Specific country notes have been prepared using data from the database OECD Health Statistics 2015, July 2015 version. The notes are available in PDF format.

The tax-to-GDP ratio in Germany increased by 0.6 percentage points from 37.6% in 2017 to 38.2% in 2018. The corresponding figure for the OECD average was a slight increase of 0.1 percentage point from 34.2% to 34.3% over the same period.

The concept of statistical signal detection by controlling the false-discovery rate (FDR) to aid the atomic model interpretation of cryo-EM density maps is reviewed. The recommended usage of the FDR software tool is presented together with its successful integration into the CCP-EM suite.

This study describes a method to estimate the likelihood of success in determining a macromolecular structure by X-ray crystallography and experimental single-wavelength anomalous dispersion (SAD) or multiple-wavelength anomalous dispersion (MAD) phasing based on initial data-processing statistics and sample crystal properties. Such a predictive tool can rapidly assess the usefulness of data and guide the collection of an optimal data set. The increase in data rates from modern macromolecular crystallography beamlines, together with a demand from users for real-time feedback, has led to pressure on computational resources and a need for smarter data handling. Statistical and machine-learning methods have been applied to construct a classifier that displays 95% accuracy for training and testing data sets compiled from 440 solved structures. Applying this classifier to new data achieved 79% accuracy. These scores already provide clear guidance as to the effective use of computing resources and offer a starting point for a personalized data-collection assistant.

Confidence maps provide complementary information for interpreting cryo-EM densities as they indicate statistical significance with respect to background noise. They can be thresholded by specifying the expected false-discovery rate (FDR), and the displayed volume shows the parts of the map that have the corresponding level of significance. Here, the basic statistical concepts of confidence maps are reviewed and practical guidance is provided for their interpretation and usage inside the CCP-EM suite. Limitations of the approach are discussed and extensions towards other error criteria such as the family-wise error rate are presented. The observed map features can be rendered at a common isosurface threshold, which is particularly beneficial for the interpretation of weak and noisy densities. In the current article, a practical guide is provided to the recommended usage of confidence maps.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers detailed recommendations to guide federal statistical agencies in creating a new entity that would enable them to combine data from multiple sources in order to provide more relevant, timely, and detailed statistics – for example, on the unemployment rate or the rate of violent crime.

Producing more precise county-level estimates of crops and farmland cash rents will require integrating multiple data sources using model-based predictions that are more transparent and reproducible, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Myke is sick, Grey hits two million YouTube subscribers, and they are both very upset about Apple Pencil support in iOS 9.3.

Wasted food accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than any country except China and the United States, according to a new report.

World Rhino Day has us thinking about how amazing this animal really is, and how close we are to losing it forever.

Some of the greats of the game had some astounding statistics. I guess that makes sense. Looking at some of these stats in a different way is what I think you will enjoy about this piece.

The Transportation Equity Network (TEN) has released More Transit = More Jobs: The Impact Of Increasing Funding For Public Transit (31p. PDF). TEN is a coalition of more than 350 grassroots organizations in 41 states that has worked since 1997 to build a more just, prosperous, and connected America.

This study asks two key questions:

What would be the effect on jobs in each metropolitan area of shifting 50% of the money spent on highways to public transit?

How many jobs would be created in each metro area if we increased funding on public transit at the rate indicated by the Transportation For America proposal for the next transportation authorization act?

The report highlights several statistics in answering those questions based on data from Transportation Improvement Programs (TIPS) in 20 U.S. metropolitan areas. For example, 1,123,674 new transit jobs would be created over a 5-year period for a net gain of 180,150 jobs without a single dollar of new spending.

However, if federal spending on transit increased as proposed by TEN and Transportation For America, an estimated 1.3 million jobs over the life of the law would be created, as well as almost 800,000 more jobs than under present federal transporation law (SAFETEA-LU).

