August 8, 2011

Stat of the Week Competition: August 6-12 2011

Each week, we would like to invite readers of Stats Chat to submit nominations for our Stat of the Week competition and be in with the chance to win an iTunes voucher.

Here’s how it works:

  • Anyone may add a comment on this post to nominate their Stat of the Week candidate before midday Friday August 12 2011.
  • Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
  • The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of August 6-12 2011 inclusive.
  • Quote the statistic, when and where it was published and tell us why it should be our Stat of the Week.

Next Monday at midday we’ll announce the winner of this week’s Stat of the Week competition, and start a new one.

The fine print:

  • Judging will be conducted by the blog moderator in liaison with staff at the Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland.
  • The judges’ decision will be final.
  • The judges can decide not to award a prize if they do not believe a suitable statistic has been posted in the preceeding week.
  • Only the first nomination of any individual example of a statistic used in the NZ media will qualify for the competition.
  • Employees (other than student employees) of the Statistics department at the University of Auckland are not eligible to win.
  • The person posting the winning entry will receive a $20 iTunes voucher.
  • The blog moderator will contact the winner via their notified email address and advise the details of the $20 iTunes voucher to that same email address.
  • The competition will commence Monday 8 August 2011 and continue until cancellation is notified on the blog.

This week’s competition is now closed, the winner is announced here.

Nominations

  • avatar

    Statistic: Low hand-hygiene rate putting patients at risk

    Forty per cent of health workers fail to clean their hands as often as they should, putting patients at increased risk of harmful infections, hospital audits show.
    Source: New Zealand Herald
    Date: August 8 2011

    This stat falls into the “eew!” department, I think. It’s more than 150 years since doctors who advocated hand-washing to prevent cross-infection were ridiculed, but you would think that today’s health workers would have got the message by now …

    13 years ago

  • avatar

    Statistic: “As part of her project, Dr Swift sent questionnaires to 3400 year-9 and 10 students, both boys and girls, from 23 schools in the Tasman police district.”

    “97.6 per cent of those boys and girls said they had been involved in peer-related violence”

    “She had interviewed a 12-year-old girl who looked 18”

    “Girls of all ethnicity that are not white talked about this”
    Source: The Marlborough Express
    Date: 08/08/2011

    The article does not state the proportion of the 3400 students who actually completed the questionnaires.

    Whilst focussing on girls, the article does not state the % of girls who had been involved in ‘peer-related violence’. The closest definition of this type of violence is ” to get a girl to the ground and put the boots to her and do damage to her face.” – I don’t think this would have been the question that 97.6% of the students said ‘yes’ to.

    Who judged that the 12-year-old girl looked 18? Was this measured objectively?

    I don’t believe ‘white’ is an ethnicity.

    13 years ago

  • avatar
    Sakshi Kalani

    Statistic: “The report discloses that the top decile (top 10 per cent of wealthy in terms of numbers) have 52 per cent of the country’s wealth, compared with only 25 per cent of the country’s income.”

    Original Source:
    The Ministry of Social Development’s “Household incomes in New Zealand: Trends in indicators of inequality and hardship 1982 to 2010”
    Source: The New Zealand Herald: ‘Brian Gaynor: It shouldn’t be just the rich getting richer’
    Date: Aug 6, 2011

    It is a common belief that rich people are rich because they are more hard-working than the poor. This does not necessarily hold true and this quote does a good job of dispelling this myth.

    How ‘rich’ someone is depends on the income they earn as well as the ‘wealth’ they have (i.e. the ownership of assets in a society). Inherited wealth, that helps the rich stay rich and advance in society, is often ignored by those who question the integrity of the poor, forgetting that they started-off more disadvantaged than their richer peers.

    This quote suggests that the top 10 percent of the rich are wealthy not only because of the income they earn but that the wealth they inherit also contributes significantly to making them as rich as they are.

