The Herald’s story about perinatal mortality in the Counties Manukua DHB area is informative and statistically sensible. They also have a story about stillbirths, with actual data and expert comments.
An interactive graphic from the New York Times, using data from the American Time Use Survey, where a representative sample of people is phoned up and asked what they did the previous day.
Compare the NY Times graphic to the charts produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which are much less fun to explore, but do present some useful comparisons in simple formats.
Once again, NZ homes are at record nominal asking prices.
The real estate industry doesn’t make it easy to do inflation adjustment, but according to this, the average asking price in May last year of $429k was 2% above the previous month and ‘just topped’ the October 2007 level that was when Realestate.co.nz started publishing the statistic. That means the October 2007 national average asking price was between $420k and $429k.
Suppose you bought a house in October 2007 for $420k and sold it now for the national average asking price of $445,529. Those 2007 dollars are worth about $479k in today’s money, so you would have lost 8%, or about $34,000 in 2012 dollars. That’s before taking into account maintenance, insurance, interest, and transaction costs. The conclusion is about the same if you compare to an index of average wages: all these are helpfully provided by the Reserve Bank’s inflation calculator.
The comparison for Auckland may be more favorable — I can’t find what the 2007 average asking price was, but if it was below $535000, then we are at a new peak (or the top of a new bubble).
In May last year, Stuff had a good article on house prices and inflation, and even an infographic that told you more than ‘up’ or ‘down’, but that seems to have been an exception.
A story in Stuff about the benefits of ginger is to be commended for providing actual links to their supporting evidence for some of the claims (assuming you want more evidence than the approval of Confucius).
Unfortunately, if you provide links, there’s always the risk that people will follow them:
rich in antioxidants. The linked paper describes chemical measurements of the antioxidant effects of ginger. The abstract doesn’t support “rich” — the chemical analysis was of the antioxidant strength, not the concentrations of antioxidants and, at least in the abstract, didn’t compare to anything else (the journal, unusually, isn’t one that UoA library has access to).
combats nausea: This one appears to actually be true — it’s a combination of six randomised trials, and found ginger was better than placebo. The researchers did note that publication bias was a concern and said the data are insufficient to draw firm conclusions.
natural pain relief. The link here says that the result comes from the US National Library of Medicine. That’s only true to the extent that it’s stored on their virtual shelves, like everything else published in biology and medicine. The study (by some Iranian scientists publishing in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine) compared ginger to two medications for period pain and didn’t find a statistically significant difference. The researchers concluded that ginger was as effective, but their data don’t actually support this conclusion: you can’t conclude equivalence just from a lack of statistical signifiance. If you look at the data in their Table 2 (which you can’t, since it’s not open-access), you can compute a 95% confidence interval for the difference in proportion of women who reported that the treatment helped: ibuprofen could have been 23 percentage points better than ginger, which is hardly a convincing demonstration of equivalence.
There’s also a link to some (then) unpublished research from the University of Sydney showing that chemicals in ginger inhibit the inflammation-related enzymes COX-1 and COX-2. This link is from 2001 — I noticed how old it was because the researcher was talking enthusiastically about selectively inhibiting COX-2. As Vioxx did. He said that he planned to do a study in actual patients. Nothing seems to have come of this study in the past decade: either it wasn’t done or it has succumbed to publication bias.
Natural arthritis relief.From the conclusion section of the linked abstract “Due to a paucity of well-conducted trials, evidence of the efficacy of Z. officinale to treat pain remains insufficient. However, the available data provide tentative support for the anti-inflammatory role of Z. officinale constituents,”
Stress reducer: The first link is to the Daily Mail. Enough said. The second link is introduced as “Ginger extract showed “significant antidepressant activity” in a study that was published in the International Research Journal of Pharmacy.” A study in rats, if you follow the link.
Anti-inflammatory: In test-tubes, ginger extracts inhibit some things related to inflammation. The abstract of the linked study concludes “Identification of the molecular targets of individual ginger constituents provides an opportunity to optimize and standardize ginger products with respect to their effects on specific biomarkers of inflammation. Such preparations will be useful for studies in experimental animals and humans.” In other words, we don’t know whether this translates to benefits in mice, let alone in people.
Antibiotic: This was the one that provoked me to write this post. The story says “Ginger was more effective than antibiotic drugs in fighting two bacterial staph infections”. The research says that high concentrations of ginger extract inhibited bacteria growing in a dish in lab more than low doses of antibiotics. No “infections” were involved in the research.
Common colds: The story says “Ginger contains almost a dozen anti-viral compounds and scientists have identified several that can fight the most common cold virus, the rhinoviruses.” The linked research doesn’t mention rhinoviruses, or any other kind of virus. It’s a lab study of four types of bacteria.
Aids digestion: specifically, stimulates production of stomach acid and speeds emptying of the stomach. The stomach-emptying is apparently true. No link is given for the stomach acid increase, but a Google search finds lots of web sites telling you how ginger can reduce stomach acid and help with gastric reflux.
Fights diabetes: The story says “Ginger can help to manage blood sugar levels in long-term diabetic patients”. The research says “one fraction of the extract was the most effective in reproducing the increase in glucose uptake by the whole extract in muscle cells grown in culture.” and “It is hoped that these promising results for managing blood glucose levels can be examined further in human clinical trials,” So, again, this is lab bench research, not involving actual diabetic patients.
