Posts filed under Silly (68)

Via @BenAtkinsonPhD: a map of heavy metal bands per capita

We’re ahead of the US, though behind the Scandinavian countries, as usual.

(for foreigners: NZ political cliche)

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.

Keith Ng points me to something that’s a bit more technical than we usually cover here on StatsChat, but it was in the New York Times, and it does have  redeeming levels of cutesiness: an animation of the central limit theorem using bunnies and dragons

The point made by the video is that the Normal distribution, or ‘bell curve’, is a good approximation to the distribution of averages even when it is a very poor approximation to the distribution of individual measurements.  Averaging knocks all the corners off a distribution, until what is left can be described just by its mean and spread.  (more…)

The New York Times has reported on a study in which observers sat discreetly in bathrooms and observed whether people “properly” washed their hands (I reckon it would be quite hard to sit discreetly in a bathroom unless you’re in a cubicle). Anyway, the description of the study gave careful attention to the stats: 10.3% of women and over 15 percent of men didn’t wash at all. Of those who did wash, 22.8% did not use soap. And only 5.8% washed for more than 15 seconds.

The lead author said, “Forty-eight million people a year get sick from contaminated food, and the (American) Centre for Communicable Diseases says 50% would not have gotten sick if people had washed their hands properly. Do as your mum said: Wash your hands.”

Surely there’s some basic confusion over percentages here: 50% of those who got sick wouldn’t have if everyone had washed their hands properly, but we have no idea what percentage of those who don’t wash actually get sick.

As a matter of fact, there is no indication that these particular non-handwashers have anything to do at all with the fact that people eat contaminated food. Does it matter what bathroom activity was being carried out? Whether you use toilet paper or your foot to flush? Whether you work in food services? Whether you subsequently wash your hands before eating dinner?

Though mum may have had good advice, this sort of scare-mongering about food-borne illnesses resulting from not washing one’s hands may actually distract us from the real concerns over germs.

• Read the full analysis by Rebecca Goldin, here. She is Director of Research for STATS, an American non-profit, non-partisan service that  helps journalists think quantitatively through providing education, workshops and direct assistance with data analysis.

While watching Discovery Channel’s coverage of Nik Wallenda’s nerve-wracking high-wire walk across the Little Colorado Gorge Grand Canyon*, it was somewhat bothersome to hear the commentators repeatedly say that there was “no room for margin of error”.

I wonder if there’s any other statistical phrase that is used in other contexts so often?

First, the serious one.  Nature News has a story about new immune-based cancer treatments (like Herceptin for breast cancer), some of which are very effective, but which are increasingly expensive.  In contrast to previous `small molecule’ drugs, these won’t necessarily get cheap when the patent runs out, since generic  (technically, `biosimilar’) versions are harder to make and test.

Now for something completely different

By @altonncf — via various people on Twitter who don’t cite original sources. Pro tip: Google Image Search is quite good at finding originals.

Pew Research have released a report on public opinion in Europe. There’s lots of important stuff in there about austerity, the Euro, unemployment, inequality, and so on.  There’s also this entertaining table:

As Robert Burns didn’t quite write: O wad some Pew’R the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us!

Graeme Hill has sent in this clip from his Radio Live show on Sunday. Listen from about 4:30 until 7:00 elapsed.

He calls this quote from ONE News the “stupidest, most outrageous statistic I ever heard this week”:

“Experts say the odds of having two disasters like those in Boston and Texas in the same week are 1 in every 4,800 years.”

The statistic seems to have come from an ABC News story, but there’s no attribution there for the “experts” either.

Graeme Edgeler says on Twitter

I know many gay couples will want to marry quickly, but there *must* be a couple named Adam & Steve and we should totally let them go first.

Should we expect an Adam and Stephen couple? This is an opportunity to use public data and simple probability to get a rough estimate.

StatsNZ reported just over 5000 cohabiting male couples in 2006. That’s an underestimate of male couples, but probably an overestimate of those planning to marry soon.

I remembered seeing Project Steve, from the National Center for Science Education.  They collect signatures supporting the teaching of evolution from scientists named Stephen (after Stephen J. Gould) — they are currently up to 1268 — and make the point that under 1% of US males are named Stephen.

It turns out that they get this information from the US Census.  The most recent data is 1990 (and, of course, is US) so it’s not ideal, but it will give us a rough idea.  Stephen comes in at 0.54%, and when you add in Stephan, Esteban, Stefano, it still is no more than 0.6%.  Adam is 0.259%.

Under random assignment, then, there would be less than a 1 in 10 chance that there’s a couple called Adam and Steve living together in NZ, and even then they might well not be planning to get married.

[Update: Brendon correctly points out that I missed ‘Steven’, which is actually the most common variant. Apart from demonstrating that I’m an idiot, this doesn’t change the basic message.]