March 6, 2017
Briefly
- “Does air pollution kill 40,000 each year people in the UK?”, from David Spiegelhalter
- Phil Cook on “99% sugar free” beer (me, last year, on a similar topic)
- Newshub had a story about the Accommodation Survey not specifically excluding people in hotels who were there as emergency housing. Nerds across the NZ political spectrum (eg, me, Keith Ng, and Eric Crampton) were unimpressed with this story. Eric actually wrote a blog post, so I’ll refer you there for more details.
- Russell Brown wrote about the overuse of workplace drug tests that aren’t tests for impairment.
- Ars Technica shows you can write about lab-science discoveries relevant to health without leaving out all the cautions and caveats.
- A research paper in PLoS One shows that newspapers write about news. That is, they write `breakthrough’ stories about new treatments but give a lot less prominence to later studies that are less favorable. Interestingly, this didn’t apply to ‘lifestyle’ stories, where ‘coffee is Good/Bad this week’ can always find a place.
- The Herald had a story last week about “The $2m+ price tag for a top decile Auckland education.” In contrast to their story two years ago, this doesn’t make any attempt to estimate the premium for the top school zones. That is, if a family with school-age kids doesn’t live in the ‘Double Grammar Zone’ and pay $2 million for a house, they’ll still have to live somewhere and pay something for a house. In the 2015 story, the cost of a house just outside a top school zone was about 20% lower than just inside. Even that probably overestimates the school premium, but the total cost of a house obviously does.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
And what about the families who buy into the d-grammar zone and send their kids elsewhere e.g. private school.
I don’t think it’s wrong for a journalist to ask the minister about official statistics that come under her interest. The minister only had to say something sensible and “I leave the finer details to the wisdom of stasNZ”.
After battling through trying to understand how StatsNZ calculated “Alcohol Available for Consumption” based on what they reported (~2000s) and e-mailed me, I don’t see any harm in trying to make official statistics as transparent as possible.
7 years ago