Various updates

Various updates about life from my perspective.

October 1st, 2008 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Category: Everything, LJ XPost | 2 comments

Lies and Damned Lies too?

(via Metafilter)

The BBC is running a series of articles on statistics and on how to spot flaws in media (and other) reports of statistical findings.

I’ve read lesson 1, but not the others, but it looks hopeful. I hope they apply these to their site’s editorial standards.

September 3rd, 2008 | Tags: , , , | Category: Everything, LJ XPost | One comment

IBARW 3 – US – Directive 15, the One Drop Rule and you

I had cause recently to go (re-)read Directive 15 (because I had been speaking authoritatively about it and hadn’t reviewed it in quite some time – a couple of decades, probably). The last time (before this time) I thought I had reviewed it (or potentially related regulations with the IRS or some other governmental organization [...]

August 5th, 2008 | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Category: Everything, LJ XPost | Leave a comment

More on Relative vs. Absolute Risk and Statins

This is largely stimulated by a blog post by Junkfood Science from today.

I’ve talked about the dangers of interpreting relative risk before. Even if the actual change in risk is 0.3 (between 99.5% and 99.8%), the relative risk can be 150%, scare the crap out of you and get you to take a foolish risk.

Below [...]

January 15th, 2008 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Everything, LJ XPost | Leave a comment

Post 2 about fatness and medicine – and how similar diagnosis/treatment these days is like tech support

The other point I wanted to make about fat/fit/health/medicine is that we have now achieved the status, in U.S. medicine at least, of turning medicine into a technical support interaction. In this kind of interaction, because it is statistically sensible to do so, (wherein 95% – 99% of all complainants can have their health concerns [...]

January 2nd, 2008 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Everything, LJ XPost | One comment