Stuff’s story about the real costs and potential profits of ‘The Block’-style renovations is an example of something we should see more of.  Except, that ideally, we wouldn’t need the newspapers to do it for us.

Matthew Yglesias, at Slate, has a related complaint about ‘math is hard’ descriptions of national budgets

Sometimes you just know that apparent associations just have to be spurious: the price of tea in China really doesn’t affect NZ violent crime rates, and you’re no more likely to win at lotto if you buy your ticket from a shop that’s sold winning tickets in the past.  There’s no way that one could affect the other.

The Herald has a story on functional foods that’s very similar to one I commented on in May.  Again, before even looking at the claims, how could it be true that the shape of a food was a guide to its function? It would be necessary for God to have set it up that way (and, apparently, without bothering to tell anyone).

Match foods to parts of the body for optimum health benefits:

Also, let’s look at some of the examples

1. Healthy Bones: Bony-looking foods such as rhubarb, rich in vitamin K, and celery, rich in silicon, are both good for bones and healthy joints.

Vitamin K was once suggested as involved in bone health, based on observational studies, but a large randomised trial didn’t find any beneficial effect.  Also, although raw rhubarb has moderately high Vitamin K levels (about half as much as cooked broccoli), cooked rhubarb has much less.

3. Sight for Sore Eyes: Slice a carrot and the round circle will show a likeness to an eye, complete with pupil and iris. They contain beta-carotene and antioxidants, both helpful for eyesight issues.

Parsnips have the same shape (as do many roots), but lack the carotenoids.  Orange/golden kumara and pumpkin, which don’t have the eye shape, do have the carotenoids.  And I’m sure you could think of other body parts with more similarity to the carrot than eyes…

5. Round Fruit: Lemons and grapefruit with limonoids and vitamin C are believed to be helpful in preventing breast cancer.

How about quinces, mangoes, coconuts, and melons, which all have historical and cultural support for looking like breasts (or, if we follow Biblical authority, perhaps venison is the relevant food)

As part of Google’s mind-reading efforts, they have been working on finding connections between search targets: ‘Knowledge Graph‘, as they call it. The idea is partly to group ambiguous search results so you can choose the ones you meant, and partly to suggest other searches that you might be interested in.

For example, if you search for ‘bacon’, you could mean the 16th Century natural philosopher, the 20th century painter, the cured pig product, or actor Kevin Bacon. At the moment, I get the food as the main set of results, with Knowledge Graph side boxes suggesting the two Francis Bacons.  Kevin doesn’t show up until much further down the list.   In partial recompense, Google is advertising Knowledge Graph by providing a Bacon Number calculator, as the Herald tells us.

An actor’s Bacon Number gives their network distance from Kevin Bacon, where each link is a movie collaboration.  The same idea was had first by the mathematicians, who calculate Erdős numbers based on research collaborations with Paul Erdős. Both Bacon and Erdős are notable for the great diversity of their collaborations, not just the sheer number, so most actors and mathematicians have surprisingly small network distances from them . My Erdős number is 45(Scott, Rao, Vijayan, Erdős), and I’m not even a mathematician. Barack Obama has a Bacon Number of 2, and acting is not what he’s most famous for.   The existence of people like Erdős or Bacon makes a huge difference to the structure of a network of contacts — without them, the network tends to come apart into disconnected chunks. Worldwide connectedness is interesting for acting or mathematics, but it is more important in infectious diseases, where a few people can make a big difference to epidemic size.  There’s a nice (if somewhat old) description of some of the research on small-world networks in a magazine from the Santa Fe Institute (in the centerfold)

Back to Google again, the Bacon Number calculator is far from perfect, but the point is that, unlike the definitive Oracle of Bacon, Google gets Bacon Numbers as a by-product of a general approach rather than as a special project. Knowledge Graph also has other failures (for example, it persistently gave the wrong photograph for Australian SF author Greg Egan), but it’s another illustration of Google’s original discovery that links between pages, rather than the contents of the pages, tell you what is important.

[update: I hadn’t realised that my Erdős number decreased from 5 to 4 a few months ago]

Via Stuff:  The Economist has released its World in Figures book as a free iPad and iPhone app.

