Nïck Brown🌻
@sTeamTraen
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🏴🇮🇪🇪🇺 in 🇪🇸. PhD in psychology & self-appointed data police cadet. Interested in the lower tail of many distributions. Not yet disabled.
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Joined July 2009
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Current mood: Binswanger, 2013 (10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_3). 🔥
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Since 5G is trending (in my head), an anecode that was told to me when I visited the operations centre of a large French mobile phone operator a few years ago.
I asked one of the engineers who worked on mast deployment if they got a lot of opposition. /1
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This comment from Tukey (1986, ) should be read out in the first 10 minutes of every statistics class, and at 20-minute intervals thereafter.
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When you ask the authors of articles in Science® to share their data, which the journal told you was mandatory when you submitted your article, the response very often boils down to GFY.
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In a crowded field, my least favourite COVID-19 minimisation troll tactic is the claim that "99.5% of people survive".
An angry thread.
/1
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Something rather strange is happening with the COVID-19 statistics produced by the Turkish Ministry of Health. (Thread)
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Another 250+ words by Oxman (2011, left) that appear identically in Mindy Eng's bachelor thesis (2010, right).
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Continuing with Oxman (2011, left), compare this 120-word paragraph with the 2010 bachelor's thesis by her supervisee, Mindy Eng (right).
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BTW, telco executives and engineers live in areas with 5G reception like everyone else, just as pharma executives die from cancer even though their companies are apparently hiding a $5 cure. Maybe those execs and engineers are prepared to die for the shareholders. /9 /end
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A recent Brexiteer theme is how the UK can manage just fiene without food products from the EU. Just search for mentions of "Somerset Brie" and you'll find dozens of pompous claims from true patriots who eat no other cheese. But what do we know about Somerset Brie?
A thread. /1
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Have we had this one yet?
Left: Oxman (2011), Virtual & Physical Prototyping 6(1), 3–31.
Right: Suresh (2001), Science 292(5526), 2447–2451.
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Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people have killed or injured themselves or others by phoning or texting while driving, but for some reason the same people who think that telcos are out to give them cancer also think they can drive with one hand and half their brain. /8
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@sgtwolverine
@doughibbard
I want Facebook to show me the same post at the top of my feed that I was about to read when my phone rang.
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"The mayor calls a town meeting and everyone shouts at us and tells us how bad their headaches are. And the mayor demands to know what we're going to do to make the headaches stop. And we say, well, we haven't switched the mast on yet". /4
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A short thread to try to explain to non-UK people what seems to be happening with the A-level results in England&Wales.
Disclaimers:
1) There are lots of anecdotes going round
2) The situation is still not 100% clear
3) I have surely omitted some important stuff; please add.
/1
#AlevelResults
Predicted A*A*A*. Expcetionally low performing school. No one had ever achieved a Cambridge offer before in my sixth form. Performed at A*A*A consistently. Today, A*AB. Dropped two grades in Sociology. Denied Cambridge place. This is what has happened to me.
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French government inquiry confirms (as reported earlier by investigative media) that the initial IHU-Marseille hydroxychloroquine study was faked, with different criteria for +ve/-ve PCR tests being applied to the two groups. This is straight-up scientific fraud.
Ah bah voilà : confirmation des révélations de
@Mediapart
: l'étude de Didier RAOULT sur l'hydroxychloroquine contre la covid, qui a déclenché le délire mondial, aurait bel et bien été FALSIFIEE... Mais en outre il aurait pré-sélectionné les patients du groupe-témoin...🔽
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Dear institutions: Please stop doing this. Someone who publishes 60-80 papers a year is either in charge of a big lab (and hence already well compensated) or up to no good. Either way they haven't even understood most of the papers.
Congrats to the 10 most prolific
@sloan_kettering
authors from the past year!
@DrMiguelPerales
@alexdrilon
@sgiraltbmtdoc
@aburustummd
@EileenMOReilly
@MarkRobsonMD
@motzermd
@MLadanyi
This and more in our 2020 Synapse Report:
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"And then two years later we go to deploy a new generation, and the same people start getting headaches before we've installed it, and we go round it again".
This was about 10 years ago. This guy had been through this 3 or 4 times in some places. /6
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So apparently a thousand universities ran a million studies on undergraduates, but managed to avoid discovering that they like to party and don't always obey rules.
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(It takes quite a while after erecting the mast for it to be operational.)
"And the meeting ends, people go back home, their headaches stop, and we switch the mast on, and everyone is happy except if they're in a bad reception area and they ask us to turn up the power". /5
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The Y2K problem hasn't gone away. Spain thought it had a problem with Covid mortality in young children. Turns out it was mostly people aged 103 being counted as 3 year olds by software.
