December 10, 2021

Briefly

  • From Ars Technica, Report reveals which sealed NES games are the rarest of the rare. This is relevant because most of the story is about selection bias “Wata’s sealed-NES report, for instance, only shows one graded, sealed copy of Jeopardy!, a game that most collector’s regard as pretty common.
    This disparity could be because sealed copies of Jeopardy! happen to be much rarer than open boxes or loose carts. Or it could simply be that almost no one has bothered going through the time, expense, and hassle of going to Wata for a professional grade on a relatively ignorable game like Jeopardy!.
  • Phillip Bump, of the Washington Post, is starting a newsletterHow to read this chart
  • NZ police release an independent report on facial recognition technology
  • The police, and various other agencies, have asked the Ministry of Health for data from Covid contact tracing. They were (correctly) turned down.
  • According to UK supermarket chain Tesco, via Wales Online,  33% of people in London and 39% of 18-24 year olds in the UK celebrate Thanksgiving. I’m reasonably sure this isn’t true, but it doesn’t seem possible to find out any more about where they got the numbers.
  • NZ Herald, Nov 22 “Auckland CBD sinking into anarchy and resembling 1980s New York, city leaders told. Newsroom, Dec 6, “yeah nah”
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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 »