Posts from August 2011 (37)

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!

From the Dominion Post, via stuff.co.nz: The Cabinet will today issue an instruction to government departments that they should make all data they hold available for free or at a reasonable-price in accessible file formats for reuse by businesses, unless there are good reasons not to.

This policy has worked very well in the US, where the website data.gov, after just over two years’ of operation, has nearly 400,000 data sets, and there are 236 apps available on the web that make use of the data to do things that would otherwise be expensive or impossible.

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…)

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.“

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.