Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Science
-
I’m working on a couple of complex multi-level models at the moment, using Stata, and I’ve run into some big problems getting them to work. In the spirit of helping others to solve problems I’ve spent a lot of time attacking, in this post I’m going to describe the problems I encountered and my solutions.…
-
Introduction Every year the Arctic Research Consortium of the US runs a competition to predict the mean arctic sea ice extent in September, and this year I have decided to enter. I have been an avid reader of Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice Blog for the last year, and they host predictions there too. The general…
-
Friday’s Guardian editorial featured a spit-flecked rant against internet pornography, starting and finishing with a demand to ban all of it. At the same time, the Daily Mail was putting up a strident demand for more efforts to police child porn. These articles are both profoundly wrong on facts and science, and breath-takingly hypocritical, not…
-
Imagine our planet sends out a colony ship, to colonize some distant planet. It’s flying at near light speed, but the journey is still expected to take about 300 years; time dilation effects on the ship mean shipboard it’s only, say, 150 years – 5 or 6 generations. While the ship is speeding to its…
-
Recently a major economics paper was found to contain basic excel errors, among other problems, and an amusing storm of controversy is growing around the paper. The controversy arises because the paper was apparently quite influential in promoting the most recent round of austerity politics in the western world, and the authors themselves used it…
-
Today it was 26C in Tokyo, and we had our first taste of this year’s yellow dust, the strange and nasty pollution that tends to drift over Japan from China during spring and summer. Today’s was the worst I have ever seen in 5 years in Japan – the above photograph, taken from my ground…
-
This week a student and I published an article in PLOS ONE examining the relationship between healthcare-related expenditure and financial catastrophe in Bangladesh. Because PLOS ONE is an open access journal it is possible to read the entire article free online, here. Our study was a statistical analysis of data from a probability-sampled survey of…
-
Next week sees the release of the Ken Loach movie The Spirit of ’45, which describes the UK’s attempts to implement socialism through the ballot box between 1945 and 1951. Ultimately a failed project, this revolution has left one enduring and much-loved symbol, the UK National Health Service (NHS). In the same month as the…
-
I received a very interesting hospital dataset recently, in excel format and containing some basic variable names and values in Japanese. These included the sex of the patient, the specialty under which they were admitted to hospital, and all variable names. Initially this would be reasonably easy to convert to English in excel before import,…
-
In October my master’s student had her work on modeling HIV interventions in China published in the journal AIDS, with me as second author. You can read the abstract at the journal website, but sadly the article is pay-walled so its full joys are not available to the casual reader. This article is a sophisticated…
Compromise and Conceit 