Posts filed under General (3152)

Three examples that have come across my Twitter feed recently:

A genetic “crystal ball” can predict whether certain people will respond effectively to the flu vaccine. Science News

This is actually really interesting research looking at why some people get high levels of antibodies and others don’t.  However, the ‘crystal ball’ is cloudy. If people are divided into ‘low’, ‘medium’ and ‘high’ responders, and you take one ‘low’ responder and one ‘high’ responder, the test has about a 75% chance of working out which is which.

Is Swiss cheese a superfood?, asks Food & Wine.

According to metro.co.uk, researchers at the University of Korea have found that Swiss cheese has a whole lot of health benefits. It contains a probiotic called—you ready for this?—propionibacterium freudenreichii, which reduces inflammation. Among other things, reducing inflammation can reduce the risk of getting a number of diseases and slow the aging process. Propionibacterium freudenreichii also boosts immune system functions.

The research was carried out in microscopic nematodes, and didn’t involve Swiss cheese. The nematodes eat bacteria, and these ones were given a diet of  Propionibacterium freudenreichii instead of their normal E. coli. While the live bacteria are present in Swiss cheese, the recipes linked from the story would make sure no live bacteria reached your gut.

From the Guardian

Dating from 1,000 years before Pythagoras’s theorem, the Babylonian clay tablet is a trigonometric table more accurate than any today, say researchers.

It’s pretty clear that this has to be bullshit. It’s harder to find what’s actually being claimed.  Popular Science has a more balanced view: the conjecture is that the Babylonians worked with triangles where the ratios of side lengths were simple fractions rather than where the angles were simple fractions of a circle.  Like we do in measuring slopes of roads or railways.  If that’s true, it’s an interesting idea and if they knew about trignometric relationships then it pushes back the discovery quite a bit.  It’s still not ‘more accurate than any today’; the rounding-off just happens in a different place.

Q: Does the Herald really know “The amount of sex you should be having according to your age group”

A: No.

Q: Can they really tell you “ if the regularity of your sex life is “normal”.”

A: No.

Q: Is that even a thing?

A: No.

Q: If it was, would a survey of people in the US be especially relevant to NZ?

A: It was from the US? The story didn’t say that.

Today’s episode of simple answers to complex questions is brought to you by the letters F and F and S. 

• On Thursday 7 September, 3pm, in Auckland, “The Future of Open Data in Aotearoa”, featuring Ed Corkery (CEO of Koordinates),  Harkanwal Singh (Data Editor, NZ Herald) and Liz MacPherson (Government Statistician)

• “The flip side of personal genomics: When a mutation doesn’t spell disease” from Nature News

• “Is it fair to say that most social programmes don’t work?” (yes, but some do)
• “Dramatic treatment effects are rare” from  the blog students4bestevidence

• Another story about machines learning stereotypes, this time in image recognition.

• Peter Griffin on an example of science news hype attributable to the research institution

• Peter Ellis has a nice pointy-clicky tool summarising the 2014 NZ Electoral Study (who voted for whom)

• A couple of eclipse graphs:
  From reddit user  superpaow
  
  and from Noah Illinsky
  

Team Ratings for Round 25

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 176 matches played, 107 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 60.8%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 25

Here are the predictions for Round 25. 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 2

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 7 matches played, 5 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 71.4%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 2

Here are the predictions for Round 2. 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 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 18 matches played, 11 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 61.1%.
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.

Q: Did you see avocado gives you breast cancer?

A: Me?

Q: Well, women with mutations in the BRCA genes, such as Angelina Jolie

A: 🙄

Q: “Women with the faulty ‘Angelina Jolie’ gene should cut back on trendy avocado-based breakfasts to slash their chances of cancer.”

A: No.

Q: So the study wasn’t in women?

A: No. Or avocados.

Q: Mice

A: Not even. Cells in a lab. (press release)

Q: And the avocados?

A: The cells were given extra folate.

Q: And they got cancer?

A: No, they died.

Q: Then why is there a cancer story?

A: The researchers speculated that folate could be part of a future treatment for BRCA-damaged tumours.

Q: That’s kind of not what the Herald says

A: No, but they did get the story from the Daily Mail.

Q: So what do the researchers say about avocados?

A: They don’t mention avocados

Q: Ok, what do they say about folate, then?

A: “The authors caution that no conclusions should be drawn about whether there is any overall effect in a living animal consuming folate.”

Q: So it wasn’t the press release this time

A: No, this looks like it’s down to the Daily Mail.

• “Is it legal for me to violate Terms of Service in order to collect data for a research project?” (in the US). Casey Fiesler on law and ethics of scraping

• My first boss as a statistician. John Simes, has won the University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence. Among other things, he was one of the early proponents of universal clinical trial registration. In 1986 he wrote about the impact of publication bias on treatment choice in cancer.

• Good discussion of virtues and flaws of Sankey diagrams for visualising flows (via Mara Averick).  Also, if you’re interested in data science tools and explanations, you should follow Mara on Twitter @dataandme

• A teaching example based on a baseball/brain cancer ‘cluster’ that didn’t hold up.  Much smaller numbers than the brain injury problems in US football or even rugby, and less prior plausibility.

• Guidelines on “trusted data use” from the NZ Data Futures partnership

• The US is having a census in 2020 — the Constitution says so. It could be a mess.  Ours, next year, looks to be in better shape.

• How much copper do you get out of a copper mine: visualisation

• It’s not just New Zealanders who have order of magnitude-and-units problems. From The New Yorker, via Felix Salmon
  

Q: Did you see that using emoji in work-related emails could hurt your career?

A:😕

Q: Yes, it’s apparently a common email mistake

A: 😯

Q: The 549 study participants from 29 countries “were asked to read a work-related email from an unknown person, and were asked to evaluate the competence and warmth of the sender”

A:🤔 💻 🇹🇷

Q: Yes, they were from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (paper)

A: 😕

Q: Ok, so they weren’t really work-related emails from someone they’d never met, in another country. But the participants were told to pretend they were.

A: 🙁

Q: And it undermined information sharing

A: 😕 👥 💻 🤐 ?

Q: The email replies to messages with emoji had fewer words in them on average

A: 🤔 🙂

Q: Ok, yes, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

A: 👩‍💼👨🏽‍💼🗣 😀 ?

Q: Is it really common to use emoji in business email? Yes, they say nearly 20% of emails in one previous sample included emoji.

A: 🙄 🇬🇸🇸🇱🇸🇬🇸🇳🇸🇦 👩‍💼👨🏽‍💼🗣 😀 ?

Q: No, I suppose that wasn’t international emails between people who had never met or corresponded before.

A: 🙄

Q: So using emoji in formal emails to a complete stranger could be a bad idea?

A: 😴

Team Ratings for Round 24

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 168 matches played, 102 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 60.7%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games

Predictions for Round 24

Here are the predictions for Round 24. 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.