February 24, 2026
Briefly
- The “cancer mornings” paper now has an Editors Note “The editors are issuing this note to alert readers that concerns have been raised regarding inconsistencies between the registration record of this trial on clinicaltrials.gov and published version the study protocol, as well as with some of the findings in this study. Editorial action will be taken as appropriate once an investigation of the concerns is complete and all parties have been given an opportunity to respond in full.” For people more familiar with politics, on the controversial/embattled/disgraced/former spectrum an editors note is somewhere near the controversial/embattled boundary. In this example it’s a mixture of not believing the result is possible and some changes in the trial registration over time (as I mentioned).
- Various sources are enthusiastically repeating a claim that the Tesla Cybertruck is explodier than the notorious Ford Pinto was. The Cybertruck had had 5 fire fatalities in an estimated 34,438 vehicles, versus 27 in 3,173,491 vehicles for the Pinto. Crudely, that’s a ratio of 17. There’s obviously a lot of uncertainty, but a standard uncertainty interval for the relative risk goes from 5.8 to 41. There are a few more caveats: first, one of the five Cybertruck deaths was deliberate. If we don’t count that one, the uncertainty interval is now 4 to 35. Second, the denominator isn’t that reliable for the Cybertruck. Third, we don’t have any driving information — if the cybertrucks were driven more you might expect more fires. Fourth, this is obviously a comparison selected after the fact, so it will be inflated and less reliable than the stats indicate. As an illustration of the unreliability of this comparison there are claims for the Pinto that are more than an order of magnitude higher. Mother Jones, which reported the Pinto investigation, didn’t caveat the 27 deaths figure at all in its Cybertruck story.
- Marc Daalder has an interesting story at newsroom about changes in the NZ crime rate. Or, to be more precise, the NZ reported crime rate. Retail crime is one of the sectors where the numbers are driven by reporting — most robberies from shops aren’t reported because there’s no real benefit to doing so. This is familiar in other crime areas — intimate partner violence for one — and in medical statistics, where diagnoses of, say, prostate cancer or lung cancer or melanoma are driven by testing.
- The Color Game: how well can you remember colours?
- Women’s clothing sizes: scrolly/visualisation “[at age 15] This means for the first time ever, most girls in their cohort will be able to find a size in the women’s clothing section. This will also likely be the last time this ever happens in their lives.”
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 »