest”,
  • New Zealand leaders are among the most likely in the world to ignore data and fail to seek a range of opinions when making decisions

    with no provenance except that this was based on a 600,000 person survey of managers and professionals by SHL.  Before trying to track down any more detail, just think: how could this have worked? How would you get reliable information to support those conclusions from each of 600,000 people? 

  • You may have heard about the famous Hawthorne experiment, where raising light levels in a factory improved output, as did lowering them, as did anything else experimental. The original data have been found and this turns out not to be the case.
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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 »