Posts filed under General (3156)

• Forbes has a profile of a soon-to-be billionaire statistician, Dennis Gillings.  He basically invented the commercial clinical research model, and his company, Quintiles, is going public. 
• The New York Times has a story about data(!) and science(!) being used to modify Hollywood scripts.  As Matt Yglesias points out, the studios can’t really take it that seriously or they’d be paying more than $20 000 for the service
• Some Big Data backlash, from Quartz. Most data isn’t big, most data isn’t very good quality, and most businesses are in more need of expertise on data analysis than on large-scale computing.

The news media is covering an apparent public backlash over the price of reintroduced Georgie Pie pies.

Is $4.50 for a steak and cheese pie too expensive?

It wasn’t easy to track down past prices for Georgie Pie pies, but thanks to an old ad on YouTube, I found out that in 1993, small Georgie Pie steak and cheese pies cost $1 and large ones $2.

It’s not clear what size the new pies will be. However, if we use the
Consumer Price Index to get an idea of what those 1993 prices would be today, we get $1.60 for a small pie and $3.20 for a large.

This graph, from Public Radio International, may help illustrate why public-health people have such a different attitude to business and economics people on cigarette plain packaging

Economists worry about whether plain packaging is effective in reducing smoking, and whether the costs it imposes in New Zealand are out of proportion to the benefits. Other businesses may worry that the idea will spread.

Public health advocates are genuinely mystified by this. They regard tobacco as unique, and tobacco companies as among the common enemies of humankind, to be wiped out as expeditiously as is possible without too much collateral damage.

• For journalists, an excerpt on statistics from The Science Writers Handbook, via a post at Scientific American
•  For everyone, a new book called Naked Statistics, with an interview with the author on NPR

We heard today that the Christchurch rebuild will be more expensive, by sagans of dollars, than previously computed.

3News attempted to provide some context for the cost of the rebuild, saying it was about the “same as the GDP of Kuwait or Vietnam.“(1:20)  The problem is that most of us have less understanding of the GDP of Kuwait or Vietnam than of $40 billion, so this isn’t terribly helpful.

In fact, the lack of understanding appears to extend  to 3News, since in fact the GDP of Kuwait and Vietnam are about US$175 billion and US$125 billion, not NZ$40 billion.  The government budget (not GDP) in Vietnam is roughly NZ$40 billon, but I don’t know where the Kuwait figure comes from.

The Herald today ran this story claiming that people think New Zealand is a racist country, based on the results of a survey run  for TV3’s new show The Vote. Viewers voted through Facebook, Twitter, The Vote website or by text.

I haven’t watched The Vote, but I would like to know whether its journalist presenters, presumably fans of accuracy, point out that such self-selecting  polls are unscientific – the polite term for bogus. The best thing you can say is that such polls allow viewers to  feel involved.

But that’s not a good thing if claims made as a  result of these polls lead to way off-beam impressions being planted in the public consciousness; that’s often the way urban myths are born and prejudice stoked.

I’m not saying that racism doesn’t exist in New Zealand, but polls like this  offer no insight into the issue or, worse, distort the truth.

It’s disappointing to see the Herald, which still, presumably, places a premium on accuracy, has swallowed The Vote press release whole, without  pointing out its shortcomings or doing its homework to see what reliable surveys exist. TV3 must be very pleased with the free publicity, though.

Stuff has a story using data from the NZ General Social Survey.  The data say that people 15-29 are more likely to feel lonely than older people.  The story says that this is a generational change caused by Facebook (they put it a bit less baldly, but that’s the message).

When you find differences between age groups, there are two broad classes of explanations. Epidemiologists call them “age” and “cohort” effects.  An age effect is actually due to age: teenagers today argue with their parents more than 40 year olds do, because that’s what teenagers are like.  Toddlers read less than adults, because they haven’t learned yet. When today’s teenagers get older they will argue with their parents less than they now do; when today’s toddlers get older they will read more than they now do.

Cohort effects are common to a group of people born at the same time.  For example, older New Zealanders are more likely to regard Anzac Day as very important, but we wouldn’t expect today’s teenagers to develop a greater appreciation for it as they get older.  Older people also, on average, have less formal education than 25-35 year olds, but again, todays young Bachelors and Masters graduates are not going to lose their degrees as they age.

So, is the difference in feelings of loneliness between 15-29 year olds and older people an age effect or a cohort effect?  Stuff seems pretty sure it’s a cohort effect — “Generation Net” — but the data say absolutely nothing one way or the other.  Since the NZ General Social Survey started in 2009, there isn’t enough historical data to answer the question, and the US General Social Survey (which has been going since 1972) doesn’t routinely ask a ‘loneliness’ question. The British Social Attitudes Survey, as is so often the case with UK publically-funded data collection, won’t let you see much without becoming a registered user.

There are good reasons to be skeptical about the cohort interpretation.  In 1995, well before social media, Robert Putnam wrote an essay, Bowling Alone, about a rapid decline in social connectedness in the US.  And in the 1920s, the Middletown studies blamed the same sort of changes on the new technologies of radio, film, and automobiles.

However tempting it is to say that the kids these days are different, you do actually need some evidence. More evidence than their constant facebooking and twittering, and showing no respect, and look at what they wear and their music is just noise and they need to get off your lawn.

[update: The Herald has a more balanced story]

• Roger Peng comparing the recent Excel Economics incident to an earlier case of scientific fraud in cancer bioinfomatics

One has to wonder if the academic system is working in this regard. In both cases, it took a minor, but personal failing, to bring down the entire edifice. But the protestations of reputable academics, challenging the research on the merits, were ignored. I’d say in both cases the original research conveniently said what people wanted to hear (debt slows growth, personalized gene signatures can predict response to chemotherapy), and so no amount of research would convince people to question the original findings.

• The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group would probably have a different take on it.
• A bit technical, but interesting: how Twitter combines computer and human screening to work out what’s happening with `trending terms’.
• New data on internet use from Stats New Zealand
• We’ve discussed how creation and destruction of jobs is counted: here’s an example from the West Island

• Stat of the Day: 77:44
• The role of statistics in the top public health advances of the twentieth century
• Measuring international travel by remote logins to Yahoo services (with graph). Stats NZ did something similar after the ChCh quake, looking at cellphone locations (more detail)

• Data editing and cleaning: where in the process should it be done?
• Is Data Science a threat to Statistics.

• Skepticism about ‘big data’ at O’Reilly Radar
• How data goes wrong from Tomorrow Global.  Along the same lines, the famous story from Howard Cox

“Cox, when you are a bit older, you will not quote Indian statistics with that assurance. The Government are very keen on amassing statistics – they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of these figures comes in the first place from the  [village watchman], who just puts down what he damn pleases”

• The Economist has an international currency index based on the price of  a Big Mac.  At Quartz, an alternative index using the price of the Economist, which suggests the NZ$ is undervalued.