Now what we need is an iPhone-friendly interface to Stats New Zealand’s Infoshare.

Two stories  based on exactly the same data from the Real Estate Institute.

Modest revival for housing market: Stuff

Big jump in house prices: Herald

“Modest revival” is the press release description. The Herald has more sources and pretty interactive graphics showing more details.

The disagreement isn’t necessarily a bad thing: journalists should be doing interpretation, not just copying press releases.  What is a bad thing is that no-one mentions inflation adjustment — Auckland’s ‘record’ median price is still way down from the peak when measured in constant dollars.

Stuff has excellent coverage of a new research paper finding possible risks of mammograms in women under 30 with rare mutations in two specific genes involved in DNA repair (including repair to DNA damage caused by X-rays).

It’s important to stress that the risk findings don’t apply to people in general: X-rays do increase cancer risk for everyone, but only by a tiny amount.  A study published in June this year caused concern by estimating that for every 10,000 CT scans in kids under 10 years old, two cancers would be caused.  That’s a 2 in 10000 additional risk per scan: the additional risk estimated in the breast cancer study is hundreds of times larger.

From today’s Herald …

Choose carefully, $23m is at stake

Today’s $23 million Big Wednesday draw is the fourth-largest prize in Lotto history.

And while there is no secret way to guarantee hitting the jackpot, a mathematician says you can boost chances of not having to share any cash you do win.

Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Auckland David Scott said: “There’s no way of increasing your chances of winning but it’s possible to increase your chances of getting more money and not having to share it.

“Avoid the numbers of 1 up to 30, where people choose their birthdays.”

Read the rest of the story here.

All decision rules based on observed data make mistakes, whether they are detecting the Higgs Boson or breast cancer.  And the more resources you can invest in each decision, the lower you can (typically) push the error rate.

Copyright enforcement has been a dramatic example of the opposite trend.  A century ago, individuals basically couldn’t infringe copyright in any meaningful way, so the occasional disputes got settled by expensive lawsuits.  In the modern world, copying is easy, so the companies that own lots of copyrights are looking for cheap and dirty ways to detect and stop copying.  Of course, the error rate goes up.

A dramatic example happened last night, when the live video feed for the Hugo Awards ceremony at the World Science Fiction Convention was shut down  by automated filtering systems at the company doing the broadcasting. One of the awards, for “Best Dramatic Presentation, short form” was being given for a Doctor Who script.  Clips from the TV show were shown — with full permission of the copyright owners, not that permission would have been necessary for this purpose — and some computer program made a false positive decision.

[Update: the same thing happened, briefly, to the YouTube feed of the Democratic National Convention later the same week]

Stats Chat has had a few nice mentions in dispatches over the past few days, and in this blog-eat-blog world, we thought we oughta share them.

Thanks to Janet McAllister for describing us, along with a couple of other blogs, as “excellent” and “useful” in her New Zealand Herald  column on the weekend.

And this from Public Address, Russell Brown’s thoroughly readable  blog, about his sneak preview of the new, tabloid Herald: The new pages better accommodate the use of infographics – and, happily, editorial staff will have received three training sessions in the use of statistics by the time the paper relaunches. This ought to be a more productive relationship between the Herald and the University of Auckland’s Statistics faculty than the paper having its homework constantly corrected in StatsChat.

Stats Chat just might have run one of those training sessions, on the Monday before last, and we  just might have called it “Learning to Love Statistics: A workshop for journalists”. Thumbs up to the Herald – its journos have had, or are about to have, a session with Statistics New Zealand about how they can best use its marvellous online tools.

And we aren’t out to hassle the Herald, honestly. It’s just that we’re in Auckland, and the Herald’s published seven days a week, and we are still loyal subscribers to the old-fashioned paper product …

The Internets are full of a story about herbal tea curing breast cancer. The Herald is actually more restrained than many:

An extract commonly found in herbal tea can stop the spread of breast cancer, researchers have found.

That isn’t what the researchers found.  For a start, unless you’re in or near Pakistan, the extract isn’t commonly found in herbal tea.  But that’s not the main problem.