Posts filed under Stat of the Week (619)

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 21 2011.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of October 15-21 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!

Thanks for all the nominations this week, especially all those from Tony Cooper! The winning nomination is: “Drowning deaths soar beyond 2010 total” – there are many such stories in the media where the usual type of variability one would expect to see with counts of events is seen as something unusual:

This is similar to my previous nomination in that it is making headlines out of statistical noise.

90 people have now drowned in New Zealand in 2011 and the drowning drowning toll is predicted to rise to 110 or more by the end of the year.

But an examination of the drowning deaths chart at http://www.watersafety.org.nz/research/ shows that 110 is pretty normal and that 2010 was an exceptional year in being below 100.

Looks like we have a new statistical term “soaring to the mean” to replace “reversion to the mean.”

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 14 2011.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of October 8-14 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!

This week we’ve chosen Jeremy Greenbrook-Held’s nomination of this graph found on political blog The Standard:

Many have been criticising the graph, including David Farrar, those in the comments on The Standard and a blog post on Stuff, and here’s a summary of the main concerns:

1. Using cumulative figures, making it appear as though the rate of emigration is increasing.
2. Starting the graph at zero makes it appear as though no-one emigrated prior to John Key becoming Prime Minister.
3. The graph uses gross migration rather than net migration
4. Not displaying historial emigration data for comparison

David Farrar created a graph which addresses points 3 and 4 above:

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 7 2011.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of October 1-7 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!

Thank you for the large number of nominations for last week’s Stat of the Week competition.

This week’s winning statistic was first nominated by Deepika Sulekh:

Women who eat low-fat yoghurt while pregnant increase their chances of having children who develop asthma and hay fever.

Daily yoghurt consumption raised the odds 1.6 times of giving birth to a child who suffered from asthma by the age of seven.

We plan to write up some thoughts on this study once the paper is published and we’ve had a read. In the meantime read this blog post over at Junk Science.

(Special mention must go to Natalie’s comments about the “one in 3200 chance of the space junk hitting SOMEONE”.)

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 September 30 2011.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of September 24-30 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.