September 26, 2011
Stat of the Week Competition: September 24-30
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.
Statistic: Smells that best epitomise New Zealand:
* Sea air at the bach: 53 per cent
* A sheep or dairy farm: 19 per cent
* Fish and chips: 15 per cent
* A hangi cooking: 10 per cent
New Zealand’s worst smells:
* Rubbish dumps: 49 per cent
* Freezing works: 28 per cent
* Fish markets: 13 per cent
* Rotorua’s geysers, hot pools: 10 per cent
Source: NZ herald
Date: Monday Sep 26, 2011
This is fun to tell how NZers preceive NZ in the aspect of smells.
However, the article didnt explain how the survey was carried out.
13 years ago
Statistic: Apparently – women are worse at parking than men.
Headline: “Driving tests confirm: Women really are worse at parking”
“Almost a third of the 170,000 women who failed their driving test in the UK last year for mistakes in reversing or failing to use their mirrors came unstuck on parallel parking.”
“Researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum, in Germany, who asked 65 volunteers to park a £23,000 Audi, found that women took up to 20 seconds longer than men.”
“Female drivers need an average 52 hours of tuition to pass but men speed through in just 36 hours of lessons.”
Source: New Zealand Herald (Written for the Daily Mail)
Date: 27/09/2011
The article doesn’t seem to contain evidence that really suggests any causal relationship between being a woman and being bad at parking.
There doesn’t seem much relevance in reporting the proportion of females that failed because of parallel parking if this isn’t compared to the corresponding proportion of males.
Saying that women were ‘up to 20 seconds’ slower than men at parking also doesn’t prove much. Perhaps some individual women were ‘up to x seconds’ faster than men too. This doesn’t seem to be a statistical analysis of the difference between the means. Also, speed isn’t necessarily related to quality of parking.
Also, no evidence is presented to suggest that the amount of time it takes to learn to drive is any way correlated with subsequent ability, isn’t the whole point of passing a test supposed to be demonstrating competence in the subject area?
13 years ago
Statistic: Cumulative Emegration to Australia under John Key (A graph, and a visual play on statistics rather than a statistic in itself).
Source: The Standard
Date: 28 Sept
Wah! Emigration has consistently increased under John Key’s watch! Oh, wait, no it hasn’t – if anything it’s been consistent, but the cumulative graph is misleading.
13 years ago
Statistic: Explaining the plans for a new location planned for league fans to TV3 news, mayor Len Brown said he was expecting “up to ten thousand people — at least”.
Which although literally would infer that he was very precise in his expectation would get most people thinking otherwise.
Source: TV3 News
Date: Monday 26 september 2011 evening news
It shows how people love to try and sound important and give certainty with numbers, even when they realise mid sentence that they have no idea what that number should be. It also explains the mayoral thought process behind the poor event planning.
13 years ago
Statistic: An All Black win in the Rugby World Cup final will result in widespread celebrations – at Party Central … and in the bedroom.
A Durex survey done in the past week has found two-thirds of Kiwis expected to have more sex as a result of the Rugby World Cup.
And, if All Blacks can take home the cup, nearly everyone who participated in the survey – 96 per cent – said they planned on celebrating by having sex.
According to the survey 10 per cent of the 350 respondents admitted to having had sex at a big sports tournament in the past.
Just over a third said they’d choose Party Central in downtown Auckland as the best public place for a sexual liaison, with 22 per cent preferring to linger at a stadium after the game for their celebrations.
Adonis Souloglou from Durex said the survey was “another bit of good news” for Kiwis among the excitement of the Rugby World Cup.
“There’s so much going on right around the county, it’s hard not to get caught up in the exhilaration and emotion of the tournament.
“Obviously we want Kiwis to get the most out of it – whether they are at the game or in the bedroom.”
And it’s not just good news for the fans either. Seventy-six per cent of respondents believed sports players should have sex in the lead-up to a game if they want to – with 17 per cent stating they should have as much sex as they can to help them perform on the field.
Only 7 per cent believe abstaining from sex was the way to go for all-round performance.
Source: NZ herald
Date: Friday Sep 30, 2011
It is funny that Durex connects sex with RWC.
The number of 350 respondents is not bad. But i doubt that the response bias could be large. How do they visit the participants? Are the participants the Durex’ consumers? This is more advertising than social behavour report.
13 years ago