Posts filed under General (328)

A report by research firm Strategy Analytics has estimated that Korean electronics giant Samsung took a whopping 94.7% share of the $US5.3 billion first quarter operating profits for Android handset sales. Whichever way you look at it, currently Samsung is the Android platform of choice.

The Register notes that the same report notes that Android has 43% of the smartphone market share.

• Via @felixsalmon, bad graphics moving into baseball

• Twitter Hate Map aims to show where racist or homophobic tweets occur.  It tries to correct for the usual denominator problem, but there just aren’t enough tweets from some parts of the country

• Early this morning, the moderately accurate pageview counter on WordPress ticked over to quarter of a million page views on StatsChat.  It’s only a small milestone — someone like Ben Goldacre gets more hits than that every time he tweets — but at least we’re world famous in New Zealand. Web metrics site Alexa.com estimates that 0.000066% of internet users have seen StatsChat!

Team Ratings for Round 10

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 10, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 72 matches played, 45 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 62.5%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 10

Here are the predictions for Round 10. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 14

This year the predictions have been slightly changed with the help of a student, Joshua Dale. The home ground advantage now is different when both teams are from the same country to when the teams are from different countries. The basic method is described on my Department home page.

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 14, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 81 matches played, 54 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 66.7%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 14

Here are the predictions for Round 14. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

• Two infographic-design sites: Stamen, and Feltron
• Two collections: Vizualize and Visualizing.org
• Rigorous, controlled study of hundreds of volunteers has revealed a dramatic trend toward nothing that will make you take better care of yourself, or alter your behavior in a meaningful sense, thus leading us to conclude we’re all wasting our time here: America’s Finest News Source
• Two genetics stories: Is there a gene for oversimplistic analysis? and Everyone is related 1000 years back

Stuff has a headline “Shoplifters cost $1b as staff theft soars“.  Let’s think about what we would need to know to interpret this number, and what we actually get told.

First, we note that nowhere in the story is there any evidence or informed opinion presented that staff theft has increased, just that it is high.  Also,  the $1 billion figure is fairly weak — the Retailers Association of New Zealand estimates $2 million per day, which is rounded up to $750 million per year, and then to ‘up to $1 billion’.

We don’t get told how this number is estimated: is it actual reports of theft, or imbalances between stock bought and stock sold, or just a impression from the retailers? Is it based on a representative survey, on informed opinion, or on some sort of bogus poll?  Is the cost based on actual wholesale costs paid by the retailer or is it inflated to include the anticipated retail price if the stuff had been sold? Does it include all retailers, or just members of the Retailers Association of New Zealand? Don’t wholesalers also have this problem?  We might hope that the Retailers Association website had some more details, but its press release and media log pages only go up to May 1.

If we were to stipulate the number for the purposes of analysis, does it sound plausible?  Unfortunately, as part of Statistics New Zealand’s ongoing endeavour to deliver a better web experience they are doing maintenance on their servers today, so the quality of my sources may not be up to standard. Still, the University of Auckland career planning site says that retail employs about 265 000 people in NZ.  If half the theft is by staff, that’s about $1900 average per year — and if, say, as many as 75% of them are honest, that would be about $7500 for the others, which seems a bit high.

The other half of the billion dollars, attributed to shoplifting rather than staff theft, would be an average of  $2000/year if spread over  5% of the population, which also seems a bit high.  Maybe I’m just naive and innocent about this, but the worst incident quoted in the story was $20000 by four people; $5000 each, and the next worst was $1100 dollars —  you’d think there would be better examples.

The same University of Auckland page says gross revenue in retail is $65 billion/year, so $1billion would be 1.5% of that. The Retail Association has a report (p15) saying that net margins are about 2-3% averaged over the industry, so if the $1 billion were real costs, it would mean the industry is losing more than a third of its profits to theft. You’d think that would be the headline, if it were true.

The information content in this video (7m38s) from PBS’ Off Book series is on the low side but its still an interesting watch, if only for a large collection of graphic designers’ appealing but appalling infographics.

• Forbes has a profile of a soon-to-be billionaire statistician, Dennis Gillings.  He basically invented the commercial clinical research model, and his company, Quintiles, is going public. 
• The New York Times has a story about data(!) and science(!) being used to modify Hollywood scripts.  As Matt Yglesias points out, the studios can’t really take it that seriously or they’d be paying more than $20 000 for the service
• Some Big Data backlash, from Quartz. Most data isn’t big, most data isn’t very good quality, and most businesses are in more need of expertise on data analysis than on large-scale computing.

The news media is covering an apparent public backlash over the price of reintroduced Georgie Pie pies.

Is $4.50 for a steak and cheese pie too expensive?

It wasn’t easy to track down past prices for Georgie Pie pies, but thanks to an old ad on YouTube, I found out that in 1993, small Georgie Pie steak and cheese pies cost $1 and large ones $2.

It’s not clear what size the new pies will be. However, if we use the
Consumer Price Index to get an idea of what those 1993 prices would be today, we get $1.60 for a small pie and $3.20 for a large.

Team Ratings for Round 9

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 9, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 64 matches played, 41 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 64.06%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 9

Here are the predictions for Round 9. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.