October 11, 2018
Briefly
- How good is ‘good’? YouGov looks at how various words rate in the UK. “Average” gets 5 on a 10-point scale, which is more positive than I think it would rate here, though they didn’t ask about “a bit average” or “pretty average”
- Nepal introduced a ban on internet porn. It cut Nepal’s traffic to porn site xHamster by about 50%. For about two weeks. (not NSFW apart from being about porn)
- The UK has a Statistics Authority to remind government and parliament not to misuse official statistics. This week, in correspondence with the Department for Education: “figures were presented in such a way as to misrepresent changes in school funding.
In the tweet, school spending figures were exaggerated by usinga truncated axis, and by not adjusting for per pupil spend.” (Note: using nominal, aggregate figures rather than real, per capita figures to report spending and truncating bar chart axes are just as wrong here as in the UK)
- Seek.co.nz are promoting their guide to salaries on Twitter again. This is based on advertised salaries/wages for positions advertised on Seek, not actual money paid to any group — and, for example, I’d be pleasantly surprised if “Kitchen and Sandwich Hands” actually averaged over $41,000 annual wages.
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 »