Last June, an independent tribunal concluded that the Chinese state was nonconsensually harvesting organs from prisoners despite promises that the practice had ended in 2014.
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Tag: statistics
Rage Inside the Machine: an insightful, brilliant critique of AI’s computer science, sociology, philosophy and economics
Rob Smith is an eminent computer scientist and machine learning pioneer whose work on genetic algorithms has been influential in both industry and the academy; now, in his first book for a general audience, Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All, Smith expertly draws connections between AI, neoliberalism, human bias, eugenics and far-right populism, and shows how the biases of computer science and the corporate paymasters have distorted our whole society.
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Big Data’s “theory-free” analysis is a statistical malpractice
One of the premises of Big Data is that it can be “theory free”: rather than starting with a hypothesis (“men at buffets eat more when women are present,” “more people will click this button if I move it here,” etc) and then gathering data to validate your guess, you just gather a ton of data and look for patterns in it.
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Math against crimes against humanity: Using rigorous statistics to prove genocide when the dead cannot speak for themselves
Patrick Ball and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) (previously) use careful, rigorous statistical models to fill in the large blank spots left behind by acts of genocide, bringing their analysis to war crimes tribunals, truth and reconciliation proceedings, and other reckonings with gross human rights abuses.
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High school class’s electoral predictions model is a model for electoral predictions
The students in David Stein’s Political Statistics class at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland have built a statistical model for predicting the outcomes of the upcoming midterm elections: the model makes assumptions about voter turnout and the way that polling data will translate into votes in 2018.
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English and Welsh local governments use “terrorism” as the excuse to block publication of commercial vacancies
Gavin Chait is an “economist, engineer, data scientist and author” who created a website called Pikhaya where UK entrepreneurs can get lists of vacant commercial properties, their advertised rents, and the history of the businesses that had previously been located in those spaces — whether they thrived, grew and moved on, or went bust (maybe because they had a terrible location).
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A/B testing tools have created a golden age of shitty statistical practices in business
A team of researchers examined 2,101 commercial experiments facilitated by A/B splitting tools like Google Optimize, Mixpanel, Monetate and Optimizely and used regression analysis to detect whether p-hacking (previously), a statistical cheating technique that makes it look like you’ve found a valid cause-and-effect relationship when you haven’t, had taken place.
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Puerto Rico to dismantle its statistics agency in the midst of radical shock doctrine project
The Puerto Rican senate has approved Governor Ricardo Rosselló’s plan to dismantle the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics (PRIS), handing its functions private contractors paid by the Department of Economic Development and Commerce to manage.
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A critical statistics education that fits on a postcard
Economist and maths communicator Tim Harford (previously) presents a riff on Harold Pollack’s aphorism that “The best financial advice for most people would fit on an index card,” and comes up with a complete set of rules for statistical literacy that fits on a postcard.
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An interesting way in which money is totally broken
Calculating inflation, earning power, social progress, equality and inequality — they all depend on being able to compare what used to be happening in our economy to what’s happening now, and the way we do that is with money.
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