Sometimes you watch a movie from the 1980s or something and they have this weird "hidden adverts", mostly about cigarettes $-$ things like when the camera indulges on the star of the movie fiddling with the packet and lighting up the cigarette. I suppose back then it was just another form of advert and in fact it wasn't much worse than the "normal" advert they were doing on TV, newspapers or Formula 1 cars. Like in the brilliant Thank you for smoking. Then, finally, somebody figured out that smoking actually kills (for example, David Spiegelhalter said in his documentary that "two cigarettes cost half an hour". By the way, I thought that the documentary was good, but not great $-$ may be my expectations were too high...) and governments decided it was time to ban tobacco advertisements. I guess I was too young when they actually did that across Europe, so I don' exactly remember what the public and industry reaction was $-$ I seem to remember I didn't really care; but then again, I've never being fascinated with smoking; plus, back then I was still convinced I'd end up playing for Sampdoria and overtaking Roberto Mancini as their best player ever... Anyway, it all seems sensible: once we know (beyond any reasonable doubt and based on a series of scientific studies supporting each other) that something is a public health concern, then to limit its impact on the general population is the first thing a government should do, right? Well, I'm not too sure: last week I saw this advert on TV. Apparently, there's this company that has a website which links together many take-away places, so all you need to do is give your postcode, select a type of food and choose your dinner from a wide range of menus. So far, (almost) so good. I suppose that there are things that are not OK with take-away dinners: for example, probably they increase the level of pollution (eg plastic tupperwares, plastic/paper bags, car fuel, etc). Still, on the other hand, they can't be all bad and if someone did a full economic analysis then they should factor in possible benefits (eg reduced level of pollution due to the fact that you don't do the washing up afterwards?). And to be perfectly honest, I quite fancy the occasional take-away too. But the advert I linked above really stretches it too far! I think they are meant to be funny and ironic in telling people that "The tyranny of home cooking has gone on for too long" and that "Cooking is burnt fingers; cooking is complicated recipes you need a PhD in Advanced Foodolgy to understand; cooking is celeb chef endorsed gadgets you buy and never use; cooking is hours in the kitchen to end up with mush that looks nothing like the recipe photo (and probably tastes like the paper the recipe was printed on)". If anything, I think that the advert is in bad taste [see where I'm going with this one? Food, bad taste... Hilarious, isn't it? I won't be a professional footballer, but may be there's still hope for a stand up career?]. I think that there is a real danger that the message comes up as serious, rather than a funny (?) joke. And I don't think that's something we want $-$ if there are concerns about obesity as a serious public health concern, probably putting in people's mind that cooking is bad and you should only eat take-away dinners is probably not the smartest idea... Now, I think the company should be allowed to market its product $-$ after all, everybody should be free to decide what to eat. But equally, doesn't the government have a duty to control over the way in which people are bombarded with adverts on how to live their lives?
I was thinking of posting some thoughts on the talk that Christl Donnelly gave yesterday at the Symposium (in fact, I briefly commented on a previous post here). As it happens, this is one of the main news in today's papers, and so I'm spending a bit of time on this. The very, very, very quick background to this story is that bovine tuberculosis (bTB) is an increasingly important problem; to put things in perspective, Christl said in her talk that over 26,000 cattle were compulsorily slaughtered after testing positive for the disease, last year. Clearly a huge problem in terms of animal welfare and, incidentally, for the British food industry. I have to admit that I don't know enough to judge whether this is the only theory, or some other biological mechanism could be out there to explain things off. However, one theory (in fact, the theory, it appears) is that badgers living in and around farming areas are the main responsible for the epidemics of bTB. In the late 1990s, the government commissioned a study (which Christl led and described in her talk), to investigate whether "badger culling" (or, more appropriately, "killing"; that's effectively what it is...) would be effective in reducing the level of bTB. The study was complicated to even set up, but, as far as I understand, there is not much controversy on the high quality of the trial, which went on for nearly 10 years (and data are, in theory, continuously monitored $-$ apparently, DEFRA have changed their IT supplier, which has screwed things up and so the data for the last year are still not available). The problem is that the results are not so clear cut as one would hope; according to Christl, badger culling seems to be effective within the "culling area", but also to produce higher rates of bTB just outside of it. Based on these results, the then Labour government didn't implement the policy; Tories and LibDems, on the other hand, were always in favour of culling and, once they happily got married in coalition government, they started plans to actually go for it. But, and I'm coming to today's news, there is now an apparent U-turn, due to the high cost of implementation of the policy. In fact, in order to be effective, at least 70% of the badgers in a given area need to be culled; but because there was a very large uncertainty in the estimation of the badger population stocks, this has turned out to be a more complicated and expensive enterprise than expected (as the absolute numbers have gone up from previous estimations). Now: to my mind this was always going to be a decision-making problem, where the cost components would play a major role. Christl said in her talk that, when they were setting up the trial and even later when presenting the results, some commentators pointed out that cost considerations should not enter the science, and they were criticised for actually taking them into account in their recommendations (in some way; I don't know the details here, but I'm guessing not in a formal, health-economics-like way). To me, this is nonsense and quite hypocritical too! First, there's an underlying assumption that a cow is worth (considerably) more than a badger; if this weren't the case, then why killing an animal to save another one, instead of leaving Nature alone? Of course, to humans the value of a cow is quantifiable in terms of its market in the food industry, and thus is quite high. So, by definition of the problem, the very reason why the government bothered with the trial is economic. Second, if a policy is ever to be implemented, and if science is there to help decide the best course of action, how can the costs attached to a) gathering the relevant data; and b) eventually doing something not be relevant? I think in this case the evidence is just not clear enough $-$ and that's not because of how the trial was run or the stats computed and presented. Things are just not clear. So perhaps the value of information (either on badger culling or implementing alternative or additional strategies) is clearly very high $-$ and possibly still affordable.
