a ghastly data visualisation

significant changepoint? [poor statistics]

A rather short-shighted item of news in Libération on road deaths rising in March 2021 for the first time since the beginning of lockdown in March 2020. The increase is by 22 persons, which is arguably not statistically significant (although terribly significant for the victims and their families) and somehow to be expected when considering the figures are averages over 12 months, hence representing the new volume of driving induced by the lockdown measures like work-at-home, closed schools, cancelled winter vacations. At best the following figures should see a plateau. More globally, this huge dip in the number of deaths, bringing us back to the 1920’s figures!,  is to be celebrated, alas with no prospect that this lower rate will resist a return to higher levels of activity.

a bad graph about Hubble discrepancies

Here is a picture seen in a Nature Reviews Physics paper I came across, on  the Hubble constant being consistently estimated as large now than previously. I have no informed comment to make on the paper, which thinks that these discrepancies support altering the composition of the Universe shortly before the emergence of the Cosmological Background Noise (CMB), but the way it presented the confidence assessments of the same constant H⁰ based on 13 different experiments is rather ghastly, from using inclined confidence intervals, to adding a USA Today touch to the graph via a broken bridge and a river below, to resorting to different scales for both parts of the bridge…  

on the Internet nobody knows you are an old dog

another terrible graph