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Statistics Done Wrong
July 5, 2012 — xanthippaOne of my most frustrating pet peeves is when scientists don’t understand what it is they are measuring.
And, let me assure you, this is a much bigger problem than anyone is willing to admit.
My background – going way, way back, before my ventures into the business world or even into parenthood, I studied Science. And, while I never sought a doctorate or any such thing (I had done my due diligence on child-bearing statistics in preparation for parenthood and realized that if I wanted to optimize for my children’s intelligence, I had to conceive my first child at no older an age than 25 – and my last one at no older an age than 30: and since my then fiance – now husband – agreed that we did not approve of the ‘daycare’ model of child-rearing, somewhat to my now hubbie’s chagrin, I chose not to pursue further studies), I do have a degree in Physics in there somewhere….
What I specialized for (though I did not realize at the time that this was ‘soooooo Aspie’) was data acquisition, test and measurement. I made a career out of helping other scientists (and industry, military etc.) figure out how to measure what it was they were really trying to measure, from designing the data acquisition systems to telling them if they were actually measuring what they thought they were measuring.
As such, am somewhat sensitive to ‘sloppy science’.
Which is why I so happy that my son has forwarded me a link to an absolutely excellent essay about how statistics – especially in the medical field -(where, when I was finishing my degree, I was heavily lobbied to go into post-grad, so that I could ‘clean-up’ the methodology in a prominent Canadian immunology University lab – so I really, really understand the criticism here…) are misunderstood not just by the public, not just by the media people who are reporting on it, but especially by the scientists themselves who are carrying out the studies/experiments!
‘Open a random page in your favorite medical journal and you’ll soon be deluged with statistics: t tests, p values, proportional hazards models, risk ratios, logistic regressions, least-squares fits, and confidence intervals. Statisticians have provided scientists with tools of enormous power to find order and meaning in the most complex of datasets, and scientists have embraced them with glee.
Many of these tools are misapplied or misinterpreted.
In fact, most published research findings are probably false.’
Aye, aye.
The essay is written with the layman in mind: it explains things, from first principles, without jargon but with examples of just how easy it is to manipulate results, even without realizing one is doing so.
IF you are interested in science…
IF you have not taken a lot of courses in statistics – but want to understand the real-life meaning of statistics…
IF you want to keep ‘science honest’ ….
IF you question ‘politicized science’…
…you would benefit from/enjoy reading this simple essay.
H/T: Tyr
Brian Lilley and John Robson on Free Dominion & Freedom of Speech
July 3, 2012 — xanthippa
OK, John Robson is as close to a genius as it gets – in non-science fields, that is…
Thomas Sowell is even closer – he is as close to divine as you can get without having to surrender your ‘atheist’ identity!!!
Help the Fourniers pay their legal costs: if you are reading this over the internet, you are benefiting from the legal fights they have already won…
Declaration of Internet Freedom
July 2, 2012 — xanthippaDECLARATION
We stand for a free and open Internet.
We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles:
Expression: Don’t censor the Internet.
Access: Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.
Openness: Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create and innovate.
Innovation: Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don’t block new technologies, and don’t punish innovators for their users’ actions.
Privacy: Protect privacy and defend everyone’s ability to control how their data and devices are used.
SIGN THE DECLARATION
How Canada Day was stolen from working-class people
July 1, 2012 — xanthippaWhether you celebrate Canada Day, Dominion Day, Memorial Day, Beer-and-Barbie day: today is a day that we Canadians get together with friends and family and celebrate our Canadianness.
Unless, of course, you work for a living in retail.
Or in another field where people work on the weekend…
The lawmakers are now so disconnected from real-life people, the bureaucrats who ‘aid’ them in the drafting of laws are so self-focused and unable or unwilling to consider the conditions under which the rest of us live, that the laws serve them and them only at the expense of other Canadians.
Just look at how this civic holiday law is written!
The aim of having Canada Day be a statutory holiday is so that all of us can go and celebrate with friends and family, right?
So, if the holiday falls on the weekend, most people should be able to celebrate, right?
But – the bureaucrats and policymakers feel like they are missing out on a ‘free’ day off!!!
So, they wrote the law to say that if Canada Day falls onto the weekend, the statutory holiday will fall onto the following Monday.
The effect of this, of course, is that the statutory holiday does not fall onto Canada Day itself!!!
So, people who usually work on the weekend have to work on Canada Day – and then get a day off later on in the week, when the celebrations are already over.
