December 16, 2013
Stat of the Summer Competition: December 14 2013 – February 28 2014
This summer, we would like to invite readers of Stats Chat to submit nominations for our Stat of the Summer competition and be in with the chance to win a copy of “Beautiful Evidence” by Edward Tufte:
Here’s how it works:
- Anyone may add a comment on this post to nominate their Stat of the Summer candidate before midday Friday February 28 2014.
- Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
- The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of December 14 2013 – February 28 2014 inclusive.
- Quote the statistic, when and where it was published and tell us why it should be our Stat of the Summer.
On Monday 3 March 2014 at midday we’ll announce the winner of the Stat of the Summer competition, and restart the weekly competition.
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.
- Only the first nomination of any individual example of a statistic used in the NZ media will qualify for the competition.
- Individual posts on Stats Chat are just the opinions of their authors, who can criticise anyone who they feel deserves it, but the Stat of the Week award involves the Department of Statistics more officially. For that reason, we will not award Stat of the Week for a statistic coming from anyone at the University of Auckland outside the Statistics department. You can still nominate and discuss them, but the nomination won’t be eligible for the prize.
- 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 copy of “Beautiful Evidence” by Edward Tufte.
- The blog moderator will contact the winner via their notified email address and request their postal address for the book to be sent to.
- The competition will commence Saturday 14 December 2013 and continue until midday Friday 28 February 2014.
Statistic: Heat gone out of climate claims
Source: Herald on Sunday
Date: 5 Jan 2014
This is an example of cherry picking your data to “prove” a hypothesis.
Rodney claims that the fact that sea ice is building up in parts of Antarctica means that global warming is “nutty.”
Let’s look at the data from NASA’s Earth Observatory. http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/167025main_tempanom_still.jpg is a good chart showing warming from 1880 to 2005. We see that warming is extensive over the whole planet – there’s no doubt whatsoever that the planet has been warming.
But there are still a few areas where it has cooled and a region in Antarctica is one of them. So if you want to cherry pick an area of cooling it’s easy to do.
The area where the ship was trapped is directly south of Tasmania on the coast of Antarctica. It’s a bit difficult to tell the colour but it looks quite pale, if not bluish, so it’s an area that hasn’t warmed. So no surprise that ice may increase there due to natural variation.
As for Mr Hide’s claim that “it hasn’t warmed since 1997” which he doesn’t give a reference for, that’s more cherry picking. In any trending time series with variability you can always cherry pick a period where the trend doesn’t apply.
The IPCC points this out “Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends.” (summary report http://www.climate2013.org/images/uploads/WGI_AR5_SPM_brochure.pdf). (Note: they show that January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record.)
However, if you look at the data (download from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/) you will find that the heat anomaly was 0.46 degrees in 1997 and 0.57 in 2012 – that’s an INCREASE. And a regression line from 1997 to 2012 has a POSITIVE slope of 0.0078 degrees per year (not quite statistically significant t = 1.86 but still POSITIVE). Looks clear to me that there has been warming since 1997.
The Urban Dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=plonker) gives this example for the definition of the word plonker “You are such a plonker, Rodney.” He, he.
10 years ago
Statistic: The price of installing a solar system on your house has gone done 343% since 2008.
Source: New Zealand Herald
Date: 13 January 2014
The CEO of Solar City gets a bit confused while describing the fall in solar system costs. According to his statistic a system that he would have charged $20,000 for in 2008, he will now pay the householder $48,600 just for the privilege of installing a solar system on their roof.
10 years ago
Statistic: Census 2013 figures show that women aged 25-49 – considered the prime time for settling down – outnumber men in the same category in Tauranga.
For every 100 women in that age group, there are 87 men – meaning statistically speaking, 13 women will miss out on a partner.
Source: Bay of Plenty Times
Date: 18 January 2014
The kind of cheap headline thrills that have little bearing on real life, and assumes so much, including that one’s partner must be in the same age range; that one’s partner will be found in the same Census area; that one is heterosexual, and so on and so on. (The paper acknowledges a few factors aren’t taken into account, but still uses the stat to claim a “man drought”. And who considers 25-49 “the prime time for settling down”? Sources please.)
10 years ago
Statistic: Food in Guinea, Gambia, Chad and Iran costs people 2 times more than other consumer goods, making those the most expensive countries for citizens to buy food
Source: NZ Herald
Date: 20 January 2014
In this morning’s Herald we are told by Brendan Manning and Patrice Dougan
that “NZ ranks 23rd equal with Israel when it comes to healthy eating.” They provide a link to a report produced by Oxfam: http://media.nzherald.co.nz/webcontent/document/pdf/20144/goodenoughtoeatmediabrieffinalversionenglish.pdf
I don’t know where to start….
