December 11, 2013
Briefly
- A much better Herald story on incomes in Auckland using census data.
- Statistically-themed gifts: data visualisation art, probability distribution plush toys, David Spiegelhalter’s book The Norm Chronicles
- Probability, rather than statistics: selections from the output of a Markov Chain based on the King James Bible and the programming bible “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” . That is, the program looks at all the times the current word appears in those works and picks one appearance randomly to get the following word. [update: actually, I think it looks at the current four words]
And these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, and all the abominations that be done in (log n) steps.
- A New York Times opinion piece estimating what fraction of the US male population is gay. The assumptions aren’t necessarily right, but it’s interesting to see how the estimation is done, and the result is more plausible than the Gallup poll from October
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 »
One of the problems with counting gay people is the differences in how it is defined by different people i.e. whether bisexuals count as gay and whether sexual expression is equivalent to sexual identity (e.g. the sterotype of the gay porn star who isn’t gay).
Although the article supposes that high school students in intolerant states don’t move there is an example in the documentary “Bully” of a high school student who parents move the family to another city to get away from the intolerance.
10 years ago
True, although they only assume high school students are much less likely to move, which I think is plausible.
It’s still good to see someone showing their working.
10 years ago