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!

Thanks to all who added nominations for our second Stat of the Week competition.

This week we’ve chosen Tony Cooper’s nomination of NZ Herald’s article (reprinted from The Independent) on television’s “lethal” impact.

I (sadly) enjoy the way newspapers take a statistical correlation from scientific journals and turn them into cause-and-effect producing the “television kills” conclusion. A Nobel prize for the Herald, please.

Entertaining for statisticians but perhaps not for the lay public. Very disappointing for someone who watches TV after going for a run and now learns that the TV has undone the benefits of the run.

The nomination was also seconded by Eric Crampton:

Tons of places have been reporting on the “This hour of TV Watching costs you 22 minutes of life” study. But It’s nonsense. Here’s why.

The paper they’re referencing, out of Australia, just extrapolates to some life expectancy tables the results from Dunstan et al, available here: http://t.co/CZZxF36

What do Dunstan et al find? Controlling for some health-related covariates, there may be an increased risk of mortality with TV watching. But have a look at their confidence intervals. First off, their baseline risk is watching less than 2 hours of TV per week. So it’s complete nonsense to talk about an hour costing 22 minutes. Then, the RR for 2-4 hours of watching per day, after controlling for confounds, has a 95% confidence interval that always includes 1.0. To me, that means there’s no statistically significant relationship even if the point estimates on RR are >1.

They’re able to get CIs that don’t include 1.0 on all-source mortality for >4 hours daily watching, but boy do I worry about baseline characteristics of that group being far worse than for the lower watching groups. Yeah, they control for that, and controlling for it reduces the relative risk. But when you can substantially reduce the RR for the health confounds for which you CAN adjust, how much would you additionally reduce the RR for those unobservable health characteristics for which you cannot adjust?

The whole thing just seems sensationalistic. The most you could pull out of the study is that folks watching more than four hours of tv per day may have higher risk of all-source mortality, but that a lot of it may well be due to unobservable health differences between the kind of folks who watch 6 hours of TV per day and the kind of folks who don’t.

Congratulations Tony!

(PS: Bryan Clarke’s nomination about 2 degrees Celsius not being half of 4 degrees Celsius is something which irks various members of the department too but isn’t really statistics.)

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 August 26 2011.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of August 20-26 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!

Here’s the nominations so far for this week’s Stat of the Week competition.  If you’d like to comment on or debate any of these, please do so below! There’s still time for you to add your nomination too.

1. “Statistics gathered by police show from January 1 to the…”

Thanks to all who added nominations for our first Stat of the Week competition. The nominations were all fascinating for a variety of reasons and much could be written about each of them. We’ve chosen Eric Crampton’s nomination of John Pagani’s heated blog post on youth unemployment:

In the midst of extensive discussion of the rise in youth unemployment starting around Q4 2008, Pagani points to changes in apprenticeship funding as a policy shift that could have generated the change (arguing against changes in the youth minimum wage as having been the cause). He writes:
“If it wasn’t the removal of the youth minimum wage that caused youth unemployment to increase, then it would have to have been caused by something else that happened around the same time.

One other big change was the a sharp fall in young people getting skills for work.

In December 2008 there were 133,300 people in industry training. By the end of last year, there were 108,000. ”

You could be forgiven for assuming that about 25,000 kids had been kicked out of apprenticeships – it sure looks like he’s referring to youths. All the other discussion is on youth unemployment. But the number he’s citing is overall enrolment in training and apprenticeships. And the drop in youth enrolment in training – about 4,000 – is nowhere near large enough to provide a plausible alternative explanation.

Congratulations Eric!

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 August 19 2011.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of August 13-19 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.

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

1. “Low hand-hygiene rate putting patients at risk“
2. “Girls of all ethnicity that are not white talked about this“
3. “The top decile have 52 per cent of the country’s wealth, compared with only 25 per cent of the country’s income“
4. “Debt isn’t the reason for cutting public services, it’s the excuse“
5. “17% of Fibre Optic network damage due to squirrels.“
6. “Want your child to love veggies? Start early. Very early.“
7. “Youth unemployment and cuts to apprenticeships.“
8. “27% of employees would recommend their workplace if it were environmentally irresponsible.“

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 August 12 2011.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of August 6-12 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.

This week’s competition is now closed, the winner is announced here.