Median Watch

Eyes on statistics

I did the dishes.

My daughter loves a song by Parry Gripp called “I did the dishes”. The chorus is “I did the dishes, I’m a hero.” I can’t work out if the song is trying to encourage kids to do the dishes, or if it’s making fun of people who think their housework is heroic, or a bit of both. “Plates, done! Bowls, done! Gravy boat, done!” I helped some people, I’m a hero Here’s a screenshot of some my colleagues who I’ve helped with their statistics.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Monday, June 8, 2020

The COVID-19 crisis is amplifying shortcomings in health and medical research.

Re-posted from Campus Morning Mail. Poor quality medical research is nothing new. A major cause is the race to be published first, which means researchers do not adequately check their work. The COVID-19 crisis has put an already pressured system under even more strain, and the cracks are clearly visible. Small studies have been used to justify massive changes in clinical practice, such as the early results on Hydroxychloroquine, which have looked less promising as more work is published.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Playing the scientific record backwards.

I’ve done a lot of research on seasonal models. I’ve always enjoyed playing with the elegantly simple sinusoid function, which can fit a remarkable array of shapes with just a few parameters. Put enough sinusoids together and you can create any sound. When Fourier discovered this, it was considered too simple to be true. A great number of diseases are seasonal, so these models are useful as well as being mathematically pleasing.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Wednesday, April 15, 2020

It's fun to look at the Y A C M (Yet Another COVID Model)

Yet another COVID model. I did this modelling because I was asked to provide some COVID estimates for a hospital. There have been lots of models in the last few weeks and I don’t want to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio in this vitally important area, but I’m sharing this in case someone finds my approach useful. All the code is here. I have used similar models before to simulate disease numbers over time, for example my PhD student Dimity used microsimulation to examine the long-term effects of climate change (Stephen and Barnett 2017).

Posted by Adrian Barnett Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Mistakes, I’ve made a few, but then again, not too few to mention

Statistics can be hard Here’s a great quote about working with statistics from the fantastic statistician David Spiegelhalter: “I am often asked why people tend to find probability a difficult and unintuitive idea, and I reply that, after forty years researching and teaching in this area, I have finally concluded that it is because probability really is a difficult and unintuitive idea” (Spiegelhalter 2019). Someone who attended my one-day statistics refresher course expressed disappointment in their evaluation that after a day’s training they did not now feel like an expert.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Tuesday, March 17, 2020