December 14, 2018

Briefly

By
  • I wrote about the babysitter dystopia of automated social media analysis from a Herald story. Gizmodo has a longer and more detailed piece, including what the automated system thought about the writer’s babysitter and why that’s interesting.
  • Cathy O’Neil has a short animated video about why predictive algorithms aren’t objective in the ‘value-free’ sense
  • Beautiful pictures of mortality rates over time in France, by Kieran Healy (who also has a new book on data visualisation). The vertical lines show event such as wars and pandemics; the general lightening shows improved life expectancy over time; and the subtle diagonal lines follow people born in certain specific years and show they had a shorter life expectancy than those a little older or younger.
avatar

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 »