Posts from May 2025 (28)

Team Ratings for Week 11

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 80 matches played, 51 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 63.8%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Week 11

Here are the predictions for Week 11. 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.

From RNZ

New Zealand has rates of sexual violence against teenagers above the global average, ahead of even a badly afflicted Australia, according to new research.

and from the Herald

New Zealand has rates of sexual violence against teenagers above the global average, more than even badly afflicted Australia, according to new research.

The research paper is here, and I would guess there’s a press release out there somewhere. The Science Media Centre commentary is here.

The first thing to note is that the new research tells us absolutely nothing new about rates of sexual violence against teenagers in either New Zealand or Australia.  Like many studies producing global estimates, the research takes the numbers already available for various countries around the world and tries to combine them.  For countries without reliable data this can give us new information, but not for countries that already have reasonable-quality data.  So, the research tells us what we already know about the problem in New Zealand — it is bad.

The second thing to note is that while the number for New Zealand is higher than the number for Australia, the difference is much less than the study’s uncertainty estimate (‘margin of error’). The real conclusion is that NZ is about as bad as Australia on this front.  In fact, if you look at the figure for women currently aged 20-24 it’s actually lower in NZ (24.5%) than in Australia (25.4%).  The fact that Australia is just as bad shouldn’t reduce our concern about sexual violence in New Zealand; international comparisons don’t help for telling us whether we have a problem.

Doing a global study like this is useful to the extent that you can get estimates for countries without good data. The researchers tried to correct for various biases, such as narrow definitions of sexual violence in some of the component studies, different age limits, not including boys as victims, and whether the questions were asked face-to-face or not.  They didn’t have any data in some places, and so patched in estimates from nearby countries.  It’s not clear that this all worked.

If you look at the estimates from across the world there are some surprising numbers.  Wars are generally recognised as bad for all sorts of violence, but the number for New Zealand women currently aged 20-24 (25.4%) is substantially higher than the Democratic Republic of the Congo (17.6%) and South Sudan (20.9%) which have recently suffered actual civil wars, and Yemen (12.7%), which is currently in one.  It’s notable that this low estimate is identical for Yemen and Syria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Qatar, Palestine, Libya, Iran, and Iraq — it’s an example of using data from one country when you don’t have data for another. These surprising results come with very wide uncertainty intervals: Yemen’s is 3.8% to 30.7%, and since most such intervals underestimate the true uncertainty the estimate basically amounts to  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There just isn’t much information about rates of sexual violence in many countries, so even if you cared about international comparisons, estimates for every country aren’t all that useful.  I’m a bit surprised the Lancet thought this one was informative enough to be worth publishing.  The best you can really say about the research paper is that it gives an opportunity to get headlines about this problem, and maybe potentially do something to reduce it.

As everyone has reported,  the number of sheep in New Zealand continues to go down, due to land being used for forestry and cattle farming.  The number of people continues to go up, because… you probably don’t need me to tell you where people come from.

As a result, the average number of sheep per person continues to fall

On the other hand, the median number of sheep per person has been at zero for quite a long time.  Some people have lots of sheep, but they are outliers.

After the US started being more unfriendly to visitors, there were analyses showing a sharp fall in visitor numbers “year on year”.  The NY Times has a story about changes in international travel showing it’s a bit more complicated than that:

During the second half of March and early April the year-on-year comparison showed a drop because last year’s data included the Easter peak and this year’s didn’t.  Some people jumped to conclusions about the drop, attributing it to visitors being worried about border control.  We can now see that it wasn’t.

The Times goes on to look at bookings for summer travel to the US, where there do seem to be real decreases.

Team Ratings for Week 13

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 59 matches played, 41 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 69.5%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Week 13

Here are the predictions for Week 13. 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 10

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 72 matches played, 42 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 58.3%.
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 Week 10

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 71 matches played, 46 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 64.8%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Week 10

Here are the predictions for Week 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.

There’s a Herald story about lotto wins.  It has a sub-headline ‘Luckiest’ Lotto stores in New Zealand

The story admits that Lotto has stopped pretending ‘lucky’ stores exist:

Certain Lotto stores have long been tipped as being “luckier” than others, although Lotto previously stopped promoting this in its press releases after it was criticised by academics for misleading customers.

As you’ll know, other academics (ahem)  also criticised them for misleading consumers.

The Herald then goes on to give us a list of ‘luckiest’ stores.