Posts filed under Stat of the Week (619)

There’s still time to add your nominations for the Stat of the Summer competition, and here’s the most recent two nominations:

Outrageous Stat of the Summer?

John Small critiques the following figures:

“the $1.35 billion Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) and $300 million Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) will add $5 billion to GDP over their 20-year life time”

Students flee NZ over job fears?

Mark Wilson says the NZ Herald’s headline is misleading and the article lacks context. Thomas Lumley has subsequently blogged about this.

There’s still time to add your nominations for the Stat of the Summer competition, and here’s the most recent three nominations:

Child abuse statistics

Simon Moyes nominated a statistic from the Oamaru Mail on child abuse statistics.

Mondayising holidays

Simon also nominated the $400 million figure quoted in the NZ Herald.

Displaced / Causation

Sakshi Kalani nominated the NZ Herald for its article on workforce statistics:

Old people have displaced more than 40,000 teenagers from jobs in the past five years as more choose to stay on in the workforce and employers shun youth for experience.

Please add your nominations too!

Nominations for the Stat of the Summer are still open, and here’s the most recent three nominations:

What does relatively few mean?

Cam Slater nominated a quote from the NZ Herald:

“Auckland has become a city of extremes, containing more than half of the country’s total students in both the richest (decile 10) and the poorest (decile 1) schools, with relatively few in between.”

His comment was:

“Really…with with more than half in decile one and and decile 10 that means nearly half are in between not “relatively few”.”

How many?

Stephanie Mills nominated a quote from the Dominion Post:

Hundreds of teachers have criminal convictions and many are not fit to teach

Her comment included:

Given the Teachers Council says there are 100,000 teachers, and (say) 25 teachers were de-registered in each year, this can hardly lead to the conclusion that “many” are unfit to teach.

Thomas Lumley picked up on this and blogged yesterday on the topic, giving some context to the statistics.

Confusion

Sammie Jia nominated a quote from the NZ Herald:

Departing students owe more than those who stay

His comment included:

I am confused by the title and the content here. The article showed some comparisons but i dont understand the author’s purpose.Graduates with more loan tend to go overseas to earn more to repay or just avoid to repay. The title makes me think as long as graduates leave NZ they will owe more.

Go add your nominations, or if you would like to discuss these, add your thoughts below.

Our Stat of the Summer Competition is still running! Please submit your nominations and be in with the chance to win a copy of Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte:

For more details, see the competition page.

Congratulations to Sonia Polak for her winning nomination the “killer ham” statistic of the week!

If you haven’t already, go read her excellent commentary.

This summer, we would like to invite readers of Stats Chat to submit nominations for our Stat of the Summer competition and be in with the chance to win a copy of “Beautiful Evidence” by Edward Tufte:

Here’s how it works:

• Anyone may add a comment on this post to nominate their Stat of the Summer candidate before midday Friday March 2 2012.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of December 24 2011 – March 2 2012 inclusive.
• Quote the statistic, when and where it was published and tell us why it should be our Stat of the Summer.

On Monday 5 March 2012 at midday we’ll announce the winner of the Stat of the Summer competition, and restart the weekly competition.

The fine print:

• Judging will be conducted by the blog moderator in liaison with staff at the Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland.
• The judges’ decision will be final.
• The judges can decide not to award a prize if they do not believe a suitable statistic has been posted.
• Only the first nomination of any individual example of a statistic used in the NZ media will qualify for the competition.
• Employees (other than student employees) of the Statistics department at the University of Auckland are not eligible to win.
• The person posting the winning entry will receive a copy of “Beautiful Evidence” by Edward Tufte.
• The blog moderator will contact the winner via their notified email address and request their postal address for the book to be sent to.
• The competition will commence Saturday 24 December 2011 and continue until midday Friday 2 March 2012.

Thanks to Sammy and Steve for their nominations last week.

Sammy highlights a very common misconception – except that those who think it are not going to be loyal viewers of StatsChat!

Steve’s graph does suppress zero, but the data is there to think about, and the number of injuries reported has – for whatever reason – almost doubled in 5 years.

Congratulations to Sammy for being this week’s Stat of the Week winner!

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 December 23 2011.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of December 17-23 2011 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.

The fine print:

• Judging will be conducted by the blog moderator in liaison with staff at the Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland.
• The judges’ decision will be final.
• The judges can decide not to award a prize if they do not believe a suitable statistic has been posted in the preceeding week.
• Only the first nomination of any individual example of a statistic used in the NZ media will qualify for the competition.
• Employees (other than student employees) of the Statistics department at the University of Auckland are not eligible to win.
• The person posting the winning entry will receive a $20 iTunes voucher.
• The blog moderator will contact the winner via their notified email address and advise the details of the $20 iTunes voucher to that same email address.
• The competition will commence Monday 8 August 2011 and continue until cancellation is notified on the blog.

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 David Welch for his nomination winning our Stat of the Week award!

He nominated a front page story on the NZ Herald:

Almost half of Kiwis working overseas make more than $100,000 a year – and they are split on whether they want to come home. A quarter say they have no wish to return to New Zealand to live, but 27 per cent are looking for work here.

David commented:

A classic case of a non-representative sample — the real statistic here is that half of 15000 Kea members who chose to respond to an online survey earn over 100k. Throughout the article, the proper “respondents” is replaced with “kiwis”. But then it wouldn’t be news-worthy…

While the headline and introductory comments use “Kiwis” (and the point about a non-representative sample is not addressed in the article) the rest of the article may now have been updated to indicate it was only for survey respondents. We note also that original press release from Kea is careful with its wording, using “respondents” and “overseas-based Kiwis in the survey”.