April 15, 2015

Briefly

  • Good article in New York Times about why ‘survival rates’ aren’t the best way to assess progress in cancer. Same explanation that I’ve covered before several times: survival can improve when all you do is move diagnosis earlier without affecting disease or death at all
  • Whether state government subsidy of tuition in the US is increasing or decreasing seems like it should be an easy question. Not so much.
  • Comparing prices from different years without inflation adjustment is like comparing prices from different countries without currency conversion.  Any inflation adjustment is better than none, but if you’re interested in different ways it can be done there’s a fairly comprehensible review by the UK Statistics Authority
  • Headlines based on bogus polls are back. At Stuff, an implausible headline from a survey created to publicise a dating app and National Cheese Week. Celebrate National Library Week instead.
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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 »

Comments

  • avatar

    The link to the review of inflation adjustment seems to be to your computer.

    9 years ago

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      Ta. Fixed now. I wish my browser made it more obvious whether it was downloading or just displaying a PDF.

      9 years ago

  • avatar
    Richard Cook, MD

    The survival rate NY Times piece doesn’t mention this article http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4000199
    on the “Will Rogers effect”. The paper, now 30 years old, points out that the early detection also changes staging by shifting patients with more advanced disease to a higher stage, resulting in better performance of both stages. Rogers, an American commentator in 1930’s observed that when people moved from Oklahoma to California they improved the average IQ in both states. The improved survival from lung cancer in the 1980’s was as much from effect of CT scans generating a split that moved some of those who would have been stage I to stage II, making the survival in both stages better.

    9 years ago