Posts written by Thomas Lumley (2646)

Alex Brae, who writes The Spinoff’s  daily news summary  (which you should sign up for), is having “Say something nice about a journalist” week.

As a site that mostly specialises in not saying nice things about journalists, we should probably do the same. Here’s a selection: I’ve probably forgotten some.

• Kirsty Johnston has had a wide range of important stories this year, and is a good reason for subscribing to the Herald.
• The Herald data journalism team: Chris Knox and Keith Ng (Keith also did some non-data-journalism in Hong Kong)
• Jamie Morton, the Herald science reporter, has reported a lot of interesting and important science.
• Farah Hancock has written some very good environmental and health stories for newsroom:  most recently, on the claims that a secret lab had found huge amounts of 1080 in some dead rats when Landcare didn’t, but also on pharmacies pushing homeopathic non-remedies, and on the measles outbreak
• Eloise Gibson, also of newsroom, for her coverage of Sir Ray Avery and how some of his inventions are progressing and being evaluated, and for stories about radiata pine (big carbon sink) and about water-quality modelling
• Joel MacManus had a very good piece at Stuff about algorithmic inputs to parole and sentencing

There’s another badly-distorted bar chart being circulated, approved by Simon Bridges. It purports to show median rents in September 2017 and now.  I’m not actually going to reproduce the chart. Instead, look at this chart from interest.co.nz for the period covering the time since the 2011 election (the red line).

Over this time, rents have increased.  The trend is reasonably consistent, not far from 5.5%/year; it might be accelerating a bit.

The purple line shows the trend from September 2017 to now; you can see for yourself how it compares to the previous trend, and decide whether that’s good or bad, and who is to blame.  Presenting just the purple line, without the context, would clearly be a bit misleading.

The green line shows the trend from September 2017 to now more as the latest National Party bar chart depicts it: the bar corresponding to current rents is 39% longer than the bar corresponding to 2017 rents, which would be correct if the current median rent were $556.  Presenting the green line as the trend is more than a bit misleading.

(PS: I don’t want to get heavily into the political fact-checking business, but if the other parties are circulating graphs like these ones I’d be happy annoyed enough to write about them, too)

Multiple people have pointed me to this picture, authorised by Simon Bridges.

It’s designed to look like a barchart, but if it were a barchart the dimensions of the colored bits would have a closer quantitative relation to the numbers being displayed. I’m going to assume the numbers are correct, because that’s the sort of thing people are more careful about. The bars aren’t.

To start with, the red bar is wider than the blue bar, which is a well-known graphical exaggeration technique. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is the heights.

On my laptop screen, I measured the red bar as 61% higher than the blue bar. But $2.23/L is only 16% higher than $1.91/L: that’s nearly a four-fold exaggeration of the difference

The dark red ‘Tax’ section of the red bar is 92% higher than the dark blue ‘Tax’ section of the blue bar, but $1.12 is only 29% higher than $0.87: more than a three-fold exaggeration.

If the heights were proportional to the numbers, as in a real barchart, it would look like this:

But wait, there’s more!  The blue bar is averaged over nine years of National government; the red bar is from last week.  That means the difference between the blue and red bars is partly inflation.  Over the time since September 2008, the RBNZ calculator says there has been 18% inflation.  We could say, as a rough approximation, that the data spread over nine years should get half the inflation applied.  Doing this would wipe out about half the difference between the blue and red bars, to give a comparison like this one:

There has been an increase in petrol prices due to tax increases under Labour. It’s not anywhere near as big as National’s graphic implies.

Q: Did you see that a harrowing study of 46,000 women shows hair dyes are heavily associated with cancer?

A: Harrowing?

Q: According to FastCompany.

A: That’s just the headline, though.

Q: “You know how you don’t see very old people with dyed hair? There may be a reason for that: Hair dye is heavily associated with cancer.”

A: That would be a heavy association.

Q: So is it true? There’s a link, even.

A: “We observed a 9% higher breast cancer risk for permanent dye use in all women but little to no associated risk for semipermanent or temporary dye use.”

Q: That’s… not as harrowing as I expected. Would that kill off a big fraction of hair-dye users?

