Posts filed under General (3152)

Team Ratings for Round 1

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.

Predictions for Round 1

Here are the predictions for Round 1. 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 the Sausages of DOOM are back?

A: In the Herald? Yes.

Q: They say “Swapping a sausage for whole grain toast, a few tomatoes or a handful of nuts could lead to a much longer life, research has shown.” How much longer?

A: The research goes to great lengths not to answer that question, but we could ignore all those the details and assume the number applies to that question and is reliable.

Q: Well,  the story does, so let’s do that.

A: Ok. A bit less than a hour.

Q: That’s not very long.

A: One sausage isn’t very much.

Q: But they mean one sausage less every day, surely.

A: In that case, a bit less than an hour per day.

Q: Where does that number come from?

A: If you look at the biggest risk you can find anywhere in the research report, it’s a hazard ratio of 1.34 for an additional 3% of your energy intake from meat protein. On average 3% in the US or here is about 75 Calories, so about 19g of protein.  That’s about two sausages (Freedom Farms has nutritional info easily available, others are probably similar).  So we’re looking at a hazard ratio of 1.16 per daily sausage.  One ‘microlife‘ per day is about a hazard ratio of 1.09.

Q: What’s that in cigarettes?

A: Two or three.

Q: Where did you find the research report? There’s a link in the story, but it just goes to the publisher’s home page.

A: It’s here. Open access, too.

Q: If I ask you about those details you mentioned ignoring, will I regret it?

A: Yes.

Q: I’m going to ask anyway.

A: Ok.  The research was trying to estimate the difference in risk from a replacement of animal protein with plant protein, making no change in fat, calories, carbohydrates, or anything else.

Q: So we’d have to replace the sausage with low-carbohydrate toast with a lot of margarine?

A: Butter. Saturated fat has to stay the same, too.

Q: But they found a huge difference between processed and unprocessed red meat! That’s the same protein, just chopped up, maybe with different amounts of fat and some preservatives. How could it be the protein that’s doing it?

A: Well, obviously it can’t. They must be picking up other things about diet as well.

Q: What do they say about that?

A: They say the other factors might affect how much effect animal protein has on you, but they couldn’t explain the overall effect

Q: But..

A: They also said that the risk difference between people with healthy and unhealthy lifestyles could maybe be explained by fish and chicken protein being less harmful than red meat protein

Q:  Really?

A: Those with unhealthy lifestyles consumed more processed and unprocessed red meat, whereas the healthy-lifestyle group consumed more fish and chicken as animal protein sources, suggesting that different protein sources, at least in part, contributed to the observed variation in the protein-mortality associations according to lifestyle factors

Q: Does that make more sense than it sounds as if it does?

A: I don’t think so.

Q: So sausages are actually healthy?

A: No, but they aren’t dramatically different from last week. And it’s probably not the composition of the protein that’s the biggest problem with them

Team Ratings for the Super Rugby Final

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 141 matches played, 103 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 73%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for the Super Rugby Final

Here are the predictions for the Super Rugby Final. 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 22

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 152 matches played, 95 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 62.5%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 22

Here are the predictions for Round 22. 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.

• Public Policy Polling, who were behind the ‘would you bomb Agrabah?’ question last year, are at it again.

 Harambe, as you may recall, is ineligible because of age, vital status, and species.  (/ht @smurray38)

• Nathan Yau at Flowing Data has an animation to illustrate what, say, a 60% chance of winning the US Presidential Election means — for people who don’t work with probabilities regularly, showing them as counts is helpful. Some statisticians would argue that the ‘repeated elections’ way of thinking about the probability is wrong, but that doesn’t affect its usefulness in conveying the number.

• Russell Brown explains numbers and history for Radio NZ’s recent audience success.

• Frances Woolley, a Canadian economist, looks at the recent highly-publicised study examining height trends across the world.  (/ht @BenAtkinsonPhD)

• Wall Street Journal has a lovely glyphmap of US electoral history (/ht @fogonwater)

• Cathy O’Neill writes about the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It criminalises violations of website terms of service — which you’d expect to be a matter of contract law — and puts quite a bit of data journalism at risk.

• Update:  I wrote on how it was strange for an otherwise health 20-year-old law student to be the exemplar patient in a campaign to increase awareness about a disease primarily of the old. Stuff now has a story on who was pushing the publicity campaign.

