August 8, 2018
Briefly
- From the NY Times Upshot blog: a randomised trial finds little or no effect of providing a workplace wellness program — but within the trial, the people who ended up using the program were healthier. It would have looked effective without randomisation
- The US National Academy of Science joins the groups saying it’s a bad idea to add a last-minute citizenship question to the US census.
- “Raising the Bar” is a set of 20 talks in bar by Auckland academics, held on Tuesday 28th August. Some of them are sold out already, but the remaining ones include Andrew Chen on privacy implications of modern surveillance systems and Cather Simpson on useful and fun things she does with lasers.
- This graph appeared at vox.com,
As Kieran Healy tweeted “that 1-year, ~15lb-per-person jump in vegetable fat consumption c. 2000 is weird, and a candidate for the rule of thumb that sudden jumps in a time series are often due to changes in measurement criteria”. And so it was. Official statistics agencies try not to change their definitions without a good reason, and put this sort of thing in footnotes. Which you need to check.
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 »