Stats Chat

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.

Graeme Hill on Radio Live interviewed Professor Chris Triggs, head of the Department of Statistics at The University of Auckland earlier today about Stats Chat.

You can listen to the interview online here.

There’s a new genetic study (stuff.co.nz has the Associated Press article) claiming that variation in intelligence is about 50% genetic.  That claim is not new, but previous studies got estimates like that by studying the IQ of close relatives,  and this study actually measures genes.  The researchers studied 3500 unrelated people in Scotland and England,   measuring half a million genetic variants on each person and relating them to two different types of intelligence test, and found that while they couldn’t identify specific genetic variants that affected intelligence, they did find evidence that there were hundreds of variants with some effect.  (more…)

The West Island had their census last night, so the Australian Bureau of Statistics is in the process of collecting millions of little bits of paper from around the country. It’s a good occasion to think about what the census is actually good for, because this goes further than you might think. (more…)

A very good radio documentary (BBC Radio 4) from Ben Goldacre of Bad Science fame.

A recurrent theme of this blog is that your taxes (or, even better, other people’s taxes) pay for the collection of a lot of high-quality data on an amazing range of topics, and you can just go and look it up.

For example, the US Geological Survey has a database of earthquakes that anyone can search.  It includes pretty much everything since 1973, and a more limited coverage back into prehistory.   John Walker’s web site Fourmilab has a range of interesting astronomical pages, including an earth-moon distance calculator.  

Combining these, we can look at the distance from the earth to the moon for all 62667 earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 or greater from 1973 up to early this morning.  Using a complete census this way it’s easy to avoid cherry-picking results that support whatever conclusion you want.  For convenience I translated the earth-moon distance calculator into R, so I could run it more easily on large batches of data. (more…)

You’ll be able to find out on Tuesday August 16 at 4pm, when Department of Statistics masters student Ben Stevenson, who has been working under the supervision of Associate Professor Russell Millar, presents his findings into this very question. See more at http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/events/template/event_item.jsp?cid=411574

Student Ben Stevenson, left, and Associate Professor Russell Millar check out a freshly-caught snapper.

The Media7 science special that recently screened on TVNZ7 included a section on the best and worst science stories of the last year, some of them really useful contributions and some just woeful. Read more at the-best-and-worst-science-stories-revealed

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.

Last week, many newspaper websites (though apparently not any Kiwi ones) reported a study purporting to that users of Internet Explorer had lower IQs than users of other browsers, with IE version 6 users scoring 20 points lower than Firefox users, and more than 40 points lower than users of Opera. The results were supposed to be based on a survey of 100,000 people recruited through ads on websites.  This turns out not to be the case.

What makes the story interesting is how many reasons there were not to believe it. (more…)