absurd graph [if relevant warning]

A pretty silly graph opposing countries with an overwhelming majority of non-Muslims and countries with an overwhelming majority of Muslims in terms of alcohol consumption. Surprise, surprise! And not incorporating the average amount or anything useful… In a Guardian article reporting on a Lancet paper about the lack of health benefit from drinking even moderate amounts of alcohol. Although, as pointed out by David Spiegelhalter at the bottom of the article, an increased risk of 0.5% associated with one unit of alcohol a day [half a pint]  , as opposed to 7% for two units [a pint!], should not get occasional drinkers too worried:  “Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.”

bad graphics and poor statistics

Reading through The Guardian website, I came across this terrible graphic about US airlines 2016 comparison for killing pests pets they carry. Beyond the gross imprecision resulting from resorting to a (gross) dead dog scale to report integers, the impression of Hawaiian Airlines having a beef with pets is just misleading: there were three animal deaths on this company for that year. And nine on United Airlines (including the late giant rabbit). The law of small numbers in action! Computing a basic p-value (!) based on a Poisson approximation (the most pet friendly distribution) does not even exclude Hawaiian Airlines. Without even considering the possibility that, among the half-million plus pets travelling on US airlines in 2016, some would have died anyway but it happened during a flight. (As a comparison, there are “between 114 and 360 medical” in-flight [human] deaths per year. For it’s worth.) The scariest part of The Guardian article [beyond the reliance on terrible graphs!] is the call to end up pets travelling as cargo, meaning they would join their owner in the cabin. As if stag and hen [parties] were not enough of a travelling nuisance..!

Le Monde lacks data scientists!

In a paper in Le Monde today, a journalist is quite critical of statistical analyses of voting behaviours regressed on socio-economic patterns. Warning that correlation is not causation and so on and so forth…But the analysis of the votes as presented in the article is itself quite appalling! Just judging from the above graph, where the vertical and horizontal axes are somewhat inverted (as predicting the proportion of over 65 in the population from their votes does not seem that relevant), with an incomprehensible drop in the over 65 proportion within a district between the votes for the fascist party and the other ones, both indicators of an inversion of the axes!, where the curves are apparently derived from four points [correction at the end explaining they used the whole data collection to draw the curve],  where the variability in the curves is not opposed to the overall variability in the population, where more advanced tools than mere correlation are not broached upon, and so on… They should have asked Andrew. Or YouGov!

bad graph of Olympic proportions

In connection with the current Olympics in Rio, the New York Times produced a sequence of graphs displaying the dominance of some countries for some sports, like the above for long distance running. I find the representation pretty poor, from using a continuous time perspective for 30 Olympic events, to an unexplained colour codes singling out a few countries, to an equally unexplained second axis, with an upward drift above that does not seem to make sense…

another terrible graph…about interesting figures

terrible graph of the day

A truly terrible graph in Le Monde about overweight and obesity in the EU countries (and Switzerland). The circle presentation makes no logical sense. Countries are ordered by 2030 overweight percentages, which implies the order differs for men and women. (With a neat sexist differentiation between male and female figures.)  The allocation of the (2010) grey bar to its country is unclear (left or right?). And there is no uncertain associated with the 2030 predictions. There is no message coming out of the graph, like the massive explosion in the obesity and overweight percentages in EU countries. Now, given that the data is available for women and men, ‘Og’s readers should feel free to send me alternative representations!

Significance and artificial intelligence

As my sorry excuse of an Internet provider has been unable to fix my broken connection for several days, I had more time to read and enjoy the latest Significance I received last week. Plenty of interesting entries, once again! Even though, faithful to my idiosyncrasies, I must definitely criticise the cover (but you may also skip till the end of the paragraph!): It shows a pile of exams higher than the page frame on a student table in a classroom and a vague silhouette sitting behind the exams. I do not know whether or not this is intentional but the silhouette has definitely been added to the original picture (and presumably the exams as well!), because the seat and blackboard behind this silhouette show through it. If this is intentional, does that mean that the poor soul grading this endless pile of exams has long turned into a wraith?! If not intentional, that’s poor workmanship for a magazine usually apt at making the most from the graphical side. (And then I could go on and on about the clearly independent choice of illustrations by the managing editor rather than the author(s) of the article…) End of the digression! Or maybe not because there also was an ugly graph from Knowledge is Beautiful about the causes of plane crashes that made pie-charts look great… Not that all the graphs in the book are bad, far from it!

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’ S. Hawkins

The central theme of the magazine is artificial intelligence (and machine learning). A point I wanted to mention in a post following the recent doom-like messages of Gates and Hawking about AIs taking over humanity à la Blade Runner… or in Turing’s test. As if they had not already impacted our life so much and in so many ways. And no all positive or for the common good. Witness the ultra-fast codes on the stock market. Witness the self-replicating and modifying computer viruses. Witness the increasingly autonomous military drones. Or witness my silly Internet issue, where I cannot get hold of a person who can tell me what the problem is and what the company is doing to solve it (if anything!), but instead have to listen to endless phone automata that tell me to press “1 if…” and “3 else”, and that my incident ticket has last been updated three days ago… But at the same time the tone of The Independent tribune by Hawking, Russell, Tegmark, and Wilczek is somewhat misguided, if I may object to such luminaries!, and playing on science fiction themes that have been repeated so many times that they are now ingrained, rather than strong scientific arguments. Military robots that could improve themselves to the point of evading their conceptors are surely frightening but much less realistic than a nuclear reaction that could not be stopped in a Fukushima plant. Or than the long-term impacts of genetically modified crops and animals. Or than the current proposals of climate engineering. Or than the emerging nano-particles.

“If we build systems that are game-theoretic or utility maximisers, we won’t get what we’re hoping for.” P. Norvig

The discussion of this scare in Significance does not contribute much in my opinion. It starts with the concept of a perfect Bayesian agent, supposedly the state of an AI creating paperclips, which (who?) ends up using the entire Earth’s resources to make more paperclips. The other articles in this cover story are more relevant, as for instance how AI moved from pure logic to statistical or probabilist intelligence. With Yee Whye Teh discussing Bayesian networks and the example of Google translation (including a perfect translation into French of an English sentence).