May 16, 2018
Briefly
- “The Home Office seems to have used some sort of voice identification test in an effort to find international students who got someone else to take their mandatory English exam. And this went about as well as you might have expected if you read this blog.” from the Yorkshire Ranter
- NZ supermarkets have apparently been using computerised facial recognition systems to identify shoplifters. Here’s the Privacy Commissioner on Radio NZ. Of course, supermarkets have used non-computerised facial recognition systems for a long time, and there have definitely been concerns about the bias of these, too. And while the current systems seem to have high error rates, that’s temporary: they are going to get better.
- From the Washington Post, a video on how opinion polls work
- “To work for society, data scientists need a Hippocratic oath with teeth” Cathy O’Neil in Wired. I agree on the basic ethics and design principles, but statistics, unlike medicine or law or engineering, has never had a wall to keep people out: anyone can practise statistics. That makes professional regulation hard.
- “Across the city, black people were arrested on low-level marijuana charges at eight times the rate of white, non-Hispanic people over the past three years, The New York Times found.” This won’t actually surprise most people, but the NYT has done a good job of showing that the usual excuses don’t explain the bias.
- Beautiful infographic/visualisation of different types of alcoholic drinks by Rego Sen
- The birth cohort study Growing Up In New Zealand has been refunded
- The story of the HP-35 calculator, the first scientific pocket calculator. I’ve used the next model, the HP-45. Calculators were much better engineered when they cost the equivalent of what a Macbook does now.
- “Baking the most average chocolate chip cookie” from pudding.cool
- Why not to use two y-axes on a graph, from Datawrapper
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 »
from the story about the Hp35
“Literally overnight the slide rule became obsolete; in July, 1976 the venerable firm of Keuffel & Esser manufactured the last slide rule made in America
6 years ago
Much thanks for this. Takes me back to when I was an undergraduate at Canterbury doing Physics at the time the HP-35 was released. I clearly remember many students, particularly the engineers, going into hock to buy one. Also the way you had to attach it to your belt so people *knew* you had one!
Also don’t forget we had to get familiar with reverse polish notation to use it too.
6 years ago
Still happily using the HP45SX I bought in 1990. I still have my slide rule from 20+years earlier but for demonstration purposes only…
6 years ago