Another seasonal phenomenon at this time of year is the end of US college football. For those who haven’t encountered the game, American football is not entirely unlike rugby, only with less actual kicking and more ad breaks.

Some economists in Oregon have looked at the relationship between the average male:female GPA difference  at the University of Oregon and the performance of the Ducks, the University’s football team.

So what did the economists find? While the average GPA for male students was always lower than for female students, there was a definite pattern with a larger gap in years when the Ducks did well and a smaller gap when the team did poorly. (more…)

The New York Times has an amazing infographic of the World’s Greatest Atrocities, that I’ve been looking for an excuse to link to.

And the seasonal link? Today  in the Catholic/Anglican/Lutheran churches (or tomorrow, in the Eastern Orthodox churches) is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the children killed by Herod, and remembered in the famous Coventry Carol.

According to Wikipedia

Byzantine liturgy estimated 14,000 Holy Innocents while an early Syrian list of saints stated the number at 64,000. Coptic sources raise the number to 144,000 and place the event on 29 December. Taking the narrative literally and judging from the estimated population of Bethlehem, the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) more soberly suggested that these numbers were inflated, and that probably only between six and twenty children were killed in the town, with a dozen or so more in the surrounding areas.

It’s easy to magnify the atrocities committed by our enemies, minimize those of our side, and simply forget about those committed by and against people on the other side of the world.

From Sonia Pollak’s winning Stat of the Week

Now, if we look at the number of people who lodged a claim on Christmas day: this was 3040.
In the 07/08 financial year there was 1.8 million claims, an average of around 5000 a day.

Telling people to look out over the Christmas period and take care is good, but from this, it would appear that actually, Christmas day has less, if not accidents, claims than the average day.

Another famous example in journalism is by Eric Meyer, (via Robert Niles)

My personal favorite was a habit we use to have years ago, when I was working in Milwaukee. Whenever it snowed heavily, we’d call the sheriff’s office, which was responsible for patrolling the freeways, and ask how many fender-benders had been reported that day. Inevitably, we’d have a lede that said something like, “A fierce winter storm dumped 8 inches of snow on Milwaukee, snarled rush-hour traffic and caused 28 fender-benders on county freeways” — until one day I dared to ask the sheriff’s department how many fender-benders were reported on clear, sunny days. The answer — 48 — made me wonder whether in the future we’d run stories saying, “A fierce winter snowstorm prevented 20 fender-benders on county freeways today.” There may or may not have been more accidents per mile traveled in the snow, but clearly there were fewer accidents when it snowed than when it did not. (more…)

Congratulations to Sonia Polak for her winning nomination the “killer ham” statistic of the week!

If you haven’t already, go read her excellent commentary.

This summer, we would like to invite readers of Stats Chat to submit nominations for our Stat of the Summer competition and be in with the chance to win a copy of “Beautiful Evidence” by Edward Tufte:

Here’s how it works:

• Anyone may add a comment on this post to nominate their Stat of the Summer candidate before midday Friday March 2 2012.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of December 24 2011 – March 2 2012 inclusive.
• Quote the statistic, when and where it was published and tell us why it should be our Stat of the Summer.

On Monday 5 March 2012 at midday we’ll announce the winner of the Stat of the Summer competition, and restart the weekly competition.

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.
• 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 copy of “Beautiful Evidence” by Edward Tufte.
• The blog moderator will contact the winner via their notified email address and request their postal address for the book to be sent to.
• The competition will commence Saturday 24 December 2011 and continue until midday Friday 2 March 2012.

For mathematicians, philosophers, or those of you who left things a bit late….

[From XKCD, of course. PS: Confused?]

Now that the election is over and the question is less urgently political, it might be safe to ask why the NZ media is so fixated on Australia.

NZ net emigration figures for  November have just been released and widely reported on.  At least, net emigration to Australia has been widely reported on.  Total net emigration last month (50 people) hasn’t made the news anywhere except New York.

I’m sure I’m not the only person moving to NZ from somewhere other than Australia who wonders why we don’t count.

After British singer Amy Winehouse died in July aged 27, out popped various lists of those music stars who had died at the same age, among them Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain.

An enterprising Aussie stat-man has now looked at the numbers and has found that rock stars are three times more likely to die in their 20s and 30s than everyone else – but age 27 is not particularly doom-laden.

The full story is originally from the Telegraph, and was reprinted in today’s New Zealand Herald.

… is for the media to stop making hackneyed stories out of self-selecting and meaningless ‘polls’ hawked by companies seeking free profile.  Yes, vast expanses of white space between the ads need to be filled, but really … This is in today’s Herald:

Auckland most hostile city – by a country mile

It’s the city many past the Bombay Hills love to hate and now Auckland has topped a poll to find the least friendly places in New Zealand. The city led the online poll by Yahoo NZ Travel with 50 per cent of the 4231 votes.

Thankfully Mayor Brown pointed out (and the paper reported) that  a “scientific survey” found the opposite.

The full story is here.

The NALP has released data on starting salaries for US lawyers in 2011, and the distribution is really weird.

Usually we expect salary distributions to be skewed, with a long upper tail, but in this case there are two modes: a large group earning around $45k and a smaller group earning about $160k. The mean income is about $80k, the median is about $60k, and neither is a good summary of what someone is likely to make.

The distribution didn’t always look like this. Twenty years ago, starting salaries for lawyers had a more familiar skewed distribution, with a single mode around $30k.

Over the twenty-year period, the income at the lower mode has rised by about 50%, but US median household income has roughly doubled, and the CPI has increased by about 65%.  Some law graduates are raking it in; most are not, and they nearly all have to pay off huge sums in student loans.

In reality the figures are probably worse than this for the majority: there’s a lot of missing data.  As Paul Campos puts it “People without salaries are reluctant to report their salaries”