The Federal Highway Administration published the 2009 Urban Congestion Trends (8p. PDF) document last week. This brief report utilizes a dashboard format to convey year-over-year changes in key traffic measures: daily hours of congestion, time penalty for eqach trip, worst-trip time penalty. Some key observations include:

• Overall, congestion had declined in almost all monitored regions between 2008 and 2009
• Less wasted time and fewer hours of the day were devoted to stop-and-go traffic in 16 of the 23 monitored regions
• At least one of the three measures improved in 20 of the 23 monitored regions
• Congestion is lowest during the summer vacation season

The report goes on to explain how operational improvements can mitigate congestion and promote smooth, safe and consistent traffic flow.

Examples provided from around the country include high-occupancy/toll lanes, freeway ramp metering, improved information coordination, work-zone management, and traffic signal system improvement programs.

In Managing Increasing Ridership Demand (32p. PDF), The FTA's Transit Cooperative Research Program presents an overview of a study mission investigating how several transit operators and agencies in Latin America accomodate sudden and significant growth in the number of riders and increasing demand for service.

Case studies from Guayaquil (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile), Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Porto Alegre (Brazil) were selected because they have faced and successfully dealt with challenges similar to recent ridership grown in the United States.

Each city's responses offer unique insight into managing increasing transit ridership and providing various perspectives on serving the mobility needs of their communities.

Two International Transit Studies Program study missions such as this are conducted each year. They have three objectives: To afford team members the opportunity to expand their network of domestic and international public transportation peers, to provide a forum for discussion of global initiatives and lessons learned in public transportation, and to facilitate idea sharing and the possible import of strategies for application to transportation communities in the United States.

Check out this freely available book, All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference, and learn the probability and statistics needed for success in data science.

This online course is available – for free – to anyone interested in building practical skills in using data to solve problems better.

I originally gave this post the title, “Stigler: The Changing History of Robustness,” but then I was afraid nobody would read it. In the current environment of Move Fast and Break Things, not so many people care about robustness. Also, the widespread use of robustness checks to paper over brittle conclusions has given robustness a […]

We’ve had lots of discussions here and elsewhere online about fundamental flaws in statistics culture: the whole p-value thing, statistics used for confirmation rather than falsification, corruption of the pizzagate variety, soft corruption in which statistics is used in the service of country-club-style backslapping, junk science routinely getting the imprimatur of the National Academy of […]

The University of Washington in Seattle is a big place. It includes the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which has produced a widely-circulated and widely-criticized coronavirus model. As we’ve discussed, the IHME model is essentially a curve-fitting exercise that makes projections using the second derivative of the time trend on the log scale. […]

This report summarizes timber resource statistics for the 20 counties in eastern Washington. The inventory sampled all private and public lands except those administered by the National Forest System in 2001, and those that were reserved from management for wood products.

The importance to society of environmental services, provided by forest ecosystems, has significantly increased during the last few decades. A growing global concern with the deterioration of forests, beginning perhaps most noticeably in the 1980s, has led to an increasing public awareness of the environmental, cultural, economic, and social values that forests provide. Around the world, ideas of sustainable, close-to-nature, and multi-functional forestry have progressively replaced the older perception of forests as only a source for timber. The international impetus to protect and sustainably manage forests has come from global initiatives at management, conservation, and sustainable development related to all types of forests and forestry. A few of the more notable initiatives include: the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED); regional follow-ups to the Earth Summit such as the Montreal Process and Helsinki Accords; the forest elements of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD); and the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC).

Online marketing with visual content continues to grow and drive tons of traffic. The team at Venngage gathered together the latest data in the 14 Visual Content Marketing Statistics to Know for 2019 infographic and built it using their own tool.

From Nadya Khoja at Venngage:

Two years ago I asked 300 different online marketers to help me figure out how they were using visual content as part of their marketing strategies in 2016 and their predictions for 2017.

This year I wanted to see if there were any changes in how marketers were creating visuals, and what kind of content engagement they were seeing.

I also asked a couple of additional questions to see how the use of various visual formats impacted their blogging strategies.

Conclusion:

The data says it all–visual content isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Not only are more brands leveraging the use for of visuals for various social media platforms, but there is a lot of added benefit when it comes to SEO and organic rankings as well, particularly in Google’s image search results.