Sanidad admite un error en la mortalidad infantil por coronavirus
"Los pediatras creen que el error es que los fallecidos de, por ejemplo, 103 años, computan como 3"
Cc/ A todos los que llevan semanas alarmando y metiendo miedo con datos incorrectos
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The virus is real, it's nasty, it's killing people, and common humanity ought to mean that we respect that. A majority of people in every country are doing their best to stay safe. The people who blithely wheel out the "99.5% will survive" argument can get in the sea.
/15 /end
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Oh. Well, apparently they don't like telling people how much tax they pay.
So, Somerset Brie comes from a French-based globalized company that pollutes the environment and refuses to say how much tax it pays anywhere. Yet Brexiteers think it's just great. /18 /end
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Call me picky, but I tend to give more weight to research where at least one member of the team knows how to extract the charts from the software without needing to take an actual photograph of the computer screen.
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Small correction to the previous tweet; a couple more words are different between the two versions.
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Quite enjoying watching all the psychologists posting on social media about how they don't understand why so many British people voted Conservative yesterday. Maybe they could run some experiments with a small number of undergraduates to find out.
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Seven years after
@JamesHeathers
and I first started to write about it, this article by Nicolas Guéguen has been retracted today. 🥂🍾🥳🎉
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Social scientists (paper): Operationalized construct C is complex and multiply determined. I'm pleased to explain 10% of the variance.
Social scientists (Twitter): Socio-political problem P could be solved overnight if people with attribute X would just stop doing bad thing Y.
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The same article by Oxman (2011, left) once again got plagiarised by Mansour et al. (2013, right).
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Amusingly, Oxman's 2011 article (left) was then apparently plagiarised in this 2013 thesis proposal (right).
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So everyone has been killed about 7 times over by mobile phone masts already. That or the brain tumours that they were going to get from holding their phones too close to their heads for 10 minutes a day. /7
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"Oh yes", he said. "For example, the best place to site a mast in many villages is on the school roof. It actually minimises the amount of radiation hitting the school roof, because there's a blind spot underneath it, but everyone objects." /2
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Please don't follow this advice. Please write me the longest review you can. Point out my typos. Tell me about the times you made the same mistakes as me. The main purpose of the review is to improve the paper, not to let the editor decide yes/no in 3 minutes.
9/ Please don’t write a 3+ page review. Please don’t line edit. Please be constructive. For those that write very long reviews, you are wasting your time and, unfortunately, not being has helpful as you probably think you are being.
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This preprint is getting a lot of likes and retweets. But a correlation of .994 when one of the variables is an integer in the range (0,29) seems... optimistic. /1
This graph is amazing. It shows that measuring
#SARSCoV2
levels in municipal sewage almost perfectly predicts forthcoming
#COVID19
cases with a full week's notice (R=0.994). It's one of several discoveries in this new study from
@Yale
: . C-19 is
#InThePoop
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Why is it called "higher risk-taking behaviour in men" and not "male pattern boldness"?
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"So the mayor comes and says, 'Why not put the mast by the water tower, that's nice and high', so we do that."
"Then everyone who can see the water tower calls the mayor and says they have headaches and they're definitely going to get cancer". /3
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First, this ignores the other costs of COVID-19 infection, including
#LongCovid
. But let's pretend that the only outcomes are death or a full recovery.
99.5% is (are?) not odds of survival that most people would take.
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Today I learned the Danish word for "cruise control" and my inner 9-year-old is so happy right now.
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This year I learned there are many people whose entire system of logic consists of saying "X is no problem", then when we just manage to avoid X by dint of massive effort, say "See? Told you X was no problem".
COVID has highlighted this shitty contrarianism, but it's everywhere.
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I think Google Scholar might want to tweak their article parser a bit.
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This doesn't look like much like sunlit sovereign uplands full of yeoman farmers. It looks like a French-based multinational with 80,000 employees, production capacity in 51 countries, worldwide and nearly €20 billion in revenue. In other words... GLOBALISTS. /9
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In Monopoly, if you throw doubles (any doubles) three times in a row, you go to jail. One chance in 216 at the start of any turn. Anyone who has played Monopoly more than once has seen this. It's common enough that they made a rule for it, after all.
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Just as an aside, there are inconsistencies in the formatting. The decimal separator for the % of patients with pneumonia varies between a comma & a period, suggesting that the data on the web page may come from a manually-maintained spreadsheet rather than a database report. /3
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I'm not usually a very Quillette-y person, but this I believe:
Progressive people do their causes no favours by denying certain scientific truths, as if to state those truths is to implicitly endorse the worst possible oppression that a bigot could imagine on the basis of them.