In spite of the report stating “[the report] is the first of its kind”, the article insists on implying several times that New Zealand’s position has changed (“The cost of food and unhealthy eating habits pushed New Zealand down the list… New Zealand has fallen well behind Australia and most of Europe in a new report ranking the healthiest places to eat in the world…. New Zealand also fell behind the United Kingdom (13), Japan (21) and the United States (21).”).
The article also says of New Zealand, “Ranked on obesity, only 13 countries out of 125 scored worse” yet provides no evidence of this and the report it links to does not have the full (or indeed, any) rankings.
It also says, “Food in Guinea, Gambia, Chad and Iran costs people 2 times more than other consumer goods, making those the most expensive countries for citizens to buy food.” What food? What consumer goods? Yesterday I bought a pie ($4.50) and a battery ($1.50). Therefore, in New Zealand, food costs 3 times more than other consumer goods. The only reference to this in the report is the statement, “the only countries where food is more expensive are Guinea (100 points) and The Gambia (97 points)” and Iran doesn’t get a mention at all.
To be fair to the journalists (although, why should we?) they are simply repeating mistakes from the Oxfam website (http://www.oxfam.org.nz/news/new-zealand-beaten-australia-oxfam-s-new-global-food-table) where it states, “Food in Guinea, The Gambia, Chad and Iran costs people two-and-a-half times more than other consumer goods, making those the most expensive countries for citizens to buy food.”
The only data provided by Oxfam is the report linked to by the Herald, which contains no rankings. The Oxfam statement does claim that “New Zealand also fell behind the United Kingdom (13), Japan (21) and the United States (21)”, and it is perhaps here where the Herald got it’s information. A pity it repeated it unquestioningly…
10 years ago
Statistic: The “tidal wave of cancer”
This might not count as a statistic for the purposes of the competition, but is interesting in light of your recent coverage of how the Herald reports various things.
Apparently the 2014 World Cancer Report warns of a “tidal wave of cancer”.
The Herald’s reporting focuses on alcohol and smoking (with a mention of “highly processed food).
Compare with this report from cnn, which paints a rather different picture:
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/04/health/who-world-cancer-report/
The focus is wider than alcohol/smoking:
“The report said about half of all cancers were preventable and could have been avoided if current medical knowledge was acted upon. The disease could be tackled by addressing lifestyle factors, such as smoking, alcohol consumption, diet and exercise; adopting screening programs; or, in the case of infection-triggered cancers such as cervical and liver cancers, through vaccines.”
The cnn report also discusses the impact of an aging population, quoting an expert who states:
“Since we have an aging population, the cancer rate increases, and if you adjust for the aging of America, the cancer rate is declining notably.”
Regardless of the reporting of the causes of the “tidal wave of cancer”, it seems to be a rather unhelpful and uninformative turn of phrase – but one pretty much guaranteed to be repeated in headlines.
A “tidal wave” tends to refer to an unusually large wave – but we’re talking about something growing at an alarming pace here, not a one-off event that goes in and out. A better analogy would perhaps be to refer to rapidly rising sea levels.
Source: NZ Herald
Date: 5-2-2014
The phrase “tidal wave of cancer” (for which the Herald is not responsible) is an unhelpful way to try and describe the increase in cancer rates in question.
In addition, the Herald’s explanation is oddly focused on alcohol and smoking, doesn’t mention the role of an aging population, and gives something of an inaccurate impression of what’s going on.
10 years ago
Statistic: Not a statistic as such, but the survey methodology detailed in this article made me laugh – a survey commissioned by an organisation with a vested interest in the result, asking a bunch of people who haven’t seen the movie a question framed in the most inflammatory language possible… and then holding the result up as an informative statistic.
Source: NZ Herald
Date: 19 February 2014
Great example of how NOT to conduct a survey…
10 years ago
Statistic: “Students do much better when they are internally assessed than when they are put under the pressure of an exam, a comprehensive Weekend Herald analysis of NCEA entries reveals.”
Source: NZ Herald
Date: 22-2-2014
The analysis doesn’t show what the Herald claims it does at the start of the piece.
The analysis shows that a higher proportion of students are graded achieved in internal assessment than external assessment.
There analysis does not show that the explanation for this is “the pressure of exams”. The rest of the article is filled with comments form experts which suggest that the picture is more complex than that. And none of the experts even refer to the “pressure” aspect of exams a factor.
The interactive graphic is fancy, but although we can select “all subjects”, we can’t see an overall result across all deciles or NCEA levels, which would be interesting to see.
It’s set up so we can eyeball the different results over the years from 2008-2012, but I’m not sure why that’s necessarily more interesting a comparison to make than eyeball decile compared to decile or level compared to level.
10 years ago