Posts filed under General (3156)

From the Medical Journal of Australia

Accurate health journalism helps Australian consumers make informed choices by exposing fraudulent or exaggerated claims about health products and services, by informing them about effective products and services, and by countering disease mongering. A well informed public is also vital to the proper functioning of a modern democracy; and in democratic countries like Australia where the state is a major funder of health services, it is particularly important that the public have accurate information…

While some health reporting in the mainstream media undeniably fails the test of accuracy, it has also been shown that reports about health interventions in the less sensationalist newspapers are more accurate and complete than reports in other media, including online news outlets.

Substitute as necessary for NZ.

(via @vincristine)

Team Ratings for the SemiFinals

Here are the team ratings prior to the SemiFinals, 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.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 30 matches played, 15 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 50%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for the SemiFinals

Here are the predictions for the SemiFinals. 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.

• Eric Crampton discusses a Gallup poll in the US which thinks >20% of the population is gay
• At NBR, Horizon polling claims to have predicted the Auckland election most accurately. At least, after they changed which one of their numbers was supposed to be the prediction.  Basically, everyone got the winner right, and getting accurate results has to be pretty much luck given this is only the second election ever for mayor of the supercity.
• From The Civilian, a nice send-up of bogus polls: “Stewart Island to be renamed Harry Styles as a result of online poll”
• Census population counts for areas are now out.  Auckland is bigger. ChCh is only very slightly smaller, and Canterbury is bigger.

Q: There isn’t a Nobel Prize for Mathematics, is there?

A: No

Q: I’ve heard that was because Nobel’s wife was having an affair with a prominent mathematician. Is that true?

A: Almost certainly not

Q: How can you be sure?

A: Various reasons. For a start, Nobel wasn’t married.

Q: Oh. Is there a Nobel Prize for Statistics?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: Various reasons. For a start, statistics hadn’t really been invented in 1895, when Nobel died.

Q: Do statisticians ever win Nobel Prizes?

A: Yes and no.

Q: How is that not a simple “yes” or “no”?

A: The Sverige Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has often been given for statistical research. Opinions vary on whether this is a ‘real’ Nobel Prize.

Q: Can you explain how to pronounce that?

A: No.

Q: When was the most recent time it was given for statistics research?

A: Yesterday, to Lars Peter Hansen (together with two other people for non-statistical research)

Q: Can you explain in simple terms what he did?

A: I could try, but Jeff Leek at Simply Statistics has already done a reasonable job

Neville Davies, from the Royal Statistical Society Centre for Statistical Education, Plymouth University, UK, is visiting the Department of Statistics at The University of Auckland, the home of statschat.  I asked him to share his first impressions … 

Does New Zealand have one of the most innovative school statistics curriculums in the world? Yes! But how does it compare with the UK?

Well, in the UK for the last 50 years the school statistics curriculum has been hijacked by policymakers and maths teachers who believe the subject is a subset of maths and should be taught as such. And there is research evidence to support this.

This attitude has stifled curriculum development for statistics and helped to make the subject disliked by many school-aged learners. And many schoolteachers dislike teaching it too – it’s a bit of a nuisance that gets in the way of the maths.

But things are much better in New Zealand: here the school curriculum is data-driven throughout and is taught, learned and assessed accordingly. And that’s how it should be.

Everyone should have noticed that we are awash with data: bombarded with the stuff. As more and more people try to make sense of these mountains of data, very often information gleaned from them are at best untrustworthy and often misleading and wrong. It is a matter of common sense that young people should be taught to be confident with what to do about data they see in everyday life, as well as being sceptical about what others claim about them.

The best way to teach the skills necessary is precisely what the New Zealand school curriculum specifies.

By talking to the developers of the curriculum in New Zealand, visiting schools, talking to teachers, attending classes and chatting to students I am discovering how the statistics part of the mathematics and statistics curriculum is being implemented in refreshing and innovative ways. To coin a phrase used in New Zealand school statistics resources,  I am being a ‘data and information detective’  and I will take back to the UK lessons we can learn to try to change what is going in that distant land. It’s a case of grandmother needing to learn new ways to suck statistical eggs!

Watch this space for updates.

Good work by journalist Steve Deane in today’s New Zealand Herald:

A study published by the Lion Foundation which extols the benefits of funding community projects with gambling money is course work produced by a group of Massey commerce students.

… I wonder if the students knew that their coursework, which for various reasons explained in the story can’t be used to draw such conclusions, knew their work was going to be hijacked? Either the Lion Foundation doesn’t know much about statistical rigour, or is grasping at straws and hoping no-one will ask questions.

The Currie Cup continues to be a nightmare for prediction. In past seasons there appeared to be a large home ground advantage, but not this year. There have been some very high scores and games won away from home starting with Griquas beating the Sharks in Durban in the first week. Griquas have subsequently lost all their games, but have 5 points from loss bonuses, and 1 four try bonus. They then have had 52 points against them in each of the last two games. (Do they still have any supporters after that sequence of games?) One reason for the difficulty of prediction is possibly that the Lions, Cheetahs and Bulls are all fairly evenly matched, so that any one might beat any other on a given day, no matter whether home or away.

Team Ratings for Round 10

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 10, 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.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 27 matches played, 13 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 48.1%.

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.

• From Wired, 13 of the best infographics from 2013. Not entirely convinced, though I quite like the pie charts showing colour changes by Impressionist artists over time.

• Rachel Kumar is a data scientist who tests fitness trackers:  she still says “it’s unclear how you use this data. I know if I’ve been active or not, and the histograms don’t tell me anything else.” 
• Algorithms: “They have biases like the rest of us. And they make mistakes. But they’re opaque, hiding their secrets behind layers of complexity. How can we deal with the power that algorithms may exert on us? How can we better understand where they might be wronging us?” by Nicholas Diakopoulos.
• An example: according to a new rating of Faculty Media Impact, MIT’s top department is Sociology. MIT doesn’t actually have a sociology department.

• There’s not as many of you as we thought: the new Census figures are out with the total population. There will be no new Maori-roll electorate, but the North Island will get a new general-roll electorate. Fortunately, the NZ redistricting procedure is very boring, compared to, say, Pennsylvania. Election nerds are reduced to arguing about the potential impact on electorates such as Epsom.
• All the more-interesting results from the Census are still to come: here’s their release timetable
• The US did not get its monthly unemployment figures last month, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics is shut down. Pew Research has a list of the other data the government won’t be releasing
• A couple of articles from the online magazine Nautil.us: one on statistics in the courtroom (US-oriented, but still interesting) and one on coincidences.
• Almost coincidentally, James Curran is giving a public lecture this Thursday, 7pm, on forensic statistics: his professorial inaugural lecture.  Everyone welcome.

From 3News tonight, spoiling a story that was otherwise accurate and reasonable (if one-sided).

A new bridge in the Auckland suburb of Bayswater cost the Auckland Council $2.5 million. It would be about the same to bridge the gap between the minimum wage and a living wage for council staff.

The bridge is a one-off cost; the wage increase is an annual cost. This isn’t a sensible comparison.

Given the preoccupations of the Auckland media this week a better comparison would be to the $3 million quoted as the savings for not mowing the berms in the old Auckland City area (especially as these savings are presumably achieved partly by not paying the type of contractor who currently gets less than the ‘living wage’).