November 21, 2011

Stat of the Week Competition: November 19-25 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 November 25 2011.
  • Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
  • The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of November 19-25 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.

Nominations

  • avatar
    Sammie Jia

    Statistic: The author used kind of PCA to show the positions of different parties. Also with ‘Percentage of agreement’ as ‘distance’.
    Source: theyworkforyou
    Date: recently

    There is no exact date on this page, but i assume this is new because the election finished recently.

    The author used kind of PCA to show the positions of different parties. Also with ‘Percentage of agreement’ as ‘distance’.

    All look statistical but look pseudo-statistical to me

    13 years ago

  • avatar
    Rob McKinnon

    Statistic: How closely did parties vote on bills in the 49th NZ Parliament?
    Source: TheyWorkForYou.co.nz
    Date: Thu 24th Nov 2011

    By analysing party voting on final bill readings, we can see how the political parties differ when it came to legislation passed during the 49th New Zealand Parliament.

    The analysis summarises three years of party bill votes in a single graphic. This information was not available anywhere else.

    The plot was created by a statistical analysis of final bill reading votes, using principal components analysis. The two principal components plotted explain 83.2% of the variance in the way parties voted on final bill readings.

    Raw data used in the analysis is available here: http://theyworkforyou.co.nz/parties/third_reading_and_negatived_votes

    A blog post explaining how you can do the PCA analysis yourself using the R statistics environment is here: http://blog.theyworkforyou.co.nz/post/55519819/statistical-analysis-of-nz-parliament-bill-votes

    More party voting analysis and information, including a table of the percentage of the time political parties agreed on bills is here:
    http://theyworkforyou.co.nz/parliaments/49

    13 years ago