July 17, 2025
Briefly
- Stuff has Eye-watering new food price stats just revealed: Price of butter has nearly doubled in a year. If you read a bit further it turns out “Butter surged to $8.60 per 500g, a 46.5% annual increase”. A 50% increase isn’t doubling. If it had doubled it would be $11.80 per 500g, not $8.60. Those are importantly different numbers.
- The Royal Statistical Society has given out its annual “Statistical Excellence in Journalism” awards: Some of the winners: How many toddlers and babies are living in temporary accommodation in the UK? and The rise in reported maternal mortality rates in the US is largely due to a change in measurement and an interactive tool linking information about members of the House of Lords, and about how a crime victimisation figure excludes stalking, sexual assault, and some other crimes
- To add to all the rugby here, Achim Zeileis and colleagues have probabilistic forecasts for the UEFA Women’s Euro 2025 competition
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 »