Three sentences from a Herald story 

The Ministry of Transport study used blood samples taken from 453 drivers who caused crashes.

Of that group, 156 were found to be on drugs not administered by a medical professional

Drivers with more than the legal limit of alcohol in their system made up just over half of the 453 samples analysed.

Now try to fill in the blank  in the headline “Tests reveal most crash drivers                                “

If you said “were drunk”, your arithmetic is better than your sense of headlineworthiness, not a problem the Herald had.

A New York Times story about buying and selling favorable online reviews

Many of the 300 reviews he bought through GettingBookReviews were highly favorable, although it’s impossible to say whether this was because the reviewers genuinely liked the books, or because of their well-developed tendency toward approval, or some combination of the two.

[Update: XKCD]

XKCD (come on, you know XKCD): I can’t help but admire the audacity of the marketer who came up with the phrase “contains a clinically studied ingredient”

headsup (journalism blog): It’s more likely that the [Detroit Free Press] doesn’t understand that you’re supposed to do a little basic arithmetic before you talk about public opinion.

Andrew Gelman: graphs showing uncertainty in a fitted curve.

journalism.org.nz: a proposal for NZ public interest journalism funded by the public

BBC: Gathering evidence for the effects of exercise on depression is harder than you might expect.

As Alan Keegan points out in his Stat of the Week nomination, the Stats Department Facebook page was sporting a graph whose only redeeming feature is that it doesn’t even pretend to convey information.

To decide what to do with the graph, we are hosting a bogus poll:

Or, as some of my colleagues would prefer “Big Data are watching you”.  In Stuff.   The story is about the potential disadvantages of your life being predictable by sophisticated analysis, and it’s pretty good.

I will comment on one example:

The Corrections Department first developed a computer system, RocRol, in 1995 that calculates the chances of prisoners being reconvicted within five years of their release…

Corrections analyst Arul Nadesu told a conference at Te Papa in February that new software developed by business analytics firm SAS that incorporates neural networking technology – a technique for processing data that mimics the way signals are passed between neurons in the brain – could reduce the risk of RocRol “misclassifying” an offender to just one in seven.

The software may be new, but neural networks for prediction have been around since the 1960s, when people did really believe that they mimicked the way the brain works. Neuroscience has come a long way since then.  Neural networks were very popular in the 1980s, but by the time I learned about them in the early 1990s they were no longer anything special or distinctive.

Also “reduce the risk … to just one in seven” suggests that it’s substantially worse than one in seven at the moment. While things may change in the future, that’s exactly the current problem with Big Data: the predictions aren’t all that good

Wit from the Sydney Morning Herald:

How Australia topped the medal tally

Who was the real winner from the London Olympic Games? According to a ground-breaking analysis of the official medal tally by a BusinessDay statistician, the most successful nation at the Olympics was … Australia!

Statistics can be used to tell a lot more than one story, of course. Other nations will try to claim victory using lesser formulations. Based on the number of athletes per medal, for example, China will claim it is the winner. Despite occasional murmurs of complaint at being fleeced out of gold, the Peoples’ Republic needed just 4.5 athletes to win a medal of any colour.

From its team of 396 athletes, the Chinese needed 10 athletes to win each of their gold medals. Next best among the top 25 nations at the Olympics was the US, which needed 12 athletes for each gold and 5.1 athletes for all medals. The American team was by far the biggest with 530 athletes.

The 410-strong Australian squad required 12 athletes for a medal, and 59 athletes for each gold medal. It has been well publicised that the 2012 Olympics were a bit lacking on the gold medal front, at least by Australia’s historical standards. Naturally, the proponents of sports funding are therefore calling on government to dig deep – to buy some more medals at the next Games.

Read the rest here.

Fascinating item in The Guardian, which looks at the Olympics from a data journalist’s point of view …. and does a great job.

One of the problems with lookingfor patterns in Big Data is that there’s a lot of things that look like patterns.  It’s easy to see things that aren’t there.

In a dramatic example, Phil McCarthy feeds a random polygon generator into an automatic face recogniser, and makes random changes to the polygons to improve the recognition score.

(via Ben Goldacre and Prosthetic Knowledge)

Nerdnite is a global collection of groups that get together for presentations on interestingly nerdy topics somewhere where you can get beer.  Wellington has had a group for quite a while, and Auckland has its first evening next Tuesday, August 14th, starting about 6:30pm, at Nectar in Kingsland

The presenters will be Siouxsie Wiles (bioluminescent superbugs),  Shay Brazier (renewable energy), and me.

A big gold medal to Statistics New Zealand for its daily tally of Olympic  medals by population (the most usual table is number of medals won), with the numbers sliced and diced different ways. Whichever way you slice and dice, the Aussies will still be cross.