[Good 2009 article by Andrew Gelman, in American Scientist, about some of the ways that statistics can go badly wrong. -egg]

Realistically, a researcher on sex ratios has to make two arguments: a statistical case that observed patterns represent real population effects and cannot be explained simply by sampling variability, and a biological argument that effects on the order of 1 percent are substantively important. The claimed effect size of 26 percent should have aroused suspicion in comparison to the literature on human sex ratios; in addition, though, the papers managed to survive the review process because reviewers did not recognize that the power of the studies was such that only very large estimated effects could make it through the statistical-significance filter. The result is essentially a machine for producing exaggerated claims, which of course only become more exaggerated when they hit the credulous news media (with an estimate of 4.7 percent ± 4.3 percent being ramped up to 26 percent and then reported as 36 percent).

Click to access 3.5.Beauty.pdf

Visual artist Noell Osvald creates startlingly bold works through simple gestures all performed in black and white. The self-portraits rarely show the 25-year-old artist’s face, instead expressing emotion through the way she tilts her head or slightly crooks her neck. Emphasizing line, her works incorporate a strict horizon or eliminate it altogether, segmenting the image from left to right…The self-taught artist’s works are mostly composites that only allude to being photographs. She explains that she does not pre-visualize any of her works, all are completely spontaneous. “I find post-processing the most enjoyable part of creating,” she told Lines magazine. “I build my pictures up from several different ones, much like a jigsaw puzzle.”

Source: New Black and White Surrealist Self-Portraits by Noell Oszvald | Colossal

[This is pretty amazing to watch. -egg]

https://goo.gl/o1veLu

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Although some price increases have been caused by shortages, others have resulted from a business strategy of buying old neglected drugs and turning them into high-priced “specialty drugs.”

Cycloserine, a drug used to treat dangerous multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, was just increased in price to $10,800 for 30 pills from $500 after its acquisition by Rodelis Therapeutics. Scott Spencer, general manager of Rodelis, said the company needed to invest to make sure the supply of the drug remained reliable. He said the company provided the drug free to certain needy patients.

Doxycycline, an antibiotic, went from $20 a bottle in October 2013 to $1,849 by April 2014, according to the two lawmakers.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association sent a joint letter to Turing earlier this month calling the price increase for Daraprim “unjustifiable for the medically vulnerable patient population” and “unsustainable for the health care system.” An organization representing the directors of state AIDS programs has also been looking into the price increase, according to doctors and patient advocates.

[Abridged]

Drug Goes From $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight – The New York Times

[From the powerful and moving manifesto by the Dark Mountain Project. I don’t agree with everything they have to say, but a hell of a lot of it resonates with me. -egg]

Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What gallery mounts an exhibition equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord?

If the answers to these questions have been scarce up to now, it is perhaps both because the depth of collective denial is so great, and because the challenge is so very daunting. We are daunted by it, ourselves. But we believe it needs to be risen to. We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.

…filming, recording and beholding a 10,000-year-old tree in northern Sweden.

Children, you must understand, are monsters. They are ravenous, ravening, they lope over the countryside with slavering mouths, seeking love to devour. Even when they find it, even if they roll about in it and gorge themselves, still it will never be enough. Their hunger for it is greater than any heart to satisfy. You mustn’t think poorly of them for it—we are all monsters that way, it is only that when we are grown, we learn more subtle methods to snatch it up, and secretly slurp our fingers clean in dark corners, relishing even the last dregs. All children know is a clumsy sort of pouncing after love. They often miss, but that is how they learn.

Cat Valente, The Habitation of the Blessed

When Enron collapsed and got hit with a lawsuit requesting discovery on its internal email, its top bosses decided that they’d skip spending money on pricey lawyers to go through the archive and remove immaterial messages — instead, the dumped the entire corpus of internal mail, including their employees’ personal messages.

For years, social scientists have used the Enron dataset to look at information cascades, social graphs, and linguistics.

Now, in Phrases That Signal Workplace Hierarchy, Georgia Tech’s Eric Gilbert applies computational lexigraphic analysis to the Enron corpus with an eye to figuring out how subordinates talk to their bosses, and how bosses talk to their subordinates, and what role gender plays in the matter.It’s a fascinating read, and suggests loads of avenues for future work.

Source: How to send email like a non-metaphorical boss / Boing Boing

Direct link to paper