July 4, 2014

Briefly

  • “There are advantages and disadvantages for reporting the median, but over time it has become common practice worldwide to report market benchmark prices as the median.” from a good explanation at interest.co.nz
  • The maximum, on the other hand, is rarely a good summary on its own. This Herald story on slow licence suspensions is not an exception. A median or 90th percentile, or proportion taking longer than a reasonable duration would have been good additions. Also, how many licence suspensions are there for accumulated demerits?
  • TheWireless is having a ‘theme’ on Risk. It’s pretty much non-quantitative, which I think misses something, but they aren’t trying to draw unwarranted generalisations from qualitative data. I liked the story on yellow-stickered earthquake-risk buildings; an interesting counterpoint is Eric Crampton’s post on house-hunting in Wellington.
  • “Measure twice; cut once” is the old saying. It’s good that the government’s welfare reform program is being evaluated. Not so good that the evaluation plan is secret even under OIA.
  • Interestingly, the retracted and recently republished paper on GMOs and Roundup  (previous StatsChat coverage)wasn’t peer-reviewed. Or, rather, it wasn’t peer-reviewed again — the journal decided that the initial review before the retraction was enough. This was not made very clear in the paper or press material.
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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 »