Posts filed under Stat of the Week (619)

If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!

Congratulations to Andrew Mardon for being this week’s Stat of the Week winner for his nomination of:

“The higher a country’s chocolate consumption, the more Nobel laureates it spawns per capita, according to findings released in the New England Journal of Medicine.”

While the article mentions both correlation and causation, it doesn’t clearly explain the difference between the two and makes the distinction murkier by saying science is fallible and including a gem quote such as this:

“[The US] would have to up its cocoa intake by a whopping 125 million kg a year to produce one more laureate, said Franz Messerli, who did the analysis.”

Each week, we would like to invite readers of Stats Chat to submit nominations for our Stat of the Week competition and be in with the chance to win an iTunes voucher.

Here’s how it works:

• Anyone may add a comment on this post to nominate their Stat of the Week candidate before midday Friday October 19 2012.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of October 13 – 19 2012 inclusive.
• Quote the statistic, when and where it was published and tell us why it should be our Stat of the Week.

Next Monday at midday we’ll announce the winner of this week’s Stat of the Week competition, and start a new one.

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If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!

Most of StatsChat is just the opinion of its individual authors, who are identified on each post and can criticise anyone they feel deserves it.  The Stat of the Week award is slightly more official and more closely connected with the Department of Statistics, so we are reluctant to award it to statistics about other parts of the University of Auckland.  In particular, we won’t ever give the award to a bad statistic originating from an individual UoA staff member outside the Statistics department, and we will typically avoid giving a `bad statistics’ award to a statistic from any source that criticises the University or the staff union.   You can nominate these statistics, and individuals may decide to write posts about them, but they won’t win the award.

The Herald story about the University travel budget was a borderline case: the statistical problem is not a University one, since the Herald is perfectly capable of dividing by 4.5, and even of finding out how many staff there are and dividing by that number, but there are also real problems with the interpretation of the number, and that’s where this starts to look like special pleading.

Each week, we would like to invite readers of Stats Chat to submit nominations for our Stat of the Week competition and be in with the chance to win an iTunes voucher.

Here’s how it works:

• Anyone may add a comment on this post to nominate their Stat of the Week candidate before midday Friday October 12 2012.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of October 6 – 12 2012 inclusive.
• Quote the statistic, when and where it was published and tell us why it should be our Stat of the Week.

Next Monday at midday we’ll announce the winner of this week’s Stat of the Week competition, and start a new one.

(more…)

If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!

Each week, we would like to invite readers of Stats Chat to submit nominations for our Stat of the Week competition and be in with the chance to win an iTunes voucher.

Here’s how it works:

• Anyone may add a comment on this post to nominate their Stat of the Week candidate before midday Friday October 5 2012.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of September 29 – October 5 2012 inclusive.
• Quote the statistic, when and where it was published and tell us why it should be our Stat of the Week.

Next Monday at midday we’ll announce the winner of this week’s Stat of the Week competition, and start a new one.

(more…)

If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!

Thanks for your nominations last week in our Stat of the Week competition. We’ve selected Alan Keegan’s nomination of car theft data which doesn’t take into consideration the number of vehicles when considering the likelihood of them being stolen.

(Thanks Brent for noticing the date typo in the competition, which has now been corrected. We’d like to think that Stats Chat is not about pointing out others’ typos or mistakes, but intelligently discussing the statistics behind the news and the issues surrounding them.)