Posts filed under General (3152)

Team Ratings for Round 7

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 48 matches played, 25 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 52.1%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 7

Here are the predictions for Round 7. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 21

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 120 matches played, 83 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 69.2%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 21

Here are the predictions for Round 21. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

The Herald website has just published another story about the imaginary and invisible planet Nibiru. That’s in addition to the nine from last year.

• 18 Nov: Conspiracy theorists claim mysterious planet Nibiru will trigger apocalyptic earthquakes
• 25 Sep: Nibiru: How the nonsense Planet X Armageddon and Nasa fake news theories spread globally
• 30 Oct: The end of the world as we know it (again)
• 23 Sep: How the nonsense Planet X Armageddon, Nasa fake news spread globally
• 19 Sep: The world is about to end, if you believe this doomsday claim
• 30 Aug: Claims new planet ‘about to destroy Earth’ and clues written on pyramids
• 23 Sep: ‘Extremely violent times will come’: TV broadcast interrupted with end-of-world prediction
• 9 Aug: Rogue planet about to smash into Earth, claim conspiracy theorists
• 4 Jan: Conspiracy theorist claims mysterious planet Nibiru will smash into Earth and the world will end in October 2017

As you see, two of the stories ask how this nonsense theory spread globally.

One says, with a splendid lack of self-awareness

Despite absolutely no scientific evidence to back up the suggestions of a rogue planet getting rapidly closer to Earth, myths about Planet X continue to be perpetuated online, according to the Telegraph UK.

Indeed they do.

An ‘insufficient data’ edition

• Data quality matters: the high rate of death reported for women giving birth in Texas seems to have been partly a data entry error.  Researchers say Approximately half (50.3%) of obstetric-coded deaths showed no evidence of pregnancy within 42 days, and a large majority of these incorrectly indicated pregnancy at the time of death. That is, these were real deaths, but not related to pregnancy. The research paper also says “Texas’ current electronic death registration system displays pregnancy status options as a dropdown list. The “pregnant at the time of death” option is directly below the “not pregnant within the past year” option”  Via Ars Technica.
• The new cancer drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda) is spectacularly effective across a wide range of tumours, but typically for a minority of patients. In the US, the FDA has approved its marketing for any tumour with a particular defect in DNA repair, but testing for that defect is not as reliable as one would like. The story in Nature News focuses on false negatives: people who would benefit but aren’t found by the test.  In New Zealand, false positives are also important: these new drugs would be more cost-effective and so more likely to be subsidised if you could avoid giving them to people who wouldn’t benefit.
• There’s a new claim that kumara got to the Pacific Islands before people did, in the New York Times, based on this research. Basically, the DNA from samples collected by the first European botanists in Polynesia has quite a lot of minor differences from modern sweet potatoes in the Americas, suggesting that its ancestors had been separated from the rest of the sweet potato lineage for over 100,000 years.  However, Lisa Matisoo-Smith and Michael Knapp from Otago argue that the samples are old enough — nearly 250 years — that the DNA will have been degraded and needs to be analysed with special obsessively-detailed protocols for old DNA.  That is, the evidence isn’t nearly strong enough to overturn the other reasons for thinking kumara were brought from South America by humans.

I have been meaning to add some additional competitions to my predictions. I have now implemented predictions for the Aviva Premiership, starting a bit late in the season, with only a few rounds to go.

Team Ratings for Round 20

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 114 matches played, 79 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 69.3%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 20

Here are the predictions for Round 20. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 9

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 48 matches played, 33 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 68.8%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 9

Here are the predictions for Round 9. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 6

The basic method is described on my Department home page. Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 40 matches played, 21 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 52.5%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 6

Here are the predictions for Round 6. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

There’s a new report from New York University’s AI Now Institute, giving recommendations for algorithmic impact assessments (PDF). Worth reading for anyone who is or should be interested in criteria for automated decision systems. As the researchers say:

Original post

To begin with: Yes, everyone being evaluated was already eligible for deportation.

There were two main categories of feedback on this point: the ‘Manus Island’ tendency, arguing they’re all guilty and so it doesn’t matter how you treat them, and the people pointing out that a model could perhaps make better decisions that an individual immigration officer.  The first group have, I think, missed an important issue: the arguments given by Immigration NZ for this model being a good thing would apply anywhere else in the immigration system or the justice system where there is currently discretion — eg, police discretion to prosecute.

The second group do have a good point (which is why it’s a point I made in my original post), but only if the model is constructed well and, ideally, audited.  As I said, it didn’t look like we had that sort of model. Today, we got more information about the model, thanks to Radio NZ’s Morning Report. Here’s a PDF of the spreadsheet and the briefing document (dated April 6, so potentially cleaned up after the initial publicity).  It’s a spreadsheet, simply adding up points for a bunch of categories, with minimal scaling for importance based on Immigration NZ’s expert knowledge or fitting to empirical data.

It’s not especially surprising that the harm model is a bit crap. What is surprising is that the Minister thinks this is a good thing

He said he was concerned about misconceptions around the pilot programme.

“Some people were talking about a sophisticated algorithm some people were talking about racial profiling, both of those are incorrect and I think it’s very important that the public know exactly what this is, and what it isn’t,” he said.

“This is not modelling or a predictive tool – this is a spreadsheet that they put some information into and they rank people based on that information.”

That’s not a defence; it’s an indictment.

• Puerto Rico’s official statistics agency is being dismantled and privatised
• A good Herald medical science story, on the McLeod family, the stomach-cancer risk gene many of them carry, and what’s being done about it
• It’s hard to do survey research on small subgroups of people, since even a small fraction of false responses can dominate the real ones. Especially with teenagers:

In a 2003 study, 19 percent of teens who claimed to be adopted actually weren’t, according to follow-up interviews with their parents. When you excluded these kids (who also gave extreme responses on other items), the study no longer found a significant difference between adopted children and those who weren’t on behaviors like drug use, drinking and skipping school

• “If your data is bad, your machine learning tools are useless” – from the Harvard Business Review, so the message is getting out.
• From the South China Morning Post: “Jaywalkers under surveillance in Shenzhen soon to be punished via text messages” — new automated system based on facial recognition.