July 16, 2012

Stat of the Week Competition: July 14 – 20 2012

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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 July 20 2012.
  • Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
  • The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of July 14 – 20 2012 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.
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Rachel Cunliffe is the co-director of CensusAtSchool and currently consults for the Department of Statistics. Her interests include statistical literacy, social media and blogging. See all posts by Rachel Cunliffe »

Nominations

  • avatar
    Tony Cooper

    Statistic: Women are smarter than men – and Kiwis can prove it
    Source: New Zealand Herald
    Date: 16 July 2012

    The headline bears no relationship to the statistics.

    I haven’t seen that data so I can’t comment fully. But here’s what I suspect is going on:

    Firstly, there’s no “proof.” There doesn’t even appear to be any statistical significance. A number of countries was studied of of these just 3 found that women scored marginally more than men.

    So the result is not significant over all countries and it is not even significant in NZ because it wasn’t randomly selected out of all the countries involved.

    My guess is that the emphasis of Flynn’s finding when he released then is that women are catching up to or equaling men and that the difference is now insignificant. But the media noticed that in a few countries the scores were marginally higher for women than men and this became the headline.

    12 years ago

  • avatar
    Nick Iversen

    Statistic: Testing to the enth degree is a waste of time
    Source: TVNZ
    Date: 19 July 2012

    The AA did a SINGLE sample test on each of two different fuels and declared that one fuel was 8% less efficient than the other.

    This disagrees with the industry standard figure of 3% difference. Obviously (to a statistician) the difference may be due to chance and the small sample size.

    But here’s the weird bit: the AA say that testing “to the enth degree” will still produce the 8% figure.

    In other words the AA says that a sample size of 1 will produce the same results as a sample size of n.

    Good one, AA.

    12 years ago

  • avatar
    Nick Iversen

    Statistic: Half of New Zealand Adults are lazy
    Source: New Zealand Herald
    Date: 20 July 2012

    There are a few interesting things about this story.

    Firstly, the print story version word “lazy” was toned down to “sloth-like” for the web version.

    Secondly, the Herald published a list of URLs to other versions of the story around the world. I thought that was quite good.

    Thirdly, The Lancet has an interesting series of articles (with the Olympics coming up) on physical activity and they are FREE to download. The editorial is titled “Chariots of fries.” It’s about the McDonalds, Cadbury’s, and Coca Cola involvement in the games.

    Fourthly, the survey uses self-reporting statistics and we know that these are unreliable. New Zealanders tend to be more honest than other folk and this often means that we end up in survey rankings at places that do not reflect our true position.

    Fifthly, the Herald picks out Malta as the most inactive country at 72% but omits the salient fact that a 95% confidence interval for this figure is 31 to 97.

    12 years ago