August 15, 2011
Stat of the Week Competition: August 13-19 2011
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.
Statistic: Statistics gathered by police show from January 1 to the July 31, 3846 drivers aged 20 and under were caught with excess breath alcohol.
That is well behind older drivers, 4837 between 21-30 and 4500 drivers between 31-50.
In the over fifties 1221 blew over the limit.
Source: TV3 News
Date: Sunday August 14
For truly awful handling of statistics.
The story tried to suggest that fewer young drivers were caught with excess breath alcohol, and were therefore unfairly targeted by the new zero limit. There was only a quick mention that the stats don’t take into account the number of drivers in each age group. Unfortunately taking that into account would almost certainly have made the story completely wrong and irrelevant.
13 years ago
Statistic: “Auckland’s high was only four degrees but in Wellington it was just half that.”
Source: TV1 7pm weather (or was it TV3)?
Date: Monday 15/8/11
Half of four degrees Celsius is not 2 degrees Celsius – it’s -134.5 isn’t it?
13 years ago
Statistic: Lethal impact of watching the box
Television kills – or at least it shortens your life by 22 minutes for every hour you spend glued to the screen.
Source: New Zealand Herald
Date: 17 August 2011
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.
Reference
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bjsm.2011.085662
13 years ago
Statistic: Young New Zealand women have the highest rate of suicide in the OECD, figures released today show.
Source: Manawatu Standard
Date: 17/08/11
Atention grabbing and misleading.
NZ’s female youth suicide rate is higher than any other OECD country, but it is not the highest overall rate in the OECD as implied by this mangling of information. And further, the report states that in NZ men have a much higher rate than women and the age group with the highest rate is 20-24, followed by the over 80 (which can be volitile and hard to track due to low numbers in this group).
The whole story focuses on one small and sensational part of a report that is about more than youth suicide and continues the trend of getting over excited about youth suicide, while almost ignoring the mental health issues of older people.
13 years ago
Statistic: I’m going to second Tony’s nomination of the “This Hour Cost 22 Minutes” study.
Source: Herald
Date: 17 August
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.
13 years ago