Posts filed under General (3156)

• “As the polar ice caps melt and the earth churns through the Sixth Extinction, another unprecedented phenomenon is taking place, in the realm of sex,” says Vanity Fair. “Yeah, nah” says New York magazine. If you only talk to top Tindr users, (especially in New York) you’re going to get strange ideas about sex.

• “How Statistics guided me through life, death, and ‘The Price is Right'” by Elisa Long, in Washington Post. Dr Long writes about her breast cancer and her appearance on the famous US game show.

• At Vox EU, an analysis of the environmental benefits or otherwise of electric cars. The cars don’t emit any pollution as they run, but the power has to come from somewhere. In about half of the US, enough of the electricity comes from coal to make electric cars worse than efficient petrol or diesel cars. In NZ my impression is that a predictable night-time load would largely come from hydro, so electric cars would be green. In Australia, probably not.
  
• You probably saw the Herald story on speeding by NZTA staff. A nice example of using data (obtained under the Official Information Act) to show the extent of an issue

Team Ratings for Round 1

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 1, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Predictions for Round 1

Here are the predictions for Round 1. 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 2

The basic method is described on my Department home page. I have made some changes to the methodology this year, including shrinking the ratings between seasons.

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 4 matches played, 2 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 50%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 2

Here are the predictions for Round 2. 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 23

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 160 matches played, 91 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 56.9%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 23

Here are the predictions for Round 23. 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 this guy in the US called Donald Trump. You might have heard of him. He currently has a huge lead in the opinion polls over the other candidates for the Republican nomination.

Trump’s lead isn’t sampling error. He has an eleven percentage point lead in the poll averages, with sampling error well under one percentage point. That’s better than the National Party has ever managed. It’s better than the Higgs Boson has ever managed.

Even so, no serious commentator thinks Trump will be the Republican candidate. It’s not out of the question that he’d run as an independent — that’s a question of individual psychology, and much harder to answer — but he isn’t going to win the Republican primaries.

At the moment, Trump is doing well because people know who he is and because they aren’t actually making decisions. The question is something like:

If the Republican primary for President were being held today, and the candidates were Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, George Pataki, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Donald Trump, and Scott Walker, for whom would you vote?

or

I know the 2016 election is far away, but who would you support for the Republican nomination for president if the candidates were…

We know from history that the answer to this sort of question at this time in the campaign doesn’t correspond to anything about the election.

There’s a temptation to believe that something you can measure very precisely must exist. There are always two other explanations to consider: your measurement process might always give precise results regardless of any reality, or you might be measuring something real but different from what you’re trying to measure.

Team Ratings for Round 1

The basic method is described on my Department home page. I have made some changes to the methodology this year, including shrinking the ratings between seasons.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Predictions for Round 1

Here are the predictions for Round 1. 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 22

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 152 matches played, 88 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 57.9%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 22

Here are the predictions for Round 22. 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.

We (already!) have a Stat of the Week nomination, for the Herald’s

Conservative estimates are that the average man will lose 12,547 umbrellas during his lifetime.

At first sight this looks like deadpan humour rather than a statistic, but in that case you’d expect a by-line on the piece.  The Google, which knows all and tells all, finds thirty other examples of the statistic.  It looks as though the primary source is the Telegraph

From a Retail New Zealand Media Fact Kit

The amount New Zealanders spend on goods from foreign websites is approaching $1.5 billion and this number is growing all the time.

GST is 15%, so the total GST payable on an amount approaching $1.5 billion would be approaching $225 million.

Since $1.5 billion would be approaching $900 per household (1.68 million households according to StatsNZ), I assume it includes quite a few business purchases as well. For these, any increase in GST on the purchase would later be deducted from the business’s GST liability, leaving a net zero.

For non-business purchases, some of that GST is already payable under current law (if the total value of a single package is over $400). Some would still not be payable if the threshold was lowered to $25.  Also, some might not be payable and definitely would not be easily collectable at the border because the purchase is an electronic download — e-books or music, for example.

Putting all these together, the potential increase in revenue has to be less than 15% of $1.5 billion, though it’s hard to say how much less.

The Media Fact Kit says

The Government misses out on at least $200 million in tax (maybe as much as $500 million) every year

Based on their expenditure numbers, that doesn’t look plausible. Still, maybe their numbers are wrong and it really is more than $200 million, and maybe even as much as $500 million.  GST would still cost something to collect, and more than it does (per dollar) within New Zealand, so the net gain to the Government would be noticeably smaller than this. They don’t even pretend to take the costs into account, they just talk about how many hip replacements could be funded with all the free money.

One of the differences between a Treasury Regulatory Impact Statement and a “Fact Kit” from a lobby group is that the numbers in the RIS have to add up and the document needs to give sources. If, as Radio New Zealand reports, there will be a proposal for Cabinet this month, we might be able to get some real numbers about the likely revenue and costs, and perhaps even how the economic impact would compare to other ways of raising taxes.

Today’s newspaper wants to tell you what is new today. It turns out that’s a problem.

Felix Salmon, at Fusion

But here’s the thing: it turns out that the scientific world is actually far, far ahead of the journalistic world on these matters. Yes, the world of online journalism is full of parasites, and a lot of those parasites have real value. But all that the parasites have to go on are published articles: no one is transparent about the process that created those articles. No one shows their work, and no one ever tries to replicate anything.