While I’m busy packing my life into boxes, here’s an xkcd to make you smile.
Scientific hubris, or: Everything you thought you knew about straight line fits is wrong
September 13, 2010 By
Think you’ve got your least squares down to a tee? Think again.
In a paper posted to the Arxiv in late August, David Hogg of NYU and his collaborators take us to task on our sloppy data fitting habits. And he’s not in the mood to mince his words.
It is conventional to begin any scientific document with an introduction that explains why the subject matter is important. Let us break with tradition and observe that in almost all cases in which scientists fit a straight line to their data, they are doing something that is simultaneously wrong and unnecessary.
Hear that? Next time you fit a straight line to your data, consider that you’re probably wasting your time. Stop pandering to style to get a “catchy punchline and compact, approximate representations”.
Lucia cleared, Dutch justice shamed
April 19, 2010 By
Quick update from the frontlines of judicial excellence. As expected, nurse Lucia de Berk was cleared of all murder charges by the court of Arnhem on 14 April last week. The case has been extensively covered in the Dutch media, with some frank editorials, most of which are sadly hiding behind a paywall. The Haga Hospital, which owns the Juliana Children’s Hospital where Lucia worked at the time of her arrest, will pay her 45,000 euro in compensation for wrongfully firing her. While that’s a decent amount of money, given that the hospital’s own apparently shabby internal investigation led to her arrest in the first place, I think it’s a pretty measly gesture. The hospital’s own statement is very brief and terse.
Everyone’s been falling over each other to apologise to Lucia for this awful miscarriage of justice – Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin, Harm Brouwer, Chairman of the Public Prosecution – and apparently negotiations on what compensation she will receive from the government are ongoing.
As usual the best coverage comes from GeenStijl, the Netherlands’ answer to The Onion, who report that Lucia has signed up to star in Kafka: The Musical. If you know Dutch, go read.
Here’s a short news report in Dutch from NOS:
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Science, statistics and society
January 21, 2010 By
What are the odds?
On Tuesday I attended Science Cafe in Leiden, a monthly discussion evening on all matters scientific and their role in society. The theme was the way chance, likelihood and statistics are (mis-)used and represented by the media, politicans and the law. Leading the discussion was Arnout Jaspers, columnist for Dutch science magazine Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, with special guest Richard Gill, Professor in Mathematical Statistics at Leiden University. Gill and Jaspers illustrated the potentially far-reaching consequences of bad statistics with two recent stories to hit the headlines: the reopening of the Lucia de Berk case, and the drug suspension of Germany’s most successful winter Olympian, Claudia Pechstein.
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