April 9, 2018
Briefly
- Puerto Rico’s official statistics agency is being dismantled and privatised
- A good Herald medical science story, on the McLeod family, the stomach-cancer risk gene many of them carry, and what’s being done about it
- It’s hard to do survey research on small subgroups of people, since even a small fraction of false responses can dominate the real ones. Especially with teenagers:
In a 2003 study, 19 percent of teens who claimed to be adopted actually weren’t, according to follow-up interviews with their parents. When you excluded these kids (who also gave extreme responses on other items), the study no longer found a significant difference between adopted children and those who weren’t on behaviors like drug use, drinking and skipping school
- “If your data is bad, your machine learning tools are useless” – from the Harvard Business Review, so the message is getting out.
- From the South China Morning Post: “Jaywalkers under surveillance in Shenzhen soon to be punished via text messages” — new automated system based on facial recognition.
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 »
For the authors of the 2003 study on teenagers, ( they covered more than just adoption) the results were so compromised the paper was retracted.
But a google search before would have told them lots of papers about teenagers lying, some researchers whole field is on deception in children.
6 years ago