Posts from February 2017 (23)

As many of you may already know, the Department of Statistics runs the magnificent, biennial CensusAtSchool TataurangaKiTeKura, a national statistics literacy programme in schools supported by the Ministry of Education and Statistics New Zealand. Students aged 9 to 18 (Year 5 to Year 13) use digital devices to answer 35 online questions in English or te reo Māori about their lives and opinions. The aim is to turn them into data detectives – and turn them on to the value of statistics in everyday life.

Photo: Stephen Barker.  © The University of Auckland.

The latest edition of CAS starts next Tuesday, February 7, after the Waitangi Day holiday, and we’re hoping to get more than 50,000 Kiwi students taking part, which would be a record since CAS started in Aotearoa in 2003. Registrations have been open for a few weeks and are piling in, and I can see that so far we have 780 teachers from 507 Māori-language and English-medium schools registered – and there’s also a school from the Cook Islands, Tereora College. Check out if your local school is involved here.

CAS started as a pilot programme here, in 1990, run by Sharleen Forbes. As an international educational project, it started in the UK in 2000, and now runs in the UK, New Zealand, Ireland, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Japan, and the US. Good ole NZ, still punching above its weight in stats education.

There are questions common to all the censuses so comparisons can be made, but there are locally-specific questions as well – you can see the list of questions here. This year, we’re asking students about topics such as whether they get pocket money, and how much; whether there is there a limit on their screen time after school; and if anything in their lunchbox that day had been grown at home. In each census, students also carry out practical activities such as weighing the laptops and tablets they take to school and measuring each other’s heights, as in the picture of these Pakuranga College students. From mid-June, the data will be released for teachers to use in the classroom.

As this census is the only national picture of how kids are feeling, what they’re thinking and what they’re doing, journalists love the stories that flow from the results. The publicity isn’t only fascinating – it helps raise awareness of the value of statistics to everyday life. With any luck, some of the kids who do this year’s census will end up being our statisticians of tomorrow.

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has basically given up on its candidate Alzheimer’s treatment, solanezumab (they’re still trying for one special genetically-driven subtype).

In a Herald story in 2015, the lead was

The first drug that slows down Alzheimer’s disease could be available within three years after trials showed it prevented mental decline by a third.

That was clearly overstating the case. Previous trials has failed to find the benefits they were looking for; this report was based on hints of benefit in a new trial earlier in the disease — a reasonable hope, but nothing like good evidence.

Last year, the company changed the ‘primary endpoint’ of the trial — the definition of what they were hoping to find. That’s usually not a good sign. And it wasn’t.  The company now says

there was no scientific basis to believe they would find a “meaningful benefit to patients with prodomal Alzheimer’s disease.”

Alzheimer’s is an especially difficult condition to research, in part because scientists don’t have a good handle on exactly what’s going wrong. Solanezumab binds to the amyloid protein that causes plaques, enabling it to be removed. That makes a lot of sense as an approach — it wasn’t successful this time. Finding that out was very time-consuming and expensive, because the only way is to run large, long-term randomised trials in people with early-stage disease.

For some drugs and some conditions, you can find out about effectiveness easily: we know Sudafed works for nasal congestion, because it’s obvious. We knew penicillin worked in septicaemia and pneumococcal pneumonia , because of all the people who didn’t die. It took a lot more effort to learn than penicillin works for preventing rheumatic fever. And studies in chronic, slow-moving diseases are far harder than that.

Solanezumab is safe, unlike some previous drugs with similar mechanisms.  It’s an example of a treatment for a serious disease that would have been available years ago if it weren’t for FDA regulation. Millions of people with early dementia could have bought it and used it. It still wouldn’t work.

• Maps as a research communication tool: a research project into the relationship between rateable value and sales value for homes in Milwaukee, and who ends up overpaying their rates.

• From the ‘no way this could go wrong’ department. New York is to collect drop-off as well as pick-up times and locations for taxis, Ubers, Lyfts, etc. And the data appear to be subject to freedom of information requests.

• Cathy O’Neil (mathbabe.org, Weapons of Math Destruction) is now a Bloomsberg View columnist

• Petrol price margins are in the news again, so I’ll remind everyone again that MBIE collects data and draws pretty graphs. (They aren’t so good on regional variation or discounting, but it’s still useful reality-based information).

• No, toast isn’t going to kill you: Michelle Dickinson, David Spiegelhalter.

• Sherlock Holmes opined “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data”. As Kaiser Fung shows, this doesn’t apply to complex data-gathering tasks such as counting the number of heads on a movie poster.

• What happens when you make a major change to the definition of an important official statistic.

• One of the minor aspects of Donald Trump’s awful executive order is collection and reporting of crimes committed by immigrants. Whether this was a mistake for him depends on how good people are at denominators: immigrants commit less crime on average than people born in the US, and there are fewer immigrants than people think there are, so the number will be smaller than people should expect. But that takes maths. Or in the US, math.