statistics

Coronavirus: Government’s Covid vaccine data ‘providing material for conspiracy theorists’ | News | The Times
“Statisticians lambasted the Health and Security Agency for its weekly vaccine surveillance report, which erroneously suggests that vaccines make you more likely to contract Covid.” The denominator problem explained.
(tags: covid19 vaccination science mathematics statistics medicine)

“Are we experiencing a second wave?” – asks Stuart McDonald | AgeWage: Making your money work as hard as you do
Actuary says yes.
(tags: covid19 pandemic actuary statistics)
How to store dotfiles | Atlassian Git Tutorial
The best way to store your dotfiles: A bare Git repository
(tags: git linux)
QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded
Points out that the QAnon new religious movement has some familiar sounding rhetoric: “A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.”
(tags: conspiracy qanon nazis)

Imaginary Positions – Less Wrong
One I’d missed: Yudkowsky’s post on rounding to the “nearest cliche”.
(tags: cliche nearest eliezer-yudkowsky rationality)
The world is not falling apart: The trend lines reveal an increasingly peaceful period in history.
Steven Pinker argues we should look at trend lines rather than headlines.
(tags: statistics war politics violence world steven-pinker)
A Pasta Sea: Elijah and the Apologist of Baal
1 Kings 18 re-imagined as if Baal had a William Lane Craig on his side. Fun times. “A Pasta Sea” is a good name for an ex-Christian blog, too.
(tags: bible apologetics ahab baal elijah funny parody)
A&E in crisis: a special report – Telegraph
“As the NHS faces its worst winter in years, Robert Colvile provides an in-depth, first-hand account of the pressures facing the health service.” Interesting: combination of people unable to see a GP quickly enough and hospitals unable to turf old people to social care quickly enough. Targets sometimes provide perverse incentives.
(tags: nhs health healthcare medicine hospital)
Free exchange: Nice work if you can get out | The Economist
Why the rich now have less leisure than the poor. Via WMC on FB.
(tags: leisure work economist)

Cause And Effect: The Revolutionary New Statistical Test That Can Tease Them Apart — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium
Correlation is causation, sort of.
(tags: statistics causality arxiv noise mathematics)
Why IS liberal Protestantism dying, anyway?
Religions/denominations which are stricter in their requirements for adherents actually do better.
(tags: religion anthropology psychology)

What Long Hours Really Mean | We Are Mammoth
Via Hacker News, where there’s the usual debate about all this. Previously I’ve read research which says you can get gains out of doing it for short bursts but must then rest: longer periods of overtime end up producing less, not more. This article is more about the cultural impact, though.
(tags: work programming hours overtime business productivity)
Questions to ask your potential employer | Hacker News
Linked to the Hacker News thread rather than the original post as the commenters at HN came up with some good additional ones.
(tags: work software jobs interview interviewing)
Lies, Damned Lies, And Facebook (Part 4 of ∞) | Slate Star Codex
Scott at Slate Start Codex points out that there’s no good evidence that those “Don’t be that guy” posters have reduced the incidence of rape.
(tags: society crime advertising posters rape statistics)

The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang’s short about memory, time and loss. It’s also an alien first contact story.
(tags: heptapod story science-fiction time ted-chiang sci-fi language first-contact memory)
Cambridge: Poles apart Why Warsaw beats Cambridge Blog Mike Levy
“A weekend in Warsaw made me think about Cambridge at night. In Cambridge after 6pm the city centre empties ready for the only true night time economy: binge drinking. The Market Square alive with stall holders and shoppers at 5pm magically transforms into a ghostly empty space one hour later. It is a Cinderella midnight moment that never fails to astonish. By dusk the Cambridge ball is over and the Prince has gone home to watch T.V. Only a lonely burger van takes up residence creating a sad and soulless image that realist painter Edward Hopper could capture.” Yeah, it’s crap.
(tags: night-life drinking alcohol night cambridge warsaw)
Why You Shouldn’t Support Operation Christmas Child | Mymumdom
…unless you want to contribute towards evangelical Christian evangelising, of course. But apparently some schools in the UK are collecting shoeboxes of gifts for the Samaritan’s Purse organisation without fully realising what they’re about.
(tags: religion samaritans-purse christianity christmas-child christmas evangelism)
www.me.uk RevK’s rants: Censoring the Internet
Chap who runs an ISP goes to dinner with some MPs and discusses filtering.
(tags: politics uk porn filtering censorship isp internet)
Unreliable research: Trouble at the lab | The Economist
“Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not.” Talks about the problems with reproducing research.
(tags: economist journals research statistics science)
Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation
(tags: significance experiment maths probability research mathematics statistics science)