July 18, 2016

Briefly

  • Lovely rant about Aloe vera gel and sunburn: “Listen, you antiscience monster: These people who sell aloe vera are stealing from you. As of 2004, the market for finished aloe products was worth $110 billion. The aloe barons are taking your money and building gigantic aloe palaces and not helping your sunburn at all. They are probably taking long soaks in great big hot tubs for which you helped pay. And they’re probably wearing lots of sunscreen, too, because they know nothing in their cabinets can heal sunburn.”
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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
    Megan Pledger

    My take on betting markets and brexit…

    People who bet on betting markets are not a random sample of the population. In the past that hasn’t mattered too much because those variables haven’t been factors in how the population outcome has been decided. (Or there was enough long-term knowledge to accommodate them.)

    However, in the brexit, the variables that made people people decide to leave were also the variables that made people not interested to bet in the betting markets. Added in was the fact that geographic location played a big part in brexit, as it presumably does in the betting market – so London opinion was going out via the media but “country” opinion wasn’t coming back to influence bettors.

    8 years ago

  • avatar

    I am strongly of the opinion that square pie graphs should be referred to as cake graphs.

    8 years ago