October 30, 2017
Briefly
- From Politico: “Is Washington Bungling the Census?”
- From Wired: China’s planned ‘Social Credit’ score
- Florida man arrested for meth that was actually donut glaze. Georgia police ‘drug recognition expert’ can recognise drug use that even blood tests can’t detect. In NZ, though, 95% of those who fail a roadside impairment test are positive on follow-up blood tests.
- A McDonalds promotion in Canada advertises some high-level prizes and a 1 in 5 chance of winning. Some guy bought 100 orders of large fries, thinking he’d get forty prizes (2 tickets per order). It’s actually two half-tickets per order, so he won 23 prizes. Mostly cheeseburgers. The moral: (a) read the instructions, and (b) most of the prizes are always just cheeseburgers (or the moral equivalent in other lotteries).
- rawgraphs.io is a new tool for producing fairly attractive graphs quickly from spreadsheet data
- Mark Hanna wrote a guide to the New Zealand Official Information Act
- Andrew Gelman: Advice for Science Writers
- [update] I nearly forgot Chris McDowall’s graphs of electorate vs party vote in the NZ election, from the Spinoff
- Computer maps: then
Computer visualization of population density in Los Angeles County, 1971 https://t.co/IIAD7xjiGp pic.twitter.com/BkOXgbaXrI
— Eric Fischer (@enf) October 14, 2017
and now (from Wikipedia)
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 »