Boosts circulation: Ginger extracts inhibit blood clotting and platelet aggregation in blood samples in test-tubes.
So, we have one passing grade on nausea, and a partial pass on aiding digestion. Two of the links provided absolutely no support for the claims, and the rest were mostly test-tube or rat research that might in the future lead to human research that might support the claims.
The AA is shocked (shocked!) to find that traffic and parking fines in Auckland add up to a lot of money. The Herald did a good job on basic arithmetic, in converting traffic-fine totals of $36 million over 12 months and $20 million over eight months into the much less dramatic $3 million/month and $2.54 million per month.
One further piece of arithmetic would be to divide the $3 million per month by the 1 million registered vehicles in Auckland (table 36). Is $3/month a surprising average?
For comparison, the Dominion Post reported total fines of “more than $12 million” in Wellington for the 2008-2009 financial year, on 283000 registered vehicles, giving a per-vehicle average of $3.5/month (before the GST increase).
Perhaps, as the AA’s Simon Lambourne believes, this indicates not enough effort put into education of drivers. Perhaps the idea of fining people who don’t pay for parking is “not being realistic about the importance of the car to mobility in Auckland.” But the country’s primary motoring organisation can’t really get away with pretending surprise.
This week, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a new jobs estimate that was more favorable than the previous one: good economic news, for a change.
Since the US is in an election campaign (as it is about half the time), a few conspiracy theorists came up with the idea that the new jobs weren’t real, but were part of a plot to re-elect the President. The theory comes in two flavours: either that unemployed Democrats all over the country lied about having part time jobs in order to improve Obama’s position, or that the Bureau of Labor Statistics faked the numbers.
The idea that millions of people have just now, for the first time, decided simultaneously to pretend to have jobs collapses under its own weight. The idea of an official statistics conspiracy makes sense only if you don’t know anything about the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Well-run official statistics agencies, such as the US and Canadian ones (and Stats NZ) are set up to make it hard for the current government to fudge the figures. Even for something much less important than the employment figures, attempts by the White House to change the results would, at the minimum, result in senior public servants deciding to spend more time with their families or explore exciting new employment opportunities outside the government sector. (see, for example, the Canadian census debacle)
The employment figures are guarded much more carefully, because of their impacts on politics, economics, and the financial markets. If the Democrats, who are already ahead in the polls, were going to risk a scandal that would dwarf Watergate, they’d want to get more out of it than three tenths of a percentage point in the unemployment rate, about 1.5 times the margin of error.
Matthew Yglesias, who writes a generally sensible and data-heavy opinion column at Slate, has been arguing (correctly) that US immigration policy deserves much more attention than it gets:
Imagine a counterfactual history of the United States in which we had slightly different tax and budget policies over the centuries, and you’re imagining an extremely boring scenario. Most likely, things would be about the same. But imagine a counterfactual history of the United States in which we never opened our borders to the ethnic “others” of the past—the Catholics and Jews of Eastern and Southern Europe, then more recently Asians and Latin Americans. That is a very different vision of America. Not a bad place, necessarily, but probably one that looks a lot more like New Zealand—pleasant, much less densely populated, much more focused on primary commodities, somewhat poorer, and much more monolithically focused on the originally settled port cities.
He clearly doesn’t realise that nearly a quarter of NZ residents were born elsewhere, a figure the US has not approached for at least 150 years.
The Herald has a pretty good story about the latest migration figures. It’s nice to see a link to the data source, and there’s some sensible discussion about trends and about the actual implications of a small net outflow of migrants.
Twenty-two people didn’t get murdered last year. Another 576 didn’t get robbed. Some 5300 fewer people were ripped off by fraudsters. Those who say we’re drowning in a crime wave appear not to know reported crime is the lowest it’s been this century.
A good data-based lead in to a story about community policing in the Herald today. Because crimes are much more obvious than non-crimes (I didn’t get mugged today, and my house wasn’t broken into!), it’s easy to think that crimes are increasing whether they are or not.
Two cautionary notes: we can directly observe crime rates going up or down, but the idea that we can directly observe why this is happening is a powerful cognitive illusion. It looks as though community policing is working, but there could be other reasons for crime going down (for example, whatever is responsible in the US). Secondly, my reaction to “those who say we’re drowning in a crime wave” is something along the lines of “Really? Who?” All I could find on the Google were headlines that say “crime wave” when they just mean “more than one crime.”
I don’t know for sure (though I have my suspicions) whether it’s possible to rigorously demonstrate a temperature trend using data just from New Zealand. I’m sure it’s not possible to demostrate that mammograms save lives using data just from New Zealand. Fortunately, there’s no real need to do so in either case.
We’ve mentioned the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project before. The project is run by a physicist and former climate-change skeptic, Richard Muller, and has statistical leadership from the eminent David Brillinger. They have taken a slightly different approach to temperature analyses: they use all available temperature records and weight them for internal consistency rather than selecting a high-quality subset, and their analyses of relationships between temperature and other factors are purely statistical, not based on climate models. It makes astonishingly little difference (except that they can get better estimates of statistical uncertainty).
Here are two graphs from their results summary page. (more…)