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This, however, is a world-class response from the original authors. Bravo.
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@Angieeclectic
@Otto_English
@drdavidbull
@brexitparty_uk
His objection seems to be that Strasbourg is a long way from the place where he lives. It's quite close to where a lot of other people live, but they're mostly not British so they don't count.
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Day 18 of lockdown here.
My wife called me from another room and asked if I had a sharp pain as if someone was stabbing a voodoo doll representing me.
"No" I replied.
A few seconds later she called "How about now?".
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Non-white people also seem to be at higher risk, at least in Western countries. But I get the impression that a certain subset of the people telling us that "99.5% survival is fine" probably don't really care too much about that. If you get my drift.
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My wish for 2018: that people with PhDs, especially those who describe themselves as psychologists or neuroscientists, will stop equating correlation with causation in popular media articles.
#ABoyCanDream
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Am I the only person who does not give a fuck whether or not Covid originated in a lab? It seems like the most boring topic ever.
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Left: Oxman (2011), p. 11. (Very similar text is also in Oxman's PhD thesis, section 8.2.2.2 on p. 278.)
Right: Hopkinson & Dickens, 2006, Chapter 5 in Hopkinson et al. (Eds.), Rapid Manufacturing, pp. 91–92 (Wiley).
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About half of the 50-year-old population of most Western countries has a comorbidity that places them at higher risk. They have perfectly normal lives apart from their diabetes or hypertension. They don't want to take a 1 in 200 chance of dying, let alone a higher one.
/11
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99.5% survival is one chance in 200 of dying. What does 1 chance in 200 look like?
Let's start with board games.
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White chocolate filled with miso, served on a flip-flop (thong in some places).
@WeWantPlates
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It's a bit different when your participants are humans. Primum non nocere. Even more so, I think, if you are a right-of-centre government and your model turns out to be systematically biased against disadvantaged people (again, see disclaimers in tweet
#1
). /19 /end
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Left: Oxman (2011), p. 27.
Right: Oxman (2011, the same paper), p. 29.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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This is one of the best debunkings of Ivermectin for Covid that I've seen. It probably won't convince many True Believers, but it will hopefully enable some conversations with people who are unsure how to evaluate the evidence.
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And 99.5% is just for your _first_ bout of COVID-19. We don't know how long immunity lasts, and just as important, we don't know if subsequent infections will be milder (better immune response) or worse (exacerbating previous organ damage that perhaps wasn't obvious).
/13
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Thesis:
- Doing statistics properly requires a level of training roughly akin to that needed to fly an aircraft.
- Most scientists have a level of training that is closer to that needed to drive a car.
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Or think of something you do every day, and get wrong twice a year. Put your t-shirt on the wrong way round. Leave the keys on the counter when you go to get the car out. That sort of thing. Not once in a blue moon events, but they don't affect you 99.5% of the time.
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Now let's play a game. I offer you a deal. It can be a bottle of champagne, or your phone bill paid for a year, or your student loan debt wiped off, or your mortgage paid, or a massive yacht. You get that, but you roll three dice. If they all come up 6, you die, right there.
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There is also a 2,400-word section on all of the court cases where Lactalis has been found guilty of fraud, illegal strike-breaking, price fixing, pollution of rivers, and selling baby formula contaminated with salmonella, resulting in its CEO being arrested in 2019. /11
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Now *this* is meta-science.
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99.5% seems to be the average number quoted by these trolls. For some people, the risk is a lot more than 1 in 200. And these are not just 90 year olds with dementia and cancer.
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Think about 1,000 people accepting this deal. They're gathered in a room. They step up to the stage, one by one. They take the envelope and roll the dice. 995 people get cheered. 5 get led away. A muffled shot can be heard from behind the curtain.
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I have posted my code here so that you can check my analyses. That also has a link to a copy of the data, if you don't want to go through the hassle of capturing it from the web site yourself. /14 /end
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@DrewPavlou
@DMBrookfield
@SFTHQ
It looks from the video like Harvard's security people simply removed a heckler. I'm not sure I would have invited the Chinese ambassador, but you can't just shout over an invited speaker because you don't like their politics, right?
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Here's a policy we can all get behind, if we take a moment to think about it.
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And here is the heart of that strategy. If you don't speak this language, let me translate for you: It says "We are not going to pay a penny in UK tax if we can help it". /15
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You know how the cabin crew make you lower the arm rest, put the seat in the upright position, open the window blind, put your bags from under the seat in the locker if you're in the exit row, and all that other boring stuff before takeoff and landing?
