Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Science

  • Are ISIS Defections a Sign the Movement is Unravelling?

    Vox has an interesting article today about whether the increased numbers of defections from ISIS that are recently being recorded reflect growing problems inside the movement. The post is an interview with Peter Neumann from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, which has recently released a report claiming a rapid increase in defections.…

  • Time for the pro-GMO Lobby to Renew Its Evidence Base

    This week’s New England Journal of Medicine has an opinion piece calling for a review of approval policies for GMO crops. This article, co-authored by a medical researcher and a crop scientist, does not call for a loosening of approval processes to enable more rapid movement of GMOs onto the market; rather, it calls for…

  • A Tale of Two Deals

    This week the European Union was involved in two major deals that settled two outstanding issues. One involved a long-standing issue that posed a threat to global economic prosperity, with an intransigent and corrupt government that consistently refused to adhere to past agreements, was not transparent about its activities, consistently responded to criticism of its…

  • Is Health Insurance Really of no Value? (Spoiler: No)

    Today Vox had an article about a new study of health insurance in America that annoyed me in a number of ways, and highlighted both Vox’s patronizing know-it-all style, and the simplistic economics-worship of some of its writers (in this case Ezra Klein). It’s one of those Economics-101 “Yes, you think A but really this…

  • OpenBUGS Illegal Memory Write Problem: More RAM Will Not Help You

    I ran into more problems trying to run OpenBUGS on a Bayesian spatial regression model today. The problems are laid out pretty simply in the picture above: I ran into an illegal memory write. I know this is not the fault of my model, as it runs smoothly for 50, 500 or 1000 iterations. This…

  • Problems with Out of Sample Prediction in R: Strange Behavior in Loops

    Today I’m trying to do some simple prediction in R. I have a simple linear model with a single missing data point, and I need to get the predicted values and standard errors for 14 data points including this one missing point. Because I find R’s data handling in linear prediction really hard to use,…

  • Ecooptimism or Ecofascism?

    The picture above[1] shows the latest estimated volume of arctic sea ice in March, 2015. The red line is 2015, and it looks like it is heading below the 2010 maximum. This is a disturbing trend because 2014 had a very high minimum, but the March maximum may well be very low. We know that…

  • Churchill’s Scientists: Missed Opportunities at the Science Museum

    I am in London for a week doing some research with small area analysis, and on the weekend had a brief opportunity to actually see the city. As is traditional by now on my annual trips to London, I visited the World Wildlife Photography Exhibition (which was a bit weak this year, I thought), and…

  • How the Underpants Gnomes Saved Africa

    Debate over the infiltration of the Republican party by anti-vaccination ideas has naturally led to the resurrection of that old Shibboleth, the idea that the left is also “anti-science” because left-wingers and environmentalists are opposed to GMOs, despite the available evidence that they are safe. I think the GMO issue is a good example of…

  • Is the Rhetoric of “Anti-science” Counter-Productive in Science Communication?

    The recent outbreak of measles in America, and its relationship with the anti-vaccination movement, has led to a lot of online debate. Much of this debate is about how these “anti-science” parents and the movement they listen to is increasing the risk of disease for everyone. While the increase in risk is undoubtedly a real…