June 18, 2012
Stat of the Week Competition: June 16-22 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 22 2012.
- Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
- The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of June 16-22 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.
Statistic: How research findings can get misused
Source: New Zealand Herald
Date: 16 June 2012
This is an article that contains bits that John Roughan could have written for StatsChat.
He talks about how researchers “have a licence to make their data, or lack of it, mean whatever they want” and gives an example where a researcher studied a group of females and assumed that the findings would apply to males without having included males in the study.
13 years ago
Statistic: Pacific neighbours lead fattest nation stakes
Source: NZ herald website
Date: 22 / 06 / 12
The article has taken the information that people from the pacific have a higher average weight than the rest of the world and then gone and declared that they are the fattest nations.
The problem with this conclusion is that it does not take into account the natural differences in weight between different ethnicities. For example a healthy BMI for a pakeha individual is between 18 and 25 while for a pacific or maori person is is 18.5 to 26. So it seems likely that the pacific nations would have a higher average weight and this higher weight does not automatically mean that they are fatter.
13 years ago
Statistic: While the US makes up only 5 per cent of the world’s population, it accounts for almost a third of the world’s weight
Source: New Zealand Herald
Date: 22 June 2012
This is a pretty strange statement:
“And while the US makes up only 5 per cent of the world’s population, it accounts for almost a third of the world’s weight due to obesity.”
This would mean that US people each weigh on average over six times the average weight of people elsewhere. That’s definitely not true.
It gets worse: “Asia has 61 per cent of the world’s people but only 13 per cent of the world’s weight.” That means Asians weigh a fifth of the average world weight.
Put the two statistics together and we find that US people weigh on average 30 times what Asians weigh.
In the Herald’s favour, they do provide a (malformed) link to the original paper so I’ll take a look and see what the actual findings were before the Herald mangled them.
13 years ago