Sometimes you don’t need to do the maths
On Friday, Stuff had a story about 10 pairs of twins in the same school in Wellington.
At this point I was going to break out the Stats New Zealand website and find out how many pairs of twins of school age there are in the country, and work how many schools you’d expect to have these sorts of numbers. But when I went back to search for the story I found
- A Herald story from last September, with 14 sets of twins in a Dunedin school
- A Stuff story from last October, with 4 sets, in Timaru
- A Stuff story from April, with 9 sets, in Manurewa
- A Stuff story from June, with 3 sets in the same class, Palmerston Nth
- A Stuff story from August, with 5 sets of twins and two of triplets, in Timaru
That’s just the past year, since the stories go on back in the past, and even stretch to other countries: a Stuff story from June was about 24 sets of twins in an Illinois school.
At some point it must be hard to keep pretending this is a surprise.
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 »
My wife has a photograph of eleven sets of twins at the small primary school of Te Hapara, Gisborne, taken in the 1950s. Can’t check on the roll then unfortunately.
11 years ago