October 30, 2016

Briefly

  • A long post on the use and misuse of the ‘Twitter firehose’, from Bloomberg View
  • A long story at Stuff about discharge without conviction, though a bit undermined by the fact that, as the story says, “[the] number of discharges without conviction has plummeted, from 3189 in 2011, to 2103 in 2015,
  • While the idea of  predicting the US election using mako sharks (carchariamancy?) is no sillier than psychic meerkats or lucky lotto retailers, I don’t think the story really works unless the people pushing it at least pretend to believe it.
  • On the other hand, some people did seriously argue that shark attacks affected the results of presidential elections. And were wrong
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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 »