This is why.
BREAKING: All of the 379 passengers and crew on board the Japan Airlines aircraft have been evacuated.
Read more:
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube
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If this analysis is correct (and of course it may very well not be), this is an embarrassing failure for the UK government, but it might also be a lesson for people who build statistical models and then use them to predict (or, in this case, prescribe) individual outcomes. /16
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The University of Pittsburgh seems to have a cluster of ten scientists who have gone full frootloop.
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@KateWilton1
@SteveBakerHW
@MarcusRashford
It's OK because her husband is the government's anti-corruption champion. 🤣
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New rule: Anyone saying "We should teach X in schools" should identify some Y that should be taught less to make room for X, and be prepared to defend why Y is less important than X. Otherwise the suggestion is trivial.
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Or consider Risk. You are defending. Your opponent throws three sixes. Oops. One chance in 216.
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Hey
@guardian
, to your credit you have corrected the headline on the web page linked from this tweet. Now please delete the tweet and reissue it to reflect the new headline.
Also please change the URL which still includes "kherson-separatists-pause-poll"
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New blog post on the dataset from this article.
Spoiler: it's very, very bad. Duplicate participants, authors as participants in their own study, two unreported conditions, and participant's names and DoB made public.
-Sample size: 49
-p-values: 0.045, 0.052, 0.029, 0.032 (i.e. prima facie p-hacking)
-Scientific value: very little
-Number of views on Twitter regardless: 3,000,000
Doesn’t this Huberman guy have any standards for the stuff he promotes to his huge audience?
(via
@alexabelson9
)
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New blog post: A catastrophic failure of peer review in obstetrics and gynaecology
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@BenMS
@MaxCRoser
It's like saying "my car broke down" when you tried to pull a 35-tonne trailer with a 2CV.
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What would I have to offer you for you to take that bet? I bet it would be a lot more than your student loan debt.
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I have no idea what all of this means, but it does seem somewhat unlikely that these numbers are entirely the product of natural processes. Perhaps some artefact of the data collection protocols is causing this. /13
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Maybe I'm just old, but if you can do it in base R, why would you not? What possible benefit is there to adding package dependencies when you don't have to?
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Lactalis has an English-language Wikipedia page, but the French version is much more complete.
It has sections on the company's past refusals to publish its accounts and accusations of tax evasion /10
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For those who don't read test statistics very often: With 10 possible digits and an expected uniform distribution, a chi-square statistic above 20, or a p value below .01, is starting to be an indication that something unusual is happening. So these numbers are *very* unusual. /9
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Claim: "Ivermectin halved the number of Covid cases in 2 months" (red).
Reality: Covid cases *doubled* in Ivermectin test city in those 2 months (blue).
Lesson: You can prove anything if you provide your own numbers.
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Interestingly, the repetition in the previous tweet corresponds to the repetition of the same paragraphs in Oxman's PhD thesis.
Left: Section 8.5.2, pp. 281–282
Right: Section 9.4.2, p. 299
(By the way, it's perfectly OK to rework your thesis into one or more papers!)
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I don't know what governments should do about COVID-19. I don't think we can continue with lockdowns indefinitely, and perhaps we will end up having to live with it as best we can. That's not my point here.
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Amazing survey discovery: No matter how many people you mail, with any $ reward, with or without Canadians, you'll always get 770 responses.
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The most successful people I've met all had a lot of luck in getting where they were. The nicer ones acknowledged that.
The most successful people I've met:
1. Read constantly
2. Workout daily
3. Are innately curious
4. Have laser focus
5. Believe in themselves
6. Build incredible teams
7. Admit they know very little
8. Constantly work to improve
9. Demand excellence in everything they do
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Today marks 5 weeks of isolation. No sugar, no meat, no alcohol, no dairy. A healthy vegan diet, and a 2-hour home workout each day! Lost 10lb of fat and gained muscle mass.
(I have no idea whose post this is, but I am really proud of them, so I decided to copy and paste it.)
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@sofiapapadim
You're right, but that won't happen. The editors are generally completely uninterested in enforcing this policy, because it would reveal how much fake science they are publishing.
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@Andrewbunchlfc
@Haggis_UK
"There are lots of ways" sounds very much like "There are lots of benefits to Brexit". Apparently the list is so long, so heavy, so cumbersome, that they can't physically drag it into the room to read even one of them.
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This little 2006 article by
@AndyPurvisNHM
contains the best bit of comic timing I've ever seen in an academic paper.
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