The ‘ice-bucket’ challenge was intended to raise awareness of the disease ALS and to raise research funds.  Part of this money funded genetic research, and here’s how Stuff describes it, under the headline Ice bucket challenge credited with a medical breakthrough

Researchers have just announced a medical breakthrough. Thanks to the challenge they have identified a gene found to be one of the most common in people with ALS, the deadly disease that affects neurons in the brain and spinal cord.

One News was similarly enthusiastic: Researchers have discovered an important gene linked to Motor Neurone Disease, and it’s all thanks to last year’s viral Ice Bucket Challenge. The story goes on to describe this as ‘paving the way for future treatment’.

Newshub is a little better

The researchers themselves were more restrained:

NEK1 has been previously described as a candidate gene for ALS. Here our findings show that NEK1 in fact constitutes a major ALS-associated gene with risk variants present in ~3% of European and European-American ALS cases.

That is, it’s not new that variants in NEK1 are associated with ALS, and what the research did was confirm this and quantify the extent of association:  about 3% of ALS cases have such a variant.

There’s nothing wrong with the research; this sort of incremental step is how science mostly works, and every bit of information helps when you’ve got a disease with no current cure and a poorly-understood cause. But it’s not a medical breakthrough even for the 3% who have these variants, and there’s no paved road to future treatment.

HealthNewsReview has a longer rant.

Some new headlines:

• Unprecedented Alzheimer’s drug slows disease by 80 per cent 
• Promising Alzheimer’s treatment flops in new trial, crushing hopes 
• Alzheimer’s breakthrough as new pill taken twice a day STOPS disease from shrinking brain
• First drug to halt Alzheimer’s tested by scientists
• Alzheimer’s Maverick TauRx Tries To Weave Success From Failed Trial
• Alzheimer’s Drug LMTX Falters in Final Stage of Trials
• Drug ‘may slow’ Alzheimer’s brain death

Admittedly, the shouty headline is from Daily Mirror, but the other positive ones include the BBC and New Scientist. And, yes, they are talking about the same trial of the same drug.

How can this possibly happen? And who’s right? Here’s the full press release from the conference. It starts off

A clinical trial of LMTM (TauRx Therapeutics, Ltd.) in people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s failed to demonstrate a treatment benefit in the primary analysis of the full study population in both doses tested. However, in a pre-planned analysis of a small subgroup of the study population that received LMTM as a monotherapy, there was a statistically significant benefit on cognitive and functional outcomes, and slowing of brain atrophy.

The  trial compared two doses of LMTM to placebo, in 891 people, and didn’t find the benefit it was looking for. The press release doesn’t give the results, so we don’t know if there was modest evidence of benefit or basically nothing.

They then compared the 90-odd people who were taking LMTM and no other treatment to the 250-odd who were taking placebo. It’s that relatively small group that has the impressive results.

Reasons behind the negative headlines include

• the regulatory/investment aspect: these results are unlikely to get the drug approved, so TauRx won’t be getting the truckfulls of money they’d be anticipating if the whole trial had been successful
• subgroup analyses are often over-optimistic, because you mainly get to see them when they’re the sole redeeming feature of a disappointing set of results
• in fact, getting positive results in a subgroup isn’t at all unprecedented with Alzheimer’s. Eli Lilly are betting a lot that they’ve found the right subgroup and their drug solanezumab will now be successful.
• it’s unusual to compare people getting LMTM but nothing else with everyone on placebo (rather than people getting placebo but nothing else). You’re not guaranteed a fair comparison by randomisation that way.
• in the other direction, it’s hard to see how other treatments (which focus on stimulating the cells that are still working) would counteract the effect of LMTM (which is trying to prevent protein tangles from forming). But biology is weird, so maybe it’s true.

TL;DR: So, would I try to get this drug if I had an AD diagnosis? It would depend on the actual results in the whole trial (which we aren’t told) and on the details of side effects (which we also aren’t told). But I’d certainly have been disappointed by these results.  And New Scientist should be ashamed of themselves.

David Hood writes at Public Address about his analysis of the NZ Election Survey

The data for the 2014 New Zealand Election Survey was recently released for the general public to make of it what they will, which in the modern world of home data analysis is like parachuting a gazelle into a pride of lions.

Team Ratings for the Semi-finals

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 139 matches played, 101 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 72.7%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for the Semi-finals

Here are the predictions for the Semi-finals. 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 144 matches played, 91 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 63.2%.
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.