A: Well, not very many men. For women the lifetime risk, which is the cumulative risk by the time you’re ‘very old’, is about 1 in 8. Increasing that by 9% would be about one extra breast cancer case per hundred hair-dye users.

Q:  So that’s not why very old people don’t use hair dye

A: There are probably other factors in play, yes.

Q: It’s just breast cancer, though. What about the effect on other cancers?

A: They didn’t look.  They mostly expected a risk on breast cancer, because of theories about ‘estrogen disruption’.

Q:  The story says the effects are bigger in Black women.

A: It looks like they probably are, though there’s a lot of uncertainty because Black women were only 10% of the study.

Q: Nothing about hair dye in men?

A: It was a study of sisters of people with breast cancer, so no men.

Q: Also too, no generalisability?

A: It’s not quite that bad, but, yes, it’s not clear how well this generalises. It could be that these women are more susceptible to hair dyes. Or not.

Q: What did previous research find?

A: It’s mixed. A big study in Black women in the 1990s didn’t find an association, but another current study did.

Q: So do we believe it?

A: We aren’t Black women who use hair dye. On several counts.

Q:

A: It certainly could be true, but the evidence isn’t overwhelming.

Newshub (and a lot of the British press) reported a couple of weeks ago “New blood test could detect breast cancer five years before symptoms“.

There’s a problem. Well, more than one problem.

First, the accuracy of the test is terrible.  It missed the majority of cancers and falsely diagnoses about twenty percent of the normal samples as having cancer.  There’s no way anyone would use a test like that.

Second, the story says “They estimate that, with a fully-funded development programme, the test might become available in the clinic in about four-to-five years.” If they had a working test, that might be true. But they don’t. So it isn’t.

And finally, all the breast cancer samples were taken from people who had already been diagnosed, so the idea that you’ll get early diagnosis this way is, at best, hopeful.

• ‘For example, the tweet “I saw him yesterday” is scored as 6 per cent toxic, but it suddenly skyrockets to 95 per cent for the comment “I saw his ass yesterday”.‘  The Register, talking about a paper from the University of Washington
• “Long-awaited cystic fibrosis drug could turn deadly disease into a manageable condition”. From the Washington Post. However, this drug will be priced at about NZ$485,000 for one year.  At that price, treating 500 people would cost about as much as Pharmac’s top six drugs, or as much as Pharmac currently spends on all cancer drugs. So let’s hope Pharmac can get a good deal.
• Janelle Shane, optical physicist and AI humorist, has written a book about AI. The title is one of a set of machine-generated pickup lines. “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You”
• “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users….we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.” The interesting part of this quote is the source: Page L, Brin S (1998) “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” (via Slate Money)

The 1 in 3 figure, as Tava Olsen reminded us on Twitter, is the proportion of homes that are rented.  The proportion of people is probably higher, but it’s surprisingly hard to tell. I’m going to outsource this to me from 2017, when it was a Stat-of-the-Week nomination.

• Radio NZ talks to Chris McDowall and Tim Denee about their new atlas of Aotearoa, We Are Here.
• Kieran Healy maps dog breeds in New York — and talks about colour choice for the maps
• Janelle Shane’s Ted talk on AI weirdness.
• “There was a statistic going around that said 1 in 6 millennials have at least $100,000 saved.” Nathan Yau actually looks at the numbers.
• From Ars Technica, “A health care algorithm offered less care to black patients”
• Terrible election graphs are an international problem: here, from Canada
  

From the Herald: Most Norfolk Islanders want to cut ties with Australia and join New Zealand – survey

The second sentence of the piece: “The rebels outnumber those who want free association with Australia, with 37% of the vote compared to 35%.”

We don’t usually consider 37% as ‘most’.

With a little searching, you can find the primary source: the website of Norfolk Island People for Democracy  Most people who responded don’t like the current system, and they are roughly evenly split between full independence, a looser association with Australia giving local control of domestic affairs, or a similarly loose association with New Zealand.

Also, it looks like an online clicky poll.  We’d usually just dismiss these, but there were 450 responses and the Island has a population of only 1800.  If they took reasonable care to make sure the votes were one to a person and from the local population, the numbers are worth paying attention to.  Even if you made the extreme assumption that everyone who didn’t take part supported the status quo, 415 wanting to change it is a substantial fraction.