    13 years ago

  • avatar
    Phil Doyle

    Statistic: “Debt isn’t the reason for cutting public services, it’s the excuse”
    Source: KeepNZworking – Public Service Association
    Date: Advertisement – Sunday Star Times 7/8/2011

    I think that this campaign should win ‘stat of the week’ with its use very simple but powerful data representation to tell a story. The couldn’t-be-simpler bar-chart dominates the page. The ad allows the reader to make their won conclusions.

    I notice on the KeepingNZworking web-page that the campaign also uses other data displays to continue the story.

    My only gripe with the ad is that I had to work quite hard to find the source and check the data for myself.

    13 years ago

  • avatar
    David Hood

    Statistic: 17% of Fibre Optic network damage due to squirrels.
    Source: The Atlantic
    Date: Aug 8, 2011

    The threat of squirrels to the world is vastly underrated. There are ongoing squirrel based conflicts in the media all the time (April’s was a squirrel disabling police cars).

    13 years ago

  • avatar
    Nicolai Pedersen

    Statistic: Want your child to love veggies? Start early. Very early. Research shows that what a woman eats during pregnancy not only nourishes her baby in the womb, but may shape food preferences later in life.

    At 21 weeks after conception, a developing baby weighs about as much as a can of Coke — and he or she can taste it, too. Still in the womb, the growing baby gulps down several ounces of amniotic fluid daily. That fluid surrounding the baby is actually flavored by the foods and beverages the mother has eaten in the last few hours.

    “Things like vanilla, carrot, garlic, anise, mint — these are some of the flavors that have been shown to be transmitted to amniotic fluid or mother’s milk,” says Julie Mennella, who studies taste in infants at the Monell Chemical Senses Center. In fact, Mennella says there isn’t a single flavor they have found that doesn’t show up in utero. Her work has been published in the journal Pediatrics.

    The Scent Of Amniotic Fluid

    To determine if flavors are passed from the mother to the the baby via the amniotic fluid, researchers gave women garlic capsules or sugar capsules before taking a routine sample of their amniotic fluid — and then asked a panel of people to smell the samples.

    “And it was easy,” says Mennella. “They could pick out the samples easily from the women who ate garlic.” The sense of taste is actually 90-percent smell, she added, so they knew just from the odor that the babies could taste it.

    Mennella says she got the idea from dairy farmers, who in the 1960s and 70s were doing research on how the diet of the dairy cow impacted the flavor of the milk. She says cows that graze on wild garlic and onion, or who live in stinking barns, produce milk with distinct flavors.

    But Mennella says that not only is the amniotic fluid and breast milk in humans flavored by food just like cows, but memories of these flavors are formed even before birth. That could result in preferences for these foods or odors for a lifetime. In other words, if you eat broccoli while you’re pregnant, there’s a much better chance your baby will like broccoli.

    Mennella says this had already been observed in rabbits, so she decided to test it in human babies — with carrots. Pregnant women were divided into three groups. One group was asked to drink carrot juice every day during their pregnancy, another during breastfeeding and a third to avoid carrots completely. Then when the children began to eat solid food, researchers fed them cereal made either with water, or carrot juice and videotaped their responses.

    Things like vanilla, carrot, garlic, anise, mint — these are some of the flavors that have been shown to be transmitted to amniotic fluid or mother’s milk.

    – Julie Mennella, who studies taste in infants at the Monell Chemical Senses Center
    Introducing Babies To Food Culture

    “And just like the European rabbit, the babies who had experienced carrot in amniotic fluid or mother’s milk ate more of the carrot-flavored cereal,” says Mennella. “And when we analyzed the video tapes they made less negative faces while eating it.”

    This makes a lot of evolutionary sense, says Mennella. Since mothers tend to feed their children what they eat themselves, it is nature’s way of introducing babies to the foods and flavors that they are likely to encounter in their family and their culture.

