Medical researchers are somehow allowed to get away with statistical murder. It upsets me to read the article in Forbes titled "Pet Owners May Have Lower Risk For Heart Disease." (link) This article takes the form of many other similar articles that purport to find an association between some risk factor and a common disease. Note they always use the weasel word "may". If you see this word, and immediately…
Mammograms continue to be an emotional and controversial topic. I blogged about it some time ago. (link) Felix Salmon, whose blog should be daily reading, praises an article by Peggy Orenstein called "Our Feel Good War on Breast Cancer", NYT Magazine (link). Salmon's blog provides a quick summary; Orenstein's article is very long. Orenstein's point of view has particular weight because she was diagnosed at an early age, and was…
That's not really what the FDA said but based on the shameful actions unearthed by ProPublica and reported by Scientific American here, one would think one can get away with this scam. Three years ago, the FDA busted a Houston lab (based on a whistleblower report) that fabricated loads of research studies that were used by the FDA to approve about 100 drugs. Eighty-percent of those drugs were generic drugs…
Josh hated this "dataless visualization" from ABC. (link; warning: ads). Here are his comments: The report has planes leaving China, landing across the globe and instantly infecting us all with bird flu. It doesn't do a good job explaining how...
Imagine you are locked up in a hospital room with a bed and plenty of food. What do you think you'd be doing when you aren't sleeping? *** Well, some researchers (link) discovered that you'd be eating the food. What a surprise. The New York Times then saw it fit to report this result as "Lost Sleep Can Lead to Weight Gain", which isn't as bad as the lead given…
I like Jared Diamond's column about the risk of dying from slipping while showering. (link) He's talking about repeated taking of small risks. He also differentiates between risk you can control, and risk you can't. He gives fodder to those who won't walk out of their building fearing the falling air conditioner. I just want to point your attention to one of his minor sentences: "Life expectancy for a healthy…
Big data is not about the amount of data. Big data is about the availability of data. And more and more, it is about people preying on consumer's desire for data. I hate to say it but data vendors run the risk of becoming new-age used-car salesmen. The Wall Street Journal hyped a research article about mobile apps that supposedly "detect skin cancer". (WSJ link, article link). While the tone…
For the last few hours, Yahoo! decided that I'd be interested in reading this piece of news. Every time I go there, I get this front page: I don't really know how this sort of studies gets published in journals, nor am I interested in spending an hour figuring out how they failed to prove it. The snippet summarizing the research is here. The ability to look at some data…
For the last few hours, Yahoo! decided that I'd be interested in reading this piece of news. Every time I go there, I get this front page: I don't really know how this sort of studies gets published in journals, nor am I interested in spending an hour figuring out how they failed to prove it. The snippet summarizing the research is here. The ability to look at some data…
For the last few hours, Yahoo! decided that I'd be interested in reading this piece of news. Every time I go there, I get this front page: I don't really know how this sort of studies gets published in journals, nor am I interested in spending an hour figuring out how they failed to prove it. The snippet summarizing the research is here. The ability to look at some data…
