If 100 plants were allowed to grow to maturity, conservatively worth $400000 in income.
Simple arithmetical operations on these numbers show them to be not entirely consistent: if you can turn a crop that will at maturity be worth between $50,000 and $100,000 into $400,000 in income, you’re in the wrong business.
The recycled numbers are
A study involving the police and Environmental Science and Research released last month found that levels of THC, the primary psychoactive compound in cannabis, was more than four times stronger than in 1996 when ESR last tested it.
As we pointed out last time this statistic appeared, and will keep pointing out when it gets recycled in the future, what they actually found was that in 2004-2006 the maximum concentration was four times higher than the mean concentration in 1996.
The faster-than-light neutrinos found at CERN last year were always very likely to be some subtle experimental error, and the odds of this seem to have gone up. Professor Matt Strassler, who actually knows what he is talking about, has some blog posts on the topic, including a very nice graphic that will be familiar to statistics teachers. The initial news reports last week said the FTL problem had gone away, but that appears not to be true. What we’re waiting to find out is both what the estimated speed is, and how much uncertainty there is. It could still be that the results are inconsistent with relativity, and that some other explanation is needed. Or it could be that the uncertainty is larger than the 60 nanosecond timing anomaly, so the results are consistent with relativity. Or, the experiment could have been sufficiently messed up not to tell us anything. In any case, the real test will come when someone repeats the experiment.
“the $1.35 billion Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) and $300 million Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) will add $5 billion to GDP over their 20-year life time”
Students flee NZ over job fears?
Mark Wilson says the NZ Herald’s headline is misleading and the article lacks context. Thomas Lumley has subsequently blogged about this.
Last week, The Australian reported on the politics of same-sex marriage in the West Island. The story is a bit old (I picked it up from John Quiggin), but it’s such an impressive example that it’s still worth mentioning.
Roy Morgan Single Source survey data from the middle of last year shows that over a quarter of Australians aged 14 and over — 26.8 per cent — agreed with the blunt proposition “I believe homosexuality is immoral”.
That’s a fairly small minority, and although there is variation, it’s a minority everywhere in the country. But there is this:
In 80 of the 150 federal electorates, an above-average number of people support the proposition.
So. In about half the electorates the proportion supporting the proposition is above the national average (but still a minority), and in about half it is below the national average. That sure tells us a lot.
Thirty-three of these 80 are Labor seats. They take in a who’s who of the ALP.
Of the half that are above the national average, the proportion held by Labor is 41%, a little less than the 48% of all seats they hold.
[Update: in related news, 49% of British households get less than the national average broadband speed]
Family First have collected some data from the Ministry of Education on ‘fees or donations’ to NZ state schools. You can read the Herald story, or just get the press release directly, without the light editing the newspaper provides.
The figure of $250 million per year is pretty impressive. NZ has about 750,000 children in school (EducationCounts, school roll returns), so that’s maybe $330 per child, which is quite a bit for free education.
Unfortunately, Family First thought that wasn’t a big enough number and decided it would look better as a total over four years of about a billion dollars. There’s obviously nothing special about four years here: school donations have been an issue for much longer than that, there wasn’t a big change in laws or policies four years ago, and no-one plans budgets over four year blocks, not schools, not government, not families. It’s bad enough when reports don’t provide any context for numbers, without going out of their way to remove it. Presumably if Family First had been able to get ten years of data (and inflation-adjust it), we would see a headline total of $2.5 billion.
Interestingly, one of the paragraphs from the press release that didn’t make it into the story said that the Ministry couldn’t provide information on the proportion of parents who actually paid the donations. This is interesting because the Herald has collected information of this sort itself in the past, as reported in this story and the Wikipedia article. As you might expect, the proportion paying was lower in the low-decile schools, but even in the high-decile schools there were quite a few who didn’t pay.
From the Herald (and via a Stat of the Summer submission), a story on students leaving NZ because of job fears. According to the poll, students are more likely to be worried about getting a job when they finish than about their next rent bill or next decent meal. That’s what you’d hope, and it doesn’t really seem surprising.
We aren’t told whether the students planning to head overseas are the ones worried about getting a job here, or whether they’re the ones who could easily get a job in NZ but looking for higher pay or new surroundings. In fact, it’s worse than that. The story says
While a third planned on moving straight into career mode after study,…18 per cent were heading overseas – either for work or timeout.
That is, the 18% planning to head overseas includes all the ones aiming for time off and foreign travel. This means there is absolutely no support in the story for the headline claim that students are leaving NZ because of job fears.
The other interesting part about the story is the attribution: “an online Colmar Brunton survey of more than 1000 students conducted on behalf of Student Job Search.” That sounds like it’s one of the surveys from saywhat.co.nz, a site where people aged 15-30 can sign up to do fill in questionnaires for the chance to win prizes. It’s hard to tell how accurate these polls are: they are a self-selected sample, but the respondents do have to give some personal information that could help adjust for the selection bias. The website uses age and gender as examples, which would be completely inadequate, but they may collect more useful information in the sign-up process (or, of course, by mining it from Facebook and the like).
