Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Science
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The Guardian reports today that the UK Government has released a review of its Mandatory Work Activity Programme, and that the review finds the programme didn’t have any success getting people back to work. The review was written by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and can be obtained from the blog…
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Recently I’ve been working on some problems in disease modeling for influenza, and one of the problems is to calculate the basic reproduction number for a model which includes differential disease strengths in poor and rich risk groups. Calculating this number is generally done with a method called the “Next Generation Matrix” method, and to…
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… have been in the media recently. This is a fine example of how to debunk “research” showing that computer games make children angry …
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Today’s Guardian includes an interesting and thoughtful piece on the impact and morality of drone attacks in Afghanistan. Clive Stafford Smith is obviously a brave and committed man, and his eyewitness experiences in Afghanistan would probably reduce lesser men to a state of paralytic cynicism. But when I read his article I get the impression…
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It appears that Certified Practicing Accountants Australia (the CPA) has scored a rare interview with Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. The interview is about an hour long and can be viewed at the CPA’s blog, where Mr. Armstrong holds forth on a variety of matters related to the space race.…
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I’m in Nagasaki this week to attend the 86th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society for Infectious Diseases, where I have presented the results of my work building a mathematical model of the HIV Epidemic in Japan. The model is currently submitted to a journal so I can’t give any detail about it here, but…
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This week my work started the process of buying me a PowerMac – a 12 core, 24Gb RAM monster that will replace my 8 core, 16Gb RAM windows machine. I also received a new macbook, and my colleagues are also going to or planning to buy macs in their next round of upgrades. This means…
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I have now had quite a bit of experience working with large datasets in Stata, and consistent with my previous efforts on this blog to publicize pr0blems with statistical software and solutions to computer problems, I thought I’d explain how I do it and why it’s a good idea to use Stata for large data.…
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Yesterday a paper I co-authored was published in the British Medical Journal. The paper, available free of charge at the BMJ website, analyzes mortality among Japanese working age males between 1980 and 2005 and estimates the changes that occurred after the collapse of the bubble economy. Our main findings were that a previously existing inequality…
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Today I sat through about 15 presentations, and in the x 100th of them, the powerpoint failed. Just stopped working. It was a disaster for everyone concerned, not least of the concerned being the master’s student whose grade depended on getting the software working again[1]. As the crash came down, I realized that actually Powerpoint…
Compromise and Conceit 