Last Saturday we went to the BBC to be part of the audience in a recording for a radio show. That's something we quite often do, since Marta discovered that you just need to apply and then you've got a pretty good chance of "winning" free tickets (especially for less known shows). That's usually quite funny, especially when the show is for the radio (we went to TV shows a couple of times, but it's boring $-$ they have to look fancy and there are about a million re-takes at the end, during which you need to laugh at some joke you've already heard 2 or 3 times). The show we saw on Saturday (Fringe Benefits) was a sort of summary of some of the best acts from the Edinburgh's Fringe Festival. Nearly all were quite good, but my favourite act of the night were Jonny and the Baptists, a trio mixing music and comedy. They did this song about Scotland:
which I thought was quite funny. It's only fitting, of course, that a couple of days later the independence referendum deal was signed. I'm not sure I know what to make of this; my gut feeling is that the Prime Minister Kirk Cameron (pun intended) has played a move that looks risky but it's probably not so much. I think that (much as for the Alternative Voting System referendum in 2011) they know very well that people tend to not show up for referenda, with average turnout well under 30% of the population who could in theory take part $-$ although in the last UK referendum, Scotland was the region with the highest turnout (just over 50%). On the other hand, apparently the polls show that most Scottish people are not likely (for now) to vote for independence. This, I suppose, put the First Minister Alex Salmon (again, pun intended for par conditio) in a slightly uncomfortable situation: of course he couldn't say no to the opportunity of actually staging the referendum (by the way, at some point in the future $-$ although I don't know who'll decide exactly when). But he'll probably have to work hard to convince his fellow Scottish to go for independence.
Yesterday I was reading this story, which I think is kind of interesting. Apparently the fact that Wonga (a "high interest, short-term payday loan company") has signed a multi-million deal to sponsor Newcastle United FC has caused a massive controversy among MPs, campaigners and supporters alike. The reason for this controversy is that the way they (are allowed to) work is to give easy and very quick loans, at amazing (for them!) rates. This is probably an old, outdated advert, but the idea is that they proudly roll with an "unrepresentative" 2012% APR.
Luckily, I'm not one to be too impress by TV adverts (normally I am able to just shut my brains down when they are on), but the first time I saw it I thought they've missed a "." and the rate was actually 20.12% or something. In fact, it looks as though their typical APR is twice as much (4,214%)!
Yet, they claim that their customers are very happy with the service (quoting satisfaction rates of over 90% $-$ see here). The interesting thing is how they are perceived (market themselves?) as a "data-driven" company. Their decision making process is based on evaluating a set of individual characteristics (for example, as the article in The Economist reports, "having a mobile phone with a contract helps to get money"). I thought this was how any bank would operate, but apparently start ups like Wonga do it in a better(?), more comprehensive way, eg combining different sources of information. I wonder what kind of algorithms they really have underlying their decision processes... I suppose that the crucial point here is that with such high rates the expected value of information is really low; in other words,the uncertainty (risk) associated with each decision probably isn't really substantial (ie it does not have a real impact on the decision making process); because they lend small amounts of money, a customer defaulting is not too big a deal. But if the majority of customers can repay their debt (possibly lending more money), then they're (literally) golden...
Great as it is, Google does not always give the "best", or "right" (ie "most appropriate") results on a given search. For example, if you google "jags" (using google.co.uk), the first results are a girls' independent school and a sports club. The real JAGS (OK: real in a geeky, nerdy, statistical sense) only comes up at the third hit. More to the point (to which I'm slowly but surely coming), if you google "inla" the first hit is the Irish national liberation army, again not quite what you'd expect (if you're a statistician with only limited interests outside your field, that is...). But, speaking of INLA (I mean our INLA $-$ not the Irish separatists), Marta, Michela, Håvard and I have just finished our paper, reviewing its use for spatial and spatio-temporal Bayesian data analysis. In comparison to the original series of INLA papers, we slightly changed the notation. Originally, Håvard and his co-authors had defined a linear predictor on (a suitable transformation of) the mean of the observed data as $$ \eta_i = \alpha + \sum_{j=1}^{n_f}f^{(j)}(u_{ij}) \sum_{k=1}^{n_\beta} \beta_k z_{ki} + \epsilon_i, $$ and the parameters were defined as $$\mathbf{x} = \left( \alpha,\{\beta_k\}, \{f^{(j)}(\cdot)\}, \{\epsilon_i\} \right) $$ and given a Gaussian Markov Random prior, as functions of a set of hyper-parameters $\boldsymbol\theta$. I've always thought that this was a bit confusing, as we're normally used to thinking of $\boldsymbol\theta$ as "level-one" parameters and of $\mathbf{x}$ as observable covariates. In the paper, we've modified this to clarify (in my opinion) how this works; so for us $\boldsymbol\theta$ represents the set of parameters, while we use $\boldsymbol\phi$ for the hyper-parameters (ie the variances of the structured effects). Also, in the original formulation, $\epsilon_i \sim \mbox{Normal} (0, \sigma_{\epsilon})$, with $\sigma_\epsilon \rightarrow 0$ is just a technical device used in the code to allow INLA to monitor directly the linear predictor $\eta_i$. But, as far as the model specification is concerned, there is no real need to include it (that's why we didn't). In the paper there are also several worked examples (links to the data and the R code are available here).
