Archive for journalism
EUropean media freedom act
Posted in Books, Travel with tags Council of the European Union, EU, European Commission, European elections, European Media Freedom Act, European Parliament, European Union, journalism, media, monopoly, political advertising, safeguards, social media, State of the Union Address, statistical surveilance, transparency on May 19, 2024 by xi'an
shallow learning
Posted in Books, University life with tags AI, artificial intelligence, Cédric Villani, ChatGPT, editor in chief, elections, French politics, journalism, Libé, Liberation, Parliament on June 21, 2023 by xi'an
data science in La X
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics with tags AI, CNRS, COVID-19, data science, ethics, France, interview, journalism, k nearest neighour, La Croix, ModCov19, modelling, pandemic on January 25, 2022 by xi'an
As the [catholic] daily La X has a special “Sciences&éthique” report on data science and scientists, my mom [a long time subscriber] mailed me [by post] the central pages where it appeared. The contents are not great, focusing as often on a few sentences from and missing on the fundamental limitations of self-learning algorithms. As an aside, the leaflet contained a short interview by Jean-Stéphane Dhersin, who is head of the CNRS ModCov19 centralising platform [and anecdotally a neighbour] on the notion that a predictive model in epidemiology can be both scientific and imprecise.
This is the worst of times
Posted in Statistics with tags Apple Daily, democracy, free speech, Hong Kong, journalism, National Security Law, pro-democracy protesters on June 19, 2021 by xi'an
the limits of R
Posted in Books, pictures, R, Statistics with tags Boris Johnson, COVID-19, epidemiology, journalism, Nature, nowcasting, pandemic, PHE, Public Health England, R, R number, R package, UK on August 10, 2020 by xi'an
It has been repeated many times on many platforms, the R (or R⁰) number is not a great summary about the COVID-19 pandemic, see eg Rossman’s warning in The Conversation, but Nature chose to stress it one more time (in its 16 Jul edition). Or twice when considering a similar piece in Nature Physics. As Boris Johnson made it a central tool of his governmental communication policy. And some mayors started asking for their own local R numbers! It is obviously tempting to turn the messy and complex reality of this planetary crisis into a single number and even a single indicator R<1, but it is unhelpful and worse, from the epidemiology models being wrong (or at least oversimplifying) to the data being wrong (i.e., incomplete, biased and late), to the predictions being wrong (except for predicting the past). Nothing outrageous from the said Nature article, pointing out diverse degrees of uncertainty and variability and stressing the need to immediately address clusters rather than using the dummy R. As an aside, the repeated use of nowcasting instead of forecasting sounds like a perfect journalist fad, given that it does not seem to be based on a different model of infection or on a different statistical technique. (There is a nowcasting package in R, though!) And a wee bit later I have been pointed out at an extended discussion of an R estimation paper on Radford Neal’s blog.
