February 20, 2020

Briefly

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  • “To be clear I’m not saying that the numbers are wrong, I’m just saying that you can’t have a circle representing $401m be smaller than the lump representing $223m” Felix Salmon, about this graphic from a NY Times story. These ‘bubble’ graphics can be seriously misleading, though they probably wouldn’t violate NZ advertising standards
  • A popular self-driving car dataset is missing labels for hundreds of pedestrians
  • The weirdness of UK gold export statistics, from Ed Conway on Twitter
  • A very nice piece from Hamish Rutherford at the NZ Herald, on how Ardern and Bridges can disagree so much about economic growth.
  • NY Post claims ‘majority of serial killers are Taurus’, attributing the ‘research’ to Britain’s Daily Mirror. It would be surprising if this were true, and it isn’t. The Mirror actually says “more killers on [a thriller author’s] list were Taureans – born between April 20 and May 20 – than any other star sign.” You might then worry how comprehensive or representative this list was.  Or you might wonder whether 8 out of 35 is surprisingly high for the star sign with the most entries on the list.  Or, you might think “astrology <eyeroll emoji>” (James Heathers on Twitter)
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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 »