You will have noticed the Herald’s ‘Fat list’ of foods yesterday. University of Otago researchers have come up with another idea for helping people lose weight; a list of foods that are high in calories and low in other nutrients, which aren’t necessary and can be trimmed from your diet. It’s a plausible approach, and while you might have thought the items on the list were obvious, the Herald article makes it clear that they aren’t.
For example, Honey NZ manager Greig Duncan was quoted as saying that honey was “a healthier alternative, and had many other health benefits important for a balanced diet” and that “Because honey is such a natural product, it has a lot of bioactivity which is all part of a natural diet.” At times like these it is important to remember the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davies: “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?”
The only problem with the NEEDNT list is that we are given no evidence that it actually works as a health intervention. That is, does handing out copies of this food list to people actually lead to weight loss? Does it work better than giving them a copy of the Atkins diet books, or the CSIRO Prudent Diet, or the South Beach diet? Or making them take photos of all their food? Or sending them text messages about exercise? Or any of the other thirteen bazillion weight loss strategies that have been published over the past half-century? This is exactly the sort of public health intervention that needs a randomized trial. It’s more work and less fun than coming up with creative weight-loss ideas, but it has the advantage of actually being useful.
In the mid-70s, the British comedy duet Flanders & Swann wrote a song about dietary fads, called “Food for Thought”. It’s depressing how little it has dated.
The secret is, think white fish. You can gorge until it hurts. But just one piece of shortcake and you’ll get your just desserts.
Super Rugby is on again and I will be giving my predictions each week.
Team Ratings for Week 1
Here are the team ratings prior to week 1. Most notable is the low ranking for the Reds. They did well last year but were poor before that.
Rating
Crusaders
10.46
Stormers
6.59
Reds
5.03
Waratahs
4.98
Bulls
4.16
Blues
2.87
Sharks
0.87
Chiefs
-1.17
Cheetahs
-1.46
Hurricanes
-1.90
Force
-4.95
Highlanders
-5.69
Brumbies
-6.66
Lions
-10.82
Rebels
-15.64
Predictions for Week 1
Here are the predictions for Week 1. The prediction is my estimated points difference with a positive prediction being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team. Comparing with the other tipsters in the NZ Herald this morning, I was the only one to tip the Cheetahs. That’s because the Lions have been consistently awful, while the Cheetahs actually had some reasonable results last year.
Moneyball is a semi-biographical film, starring Brad Pitt (Inglorious Basterds, Oceans 11-13, Fight Club), Jonah Hill (Superbad, Knocked Up) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Boat That Rocked, Charlie Wilson’s War, Capote), which tells the story of how the Oakland Athletics (better known as the Oakland A’s) reversed their 2001 baseball season performance with a minimal budget and the use of statistics. The film is a dramatisation of Michael Lewis’ 2003 book of the same name.
The film is an account of how Oakland’s general manager Billy Beane (Pitt) hired Yale economics graduate Peter Brand (Hill) as assistant GM to help assemble a new team with a relatively small budget. Small, at the time, was USD 40 million, which is about a third of the money being spent by the top teams in the league.
The story line, from a statistical point of view, is how the data can reveal a different picture from commonly perceived wisdom or prejudice. Beane’s management team is portrayed as a collection of old cronies and hangers-on, whose player selection method is based on “likes”,”dislikes” and rumours about form or injury, without apparent consideration of true performance. Brand, on the other hand, is portrayed as a true baseball geek, and a true geek – being pudgy, nerdy, far from athletic, and happier with a computer than people. It is an odd, stereotypical, choice given that tThe Brand character is fictional. In real life, Brand’s equivalent is Paul DePodesta, who is slim, Harvard (not Yale) educated, and a former baseball player. Brand/DePodesta is an ardent believer in methods developed by baseball historian, writer and statistician Bill James, who is credited as being the first person to use data and statistical methods to analyse player and team performance. James is credited with the term “sabermetrics” which derives from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).
As one would expect, the statistical aspects of the the storyline are reduced to playing the percentages. That is, Beane and Brand use the averages to gain competitive advantage over other teams. However, there is a hidden salutary message, in that statistics can only tell us what will happen on average, and says very little about individual events. I liked this because I felt it was a nice message about consideration of variation as well as the mean.
Overall, this was a generally enjoyable movie. It has been nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture. Some of the crunch points were lost on me and other members of the audience, because of our unfamiliarity with the rules and structure of a baseball game and the league as a whole. Don’t let this put you off, however. It is a fun David and Goliath-type story and will appeal to all.
and the two bites have different codes: W61.01XA (initial encounter), and W61.01XD (subsequent encounter). If it was a kakariki instead, the codes would be under W61.21(Bitten by other psittacines), but having a magpie dive into your head would just be the more general W61.92 (Struck by other birds).