Sure, some companies will give people the day off – but at their own cost, because they still have to give them a paid day off on Monday.
Sure, some people will take a holiday, so they can get together with friends and family.
And that is great!
But, that is what people would have done if we did not have a statutory holiday to start off with – so, it defeats the very purpose of having one, doesn’t it?
Happy Canada Day…
From OpenMedia
June 27, 2012 — xanthippaThis is from an email I received today from OpenMedia:
Imagine a world where you could be dragged to court and receive a large fine for simply clicking on the wrong link, where service providers would hand over information about your online activities without privacy safeguards, and where online content could be removed by big media conglomerates at will.
This scenario could become a reality before we know it. In just a few days1, a group of 600 lobbyist “advisors” and un-elected trade representatives are scheming behind closed doors 2 to decide how the Internet will be governed, including whether you could get fined for your Internet use.3 Instead of debating this openly, they’re meeting secretly to craft an Internet trap through an international agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).4 Our government just signed Canada onto this arrangement, without our consent.5
In short, it appears that it will be big-media lobbyists—not citizens—who get to decide whether Canadians will be fined as suspected copyright criminals. Please help us raise a loud call before it’s too late. Visit: http://stopthetrap.net
We know from leaked documents6 that industry lobbyists intend to blanket these new restrictions and laws around the world, without us having any say in the matter. How can they do this?
Instead of an open, public process, they’ll use international tribunals to go around domestic judicial systems.7 And once the trap is set, there’s no going back. That’s why OpenMedia.ca and SumOfUs are launching this campaign today.
Here are the details—the TPP’s Internet trap would:
- Criminalize some of your everyday use of the Internet,8
- Force service providers to collect and hand over your private data without privacy safeguards9, and
- Give media conglomerates more power to fine you for Internet use, remove online content—including entire websites—and even terminate your access to the Internet.10
We deserve to know what will be blocked, and what we and our families will be fined for. If enough of us speak out now, we can prevent the Canadian government from slow-walking us into an Internet trap. Make your voice heard today.
For the possibilities of an open Internet,
Steve, Shea, Lindsey, and Reilly—your OpenMedia team
P.S. We’ve been through a lot together. Industry and government bureaucracies have tried to make Canada’s Internet more costly, controlled, and surveilled. We fought back together and successfully held the line. Now some of those same bureaucracies are going around our democratic processes to impose an Internet trap through this extreme and secretive trade agreement. Let’s take the next step to safeguard the open and affordable Internet together now.
Footnotes
[1] The next round of TPP negotiations will take place between July 2nd and July 9th 2012. The meetings remain controversially secretive without meaningful public participation while, according to U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, industry lobbyists from Big Media entities like Comcast and the Motion Picture Association of America are “made privy to details of the agreement”.
[2] The TPP suffers from a lack of transparency, public participation, and democratic accountability. In this letter, a number of U.S. civil society organizations detail and decry the opacity of the process.
[3] See the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s analysis to learn more about the ways the TPP increases the threat of litigation from Big Media. Under the TPP, Big Media could come after you in court even “without the need for a formal complaint by a private party or right holder”.
[4] Find our backgrounder on the TPP here, and our press release about Ottawa’s irresponsible participationhere.
[5] On Tuesday, June 19, 2012, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that Canada would join the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
[6] Public interest groups have obtained the February 2011 draft of the TPP’s Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. In it, we can see that the TPP would drastically increase Internet surveillance, increase Big Media’s Internet lockdown powers, and criminalize content sharing in general, with a likelihood of harsher penalties.
[7] The recently leaked investment chapter of the TPP reveals that the TPP would establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt domestic courts and laws, directly sue governments before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges.
[8] In addition to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s analysis, also see Public Knowledge’s run down of concerns with The TPP IP chapter’s criminalization of downloading.
[9,10] See infojustics.org’s list of the TPP’s effects on the intellectual property law in Canada and Mexico for more information on penalties, privacy implications, and also Public Knowledge: What’s actually in the TPP?
Support OpenMedia.ca
Ruling in the ‘Warman V Free Dominion’ case – well, in one of the cases, at least…
June 26, 2012 — xanthippaI have reported on what I saw and heard in court during the hearing itself here.
