May 29, 2018

Briefly

  • “It is important that guidelines for mitigation measures are proportionate to the risk posed, and that remediation strategies should be informed by a risk-based approach.” That’s not the money quote from Sir Peter Gluckman’s report on methamphetamine testing for houses (PDF), but it’s the generic StatsChat message.  For more, see Russell Brown’s story; he has been a consistent journalistic voice against panic-based testing.
  • From an NY Times oped “Knowing a person’s political leanings should not affect your assessment of how good a doctor she is — or whether she is likely to be a good accountant or a talented architect. But in practice, does it?  Recently we conducted an experiment to answer that question”.  As Andrew Gelman explains, they totally didn’t.
  • A new UK Parliament report “Algorithms in Decision Making”
  • “Why Government needs sustainable [statistical] software, too”
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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 »