    “Each individual baby is having their own unique experience, it’s changing from hour to hour, from day to day, from month to month,” says Mennella. “As a stimulus it’s providing so much information to that baby about who they are as a family and what are the foods their family enjoys and appreciates.”

    That very idea got Matty Lau thinking ‘how is it that kids in other cultures eat foods that are spicy, bitter, or have pungent flavors?’ She’s a Chinese-American who had a baby in late July and recalls growing up eating foods most American kids she knows would never touch.

    “My parents are great cooks — and so they’ll cook things like preserved oysters. I always wondered how it was that I was able to grow up eating bitter vegetables like kale and mustard greens and things like ginger,” says Lau.

    Instilling A Love Of Chinese Flavors Before Birth

    While she was pregnant, she consciously tried to provide her baby with the flavors she loves from her native Chinese cuisine. She the hopes that when her baby is older, it will share her love of flavorful food.

    “I was really concerned that my child enjoy food as much as the rest of my family,” says Lau.

    University of Florida taste researcher Linda Bartoshuk says babies are born with very few hard and fast taste preferences. She says Mennella’s work shows that very early exposures to flavors – both before and after birth — make it more likely that children will accept a wide variety of flavors. And when those early exposures are reinforced over a lifetime, Bartoshuk thinks they might have far-reaching implications, even promoting good eating.

    “To what extent can we make a baby eat a healthier diet by exposing it to all the right flavors — broccoli, carrots, lima beans, et cetera? Could we do that or not? My guess is we could,” says Bartoshuk.

    Menella acknowledges that many toddlers will still make a sour face when given broccoli, no matter how much the mother ate while pregnant. And maybe they will never like it. But she says parents should keep exposing young children to these flavors because they can eventually learn to like them.
    Source: npr (National Public Radio)
    Date: 5 August 2011

    Whilst I realize, this doesnt qualify to enter the competition, its an interesting experiment..even if they only give few details of the experiment design. They have a control group but that about it as far as information in the article, so Im sure there is room for improvement of the experiment design..

    13 years ago

  • avatar

    Statistic: Youth unemployment and cuts to apprenticeships.
    Source: John Pagani, Stuff.co.nz
    Date: 9 August 2011

    This is the most misleading use of a statistic I’ve seen this week.

    In the midst of extensive discussion of the rise in youth unemployment starting around Q4 2008, Pagani points to changes in apprenticeship funding as a policy shift that could have generated the change (arguing against changes in the youth minimum wage as having been the cause). He writes:
    “If it wasn’t the removal of the youth minimum wage that caused youth unemployment to increase, then it would have to have been caused by something else that happened around the same time.

    One other big change was the a sharp fall in young people getting skills for work.

    In December 2008 there were 133,300 people in industry training. By the end of last year, there were 108,000. ”

    You could be forgiven for assuming that about 25,000 kids had been kicked out of apprenticeships – it sure looks like he’s referring to youths. All the other discussion is on youth unemployment. But the number he’s citing is overall enrolment in training and apprenticeships. And the drop in youth enrolment in training – about 4,000 – is nowhere near large enough to provide a plausible alternative explanation.

    13 years ago

  • avatar
    MJ Frew

    Statistic: Workplace sustainability survey. 27% of employees would recommend their workplace if it were environmentally irresponsible.
    Source: Dominion Post
    Date: 08.08.11

    Two reasons:

    First, and generally:
    The fact that all http://www.shapenz.org.nz surveys are commissioned by NZ Business Council for Sustainable Development surely means the responders are primarily of a sustainable development persuasion.

    The fact that Fairfax have attached their name to the surveys means they are not willing to address “robustness” in their reporting of them.

    Surely these surveys are a classic example of biased research, and accordingly, manufacturing “news”.

    Second, and specifically
    27% of employees would still recommend their workplace if it were environmentally irresponsible.

    This just cannot be right. It must be a result of those not of an overt green persuasion bombing the survey because of its obvious bias.

    13 years ago