March 10, 2016
Briefly
- What Every Journalist Should Know About Science, from the Neiman Foundation at Harvard — and they mean ‘know about how science works’ not ‘know about squid or neutrinos’ (via Harkanwal Singh)
- “Uber officials suggested that if an email address or rider/driver last name contains the word “rape” like “Jason Rape” or “Don Draper” it will be included when queried. … misspellings of the word “rate” and expressions like “you raped my wallet” accounted for false positives in the search results seen in the obtained screenshots.” So maybe we have a return of the ‘Scunthorpe’ problem, but maybe that’s as bogus an explanation as it sounds. From Buzzfeed.
- In Stuff’s list of the 17 most dangerous foods, the entry on the Jamaican vegetable ‘ackee’ says “In 2011 there were 35 poisoning cases” and also “1 in 1000 people develop ackee fruit poisoning each year in the Caribbean”. This fails simple arithmetic: there are more than 35000 people in the Caribbean. A 1991 analysis by the CDC found a rate of 1 in 100,000 restricted to Jamaica, which seems much more plausible. The list is also wrong about absinthe, and is unusual in considering rhubarb leaves to be a food.
- A visualisation of the ages people get married (in the US), from Flowing Data
- “If Bernie Sanders were to defeat Hillary Clinton in Michigan’s Democratic primary, it would be “among the greatest polling errors in primary history,”” He did. It was. Fivethirtyeight.com tries to explain how.
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 »