Posts from November 2011 (34)

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.

If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!

Over-protective mothers are now being blamed for road deaths among teenage boys.  I suppose it’s a change from saying that overprotective mothers make boys gay, as Freud famously imagined.

We’ve written before about the problem of seeing and trying to explain a trend when there’s really nothing there but random variation.  That isn’t what’s happening here.  In this case the trend is real. It’s just in the opposite direction to the explanation. (more…)

Goodhart’s Law says Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

The Big Mac Index has been used to compare prices across countries, as we have noted before.  Brazil Argentina currently has very high prices due to a combination of inflation and a strong economy, and this shows up glaringly in the Big Mac Index.

Tyler Cowen reports (translating a Spanish original) that the Brazilian Argentinian government has persuaded McDonalds to lower the price of the Big Mac (relative  to other McDonalds items, and relative to competing hamburgers), so that Brazil’s Big Mac Index becomes more competitive.

Updated: I actually do know that Argentina and Brazil are different countries, and that Brazil doesn’t speak Spanish.

Housing prices are in the news again, and I was curious to see how much of the change in prices is just ordinary inflation, and how much is real improvement. Over the past 45 years, housing prices have increased more than fifty-fold.  Barfoot & Thompson like to point this out, and they have a graph of Auckland prices that is designed to show the increase very dramatically.  But other things from apples to yachts are also more expensive than they were in the past. (more…)

Thanks for to those who nominated something for last week’s Stat of the Week competition, however no winner is being awarded this week.

We would like to pay special tribute to Stephen Cope’s excellent graphic on the Rena – not only because it improved a terrible one in the NZ Herald but because his was so clear. Thanks Stephen!

If you see a poor graphic in the media and have suggestions for how it can be improved, please let us know!

Everyone has heard of the placebo effect, but a lesser known effect is its counterpart, the so-called nocebo effect, which Wikipedia describes as:

A harmful, unpleasant, or undesirable effects a subject manifests after receiving an inert dummy drug or placebo. Nocebo responses are not chemically generated and are due only to the subject’s pessimistic belief and expectation that the inert drug will produce negative consequences.

In today’s Guardian paper, they’ve printed an edited version of Penny Sarchet’s winning essay on nocebo research in the Wellcome Trust science writing competition. Well worth a read.

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 18 2011.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of November 12-18 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.

If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!

Q: Did you see the BBC news article about dietary fibre and bowel cancer?

A: No, but I’ll go look. [reading noises]

Q: Well?

A: They definitely  get points for linking to the article in the British Medical Journal (and it’s even an open access article that anyone can read).

Q: Haven’t we beaten that issue into the ground yet?

A: Apparently not. (more…)