Richard Warman is an Ottawa lawyer whose hobby appears to be using the legal system to shut up people who hold views he does not like – and the consequences be damned. He also has frequent-flyer points on using the Human Rights commissions to persecute people he finds ‘annoying’ and many believe that it is at least in part because of the way Mr. Warman used (or, perhaps, abused) the Human Rights Code that the section he used most often, Section 13, got removed.
I suspect that Mr. Warman finds people who stand up to him to be ‘particularly annoying’.
Connie and Mark Fournier run Free Dominion, Canada’s perhaps oldest, certainly largest, discussion forum with a conservative bend. They have stood up to Mr. Warman and his hoard of henchmen for years.
The Fourniers have been a favourite target of the serial suer Warman.
The decision has now come down in the latest lawsuit, which will have impact on how copyright laws are interpreted not just in Canada, but to a lesser extent also in other common law countries. And, it is clearly in favour of the Fourniers and freedom of speech!!!
And, it is hitting all the internet high-sites!
From Dr. Michael Geist:
‘The court’s discussion is important for several reasons. First, the finding that several paragraphs do not constitute a substantial part of the work has echoes to the Supreme Court of Canada hearing in December when the court opened the door to questions about some of the copying in schools not rising to the level of substantial copying. Moreover, if this amount of copying is not substantial, it has implications in a wide range of additional cases (including the Access Copyright model licence). Second, the court’s conclusion is critically important to online chat forums, blogs, and other venues where copying several paragraphs from an article is quite common. Given the court’s analysis, such copying appears to be permissible on at least two grounds, including the notion that such postings can be treated as news reporting for fair dealing purposes.
The third claim involved a link to a photograph posted on the photographer’s site. The court had no trouble concluding that the link was not copyright infringement, rightly noting that the photographer authorized the communication of the work by posting it on his website. This finding should put an end to claims that linking to copyright materials somehow raises potential legal risks. ‘
In other words, 100% in favour of the Fourniers!
And, let’s not forget – this is only one of many lawsuits the Fourniers have faced and are still facing. They have already set legal precedents in Canada when they stood up for the privacy rights of the users of their forum!!!
The practical implication of this is that they had to represent themselves in this latest court battle.
Connie Fournier, a computer scientist with a formidable mind, had to not only research all the laws and put the case together herself, she had to learn all the ‘tricks of the trade’ on how to do it and how to do it right. Not an easy task…
Well, she did something right!!!
From TechDirt:
‘All told, this is an excellent decision, and offers further proof that Canada has the very real potential to move copyright law in a positive direction. There are still lots of battles to be fought, but there’s also a genuine emphasis on the rights of users (especially in the courts) that can hopefully be harnessed and nurtured more and more over time.’
From boingboing:
‘Canadian fed court: linking isn’t copyright infringement, neither is excerpting an article‘
From Law 360:
‘Ottawa Federal Court Judge Donald J. Rennie ruled against attorney Richard Warman, who along with the National Post Co. had sued Free Dominion website operators Mark and Constance Fournier for having reproduced a speech Warman had written and parts of a newspaper article that had been written about him, and for linking a photograph that was…’
I’m sure there is more….
“Democracy” in the EU – lol
June 26, 2012 — xanthippaOne would laugh, if this were not so tragic!
EU bureaucrats are openly over-ruling the will of its member states!
Some European nation states have already passed national law that make ACTA and ACTA-like monstrosities illegal in their countries.
EU bureaucrats say that’s too bad, they trump any national laws…
And, if the EU courts decide that ACTA is illegal, they’ll find some way to change the laws.
This is a very, very dangerous precedent!
From TechDirt:
‘In other words, De Gucht won’t accept the idea that the European electorate, through their representatives in the European Parliament, might possibly want to reject something they were not allowed to know about until late in the negotiating process, and to which they were unable to provide any meaningful input. In his view, ACTA must be passed, and ACTA will be passed — whatever anyone else thinks about it.’
And don’t forget, the EU is UN’s mini-me. As at the EU, so in the UN.
We will see this, more and more: bureaucrat-crafted ‘international agreements’ will be forced as laws on member nation states, whether they like it or not. In the EU and UN both!
Remember, the UN, chock-full of dictators and tyrants, is not big on Western values and civil liberties – and its laws/treaties reflect this. Even its Universal Declaration of Human Rights states clearly that human rights may only be enjoyed to the degree that local laws deem appropriate!!!
If you think this should not scare you, because you don’t live in the EU – don’t be so sure. The UN is just using the EU to work out some of the ‘how to’ kinks on its way to regulating humanity into virtual extinction!
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 