June 4, 2012

Stat of the Week Competition: June 2-8 2012

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 June 8 2012.
  • Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
  • The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of June 2-8 2012 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
    Tony Cooper

    Statistic: Once in a lifetime transit of Venus
    Source: Numerous sources in NZ
    Date: 2012

    Numerous sources describe the transit as a “once in a lifetime” event. For example the Listener said “no matter where you are on Wednesday, June 6, this is a once in a lifetime event.”

    This isn’t true because transits occur in pairs 8 years apart. The last one was 2004. That’s twice in most people’s lifetime.

    Transits of Venus are twice-in-alifetime events.

    [A list of transits till the year 4000 is at http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/transit/catalog/VenusCatalog.html. Both the 2117 and 2125 transits will be visible from NZ but the latter only just]

    12 years ago

  • avatar
    Robyn Gandell

    Statistic: John Key, on National radio this morning, reiterated that our education system is failing one in five students. This seems awfully high given New Zealand’s consistently good ranking in the international PISA studies on student achievement.
    Further investigation, on the Ministry of Education website, shows that NZ student achievement (graphs from PISA data) doesn’t fall below 80% in maths and literacy until level 3!

    Interestingly these graphs show Level 1 achievement at or above 95% (it’s a little hard to tell as the scale is graded in 20% increments). This leads me to wonder, given recent difficulties the government has had with numbers, whether someone read 5% failure as 1 in 5 students.
    Later on the same programme Ian Leckie from NZIE queried the 1 in 5 statistic stating the accepted failure was around 5 -7%.
    Source: John Key on National Radio
    Date: 8/6/2012

    Repeat a bad statistic enough times and people believe it’s veracity.

    12 years ago

  • avatar
    Stephen Murray

    Statistic: Only 9.3 per cent of the top 100 NZX-listed companies have female directors, compared with 17.3 across the Tasman.
    Source: Dominion Post
    Date: June 8

    9.3% of 100 is 9.3, so the sentence implies that NZX companies are measured continuously, not discretely (you learn something new every day)

    What I think they wanted to say is that 9.3% of the directors of the top 100 NZX-listed companies are female, which is actually feasible.

    12 years ago

  • avatar
    Nick Iversen

    Statistic: CEO Pay Survey: Salaries stall for NZ’s top bosses
    Source: New Zealand Herald
    Date: 8 June 2012

    The Herald says “the value of the average chief executive pay packet has dropped” and quote the drop in average pay as 0.4%

    That’s one way of looking at the data. Here’s another way:

    Of the CEOs surveyed 13 had drops in pay and 22 had pay rises. The median pay drop was 7%, the median pay rise was 18.5%.

    Of if you prefer mean the mean pay drop was 13.5%, the mean pay rise was 26%.

    So most of them had pay rises and the rises were higher than the drops. Looks to me as if the CEOs had a very good year.

    12 years ago