July 21, 2025
Briefly
- In “where are they now” followup: a 2016 StatsChat post examining a claim that dementia cures were just five years away. They weren’t.
- Data Strips: A nice lookup at ways to show the distribution of a single numeric variable “in-line”
- As foreshadowed by XKCD, mobile phone acceleration sensors are now genuinely warning of earthquakes-in-progress (media, research paper)
- Stuff reports a reported sighting of the South Island kōkako. From the South Island Kōkako Trust (via Mike Dickison), a map just of probable encounters with South Island kōkako (ie, leaving out their large collection of “possible” encounters). They’re everywhere!
That’s the problem. If they really existed in any significant fraction of the places they’ve been reported, you would expect them to be seen a lot more often including by people with cameras at the ready. It’s not really feasible for a bird to be on the edge of vanishing, all over the South Island simultaneously, for decades, which is why I think it’s an ex-parrot.
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 »