I've just seen that, as of today (I think, given I haven't checked the blog over the weekend), this is the most read post in the blog. It has taken over from another post, which was also discussing football [digression: I realise that by linking to these post, I'm making them even slightly more likely to be read, but I think that the third most read is quite below their numbers, so it shouldn't really cause much bias]. Now, on the one hand this is kind of cool and actually should be guiding my future endeavours in terms of blogging, so that I can finally take over the web and become one of those people who go on telly and are presented as "bloggers":
On the other hand, however, it is a bit frustrating, considering that I try to be opinionated and write as-much-as-I-can-intelligent-stuff on topics that are (evidently, just supposed to be) a bit more important than football. Well, may be before I abandon for ever everything else and focus my life on football only, I should consider that the real explanation is confounding, since the top post was also on R-blogger and thus it was probably exposed to a much wider audience than others.
It often happens that a band are quite popular for a bit and then sort of disappear from your radar (or actually, pretty much anybody's radar). I used to like Turin Brakes in the early noughties; I also liked their name [digression: apparently, they didn't choose it because Turin was their favourite city (they hadn’t even been to Turin up to that point), or that they have brakes on their cars that originated from Turin (well they very well could have $–$ but that wasn’t the reason for the name). They just thought it sounded good. To me it was just a bit weird, but I liked it anyway...]. One thing I have in common with them is that I hadn't visited Turin until a couple of years ago (well, in fact I'm not sure they did too $-$ but you know what I mean...). Of course, in my case it's probably much worse, since I've lived for 20 odds years in Italy, so it really should have happened earlier. However, since my first time, not only have I gone back in quite a few occasions, but I've also made some good friends who are, for one reason or another, related with Turin. Last week I went to give a talk at a conference and then I stayed over the weekend to see some of them. The talk was about Bayesian methods in health economics (the slides of the presentation are here). I thought it went well and people (most of whom, if not all, were pharmacologists) were kind enough to come and tell me after the talk that they've understood the basics of Bayesian analysis. I was deliberately vague with the technicalities, but hopefully they will have become interested in the approach and grasped some of the main points. Apart from the conference, I was, again, impressed by the city, which I think is really beautiful. It's quite big as well (~1 million residents, I'm told), but it doesn't really feel that way; you can easily walk around the city center and enjoy the elegant buildings and chocolate shops (and no: I did not get money from the local tourist information office!). What was really funny is that I had a strong realisation of being in Italy while we were taking a stroll on Saturday after dinner. Imagine something like this:
In fact, the picture is not us, or even Turin; but the point is that it was so familiar to see so many people walking around with no purpose at all, just for the sake of being seen and seeing other people, and the only possible distraction of an ice cream.
During a quick break between meetings, I've watched Ben Goldacre's new TED lecture. I met Ben when he gave a talk at the final conference of the Evidence project (in which I was involved), back in 2007. I like him, particularly for his wild hair, a feature I hold dear, and I quite often agree with him on issues related to the use of evidence in medical studies. In this presentation, he talks about the problem with publication bias, which I think this is one of his pièces de résistance. In particular he discusses the severe bias in the publication of clinical trial results, where unfavourable outcomes tend to be swept under the rug. Of course, this is a very relevant issue; to some extent (and I gather this is what Ben argues as well), only a clear and very strict regulation could possibly solve it. Typical examples that people consider is to establish a register of all authorised trials. In other words, the idea is to put all ongoing studies on an official registry, so that people can expect some results. Failure to publish results, either positive or negative, would then be clear evidence of the latter. [I'm not sure whether something like this does exist. But even in that case, I don't think it is enforced $-$ and Ben seems to suggest this too, in the talk]. The problem is that, probably, this would not be enough to magically solve the problems $-$ I can definitely see people trying hard to find loopholes in the regulation, eg classifying a trial as "preliminary" (or something) and therefore maintain the right of not publishing the results, if they so wish... May be this is an indirect argument for being more openly Bayesian in designing and analysing clinical trials. For example, if some information is present on the level of ongoing research in a given area, may be one could try and formalise some measure of "strength" of the published evidence. Or even more simply, if some sceptical prior is used to account for the information provided by the literature, the inference would be less affected by publication bias (I think this is a point that Spiegelhater et al discuss a lot in their book).