And of course, creating engaging visual content is a surefire way to resonate with your audience and communicate your ideas more effectively.

There are a few things to unravel here:

• It’s good survey data, but take it with a grain of salt. Venngage is a visual design tool, sharing data about visual content marketing.

• The infographic is a fantastic format to summarize the survey results and use in social media to draw in readers to the full article.

• The infographic is built using Venngage, so it’s also a great way to showcase what their design tool is capable of. In fact, clicking on the infographic gives you the opportunity to use this design as a template for designing your own infographic.

• Sections 5 & 10 are disappointing visually. There are no data visualizations, just a bunch of percentage values shown in text.

• I’m not a fan of the bright color scheme, and it’s visually distracting from highlighting insights in the data.

• The article still references 2018 data, even though the infographic has been updated with newer data from 2019.

Compromised accounts on social networks are regular user accounts that have been taken over by an entity with malicious intent. Since the adversary exploits the already established trust of a compromised account, it is crucial to detect these accounts to limit the damage they can cause. We propose a novel general framework for discovering compromised accounts by semantic analysis of text messages coming out from an account. Our framework is built on the observation that normal users will use language that is measurably different from the language that an adversary would use when the account is compromised. We use our framework to develop specific algorithms that use the difference of language models of users and adversaries as features in a supervised learning setup. Evaluation results show that the proposed framework is effective for discovering compromised accounts on social networks and a KL-divergence-based language model feature works best.

Consider the following prediction problem. Assume that there is a block box that produces bits according to some unknown computable distribution on the binary tree. We know first $n$ bits $x_1 x_2 ldots x_n$. We want to know the probability of the event that that the next bit is equal to $1$. Solomonoff suggested to use universal semimeasure $m$ for solving this task. He proved that for every computable distribution $P$ and for every $b in {0,1}$ the following holds: $$sum_{n=1}^{infty}sum_{x: l(x)=n} P(x) (P(b | x) - m(b | x))^2 < infty .$$ However, Solomonoff's method has a negative aspect: Hutter and Muchnik proved that there are an universal semimeasure $m$, computable distribution $P$ and a random (in Martin-L{"o}f sense) sequence $x_1 x_2ldots$ such that $lim_{n o infty} P(x_{n+1} | x_1ldots x_n) - m(x_{n+1} | x_1ldots x_n) rightarrow 0$. We suggest a new way for prediction. For every finite string $x$ we predict the new bit according to the best (in some sence) distribution for $x$. We prove the similar result as Solomonoff theorem for our way of prediction. Also we show that our method of prediction has no that negative aspect as Solomonoff's method.

Are you looking to start 2020 with a fresh web design for your business? If so, you must know what you need to do in 2020 to have a website that drives success for your business. With website statistics for 2020, you can see what to do and what to avoid, which will help you […]

The post Website Statistics for 2020: 10 Critical Stats to Know for Web Design appeared first on WebFX Blog.

A computer-implemented method is provided for statistical data learning under privacy constraints. The method includes: receiving, by a processor, a plurality of pieces of statistical information relating to a statistical object and aggregating, by the processor, the plurality of pieces of statistical information so as to provide an estimation of the statistical object. Each piece of statistical information includes an uncertainty variable, the uncertainty variable being a value determined from a function having a predetermined mean. The number of pieces of statistical information aggregated is proportional to the reliability of the estimation of the statistical object.

Method and system are disclosed for statistical circuit simulation. In one embodiment, a computer implemented method for statistical circuit simulation includes providing descriptions of a circuit for simulation, wherein the descriptions include variations of statistical parameters of the circuit, partitioning the circuit into groups of netlists according to variations of statistical parameters of the circuit, simulating the groups of netlists using a plurality of processors in parallel to generate a plurality of output data files, and storing the plurality of output data files in a memory. The method of partitioning the circuit into groups of netlists includes forming the groups of netlists to be simulated in a single instruction multiple data environment, and forming the groups of netlists according to proximity of variations of statistical parameters of the circuit.