Posts from September 2012 (71)

As you will doubtless have heard, 63 people, mostly kids and youth, have died from ‘huffing’ over the past 12 years.  That’s about the same as the number of youths who commit suicide in six months.

Suicide coverage in the media is restrained by awareness of the risks of over-publicising it.  Along those lines, the NZ Drug Foundation (on Twitter) points us to the Chief Coroner’s recommendations (page 3) for media coverage of `volatile substance abuse’

The reporting of all volatile substance abuse is recognised  as being of a highly sensitive nature. Reporting has the potential to assist in the reduction of abuse, or conversely increase the incidence by promoting use and the availability of products that may be used. Although there are no inhalant specific media guidelines, the following considerations based on those expressed by the 1985 Senate Select Committee on Volatile Fumes in Canberra, Australia may be a useful guide:
• The products subject to abuse should not be named and the methods used should not be described or depicted.
• Reports of inhalant abuse should be factual and not sensationalised or glamourised.
• The causes of volatile substance abuse are complex and varied. Reporting on deaths should not be superficial.
• Stories should include local contact details for further information or support.

The Drug Foundation say they have a site with resources, but it seems to be down at the moment (up again now).

Following up on the discussion of green coffee extract and unsupported health claims, I’d like to point out two links.

The Nightingale Collaboration is a British initiative to oppose  unsupported health claims by making complaints to various regulatory bodies.  This includes the Advertising Standards Authority, but also the professional councils that regulate various health professions.  For example, the General Chiropractic Council regulates chiropractors in the same way that the General Medical Council regulates medical doctors, and both have a duty to investigate complaints of, say, misleading advertising by their members.

In New Zealand the main resource would be the NZ Advertising Standards Authority.  They have details of the Advertising Codes (which were formulated by advertisers and media, not handed down from above), and complaint procedures, including an online complaint form.  If you honestly believe an advertiser is making an unsupported health (or environmental, or financial) claim, you can file a complaint explaining why. Your part in the process is now over. All complaints are reviewed by the Chairman, and if there is potential merit to the claim, the advertiser has to respond:

The Advertising Standards Authority’s complaints process operates on the basis that the Advertiser must provide substantiation/evidence to support the claims made in their advertising. Therefore, if a complaint is made that an advertisement is misleading or deceptive, it is the responsibility of the Advertiser to provide sufficient information to enable the Complaints Board to assess the accuracy of claims or statements made.

Last year I filed a complaint about a website selling green tea extract, and the process seemed to work.

I’m glad to see that the cost estimates for beneficiaries released yesterday have become boring  and aren’t featured news (at least on the online media sites, I haven’t checked the squashed-tree versions).  If you’re planning to spend money getting people off benefits, it’s only financially worth doing so if you don’t spend a lot more than their benefits would have cost, so you need some idea of what that is.

I had looked briefly at a similar estimate of the cost of Parliament members. It works about to about $1 million each per year: if you add up the parts of budget Votes for the Parliamentary Counsel, Parliamentary Service, and Prime Minister and Cabinet that aren’t capital expenditure (and take off the cost of printing and distributing Parliament documents to the public) and divide by the number of MPs. To get a lifetime cost you’d need data on the distribution of time in office, which looked like it would take more than ten minutes to come up with.

We need a Parliament, and we need support for people who can’t support themselves.  Aggregate costs are a useful input to calculations, but as isolated headlines they’re not helpful.  They fail to address the basic question about any number: compared to what?

Republicans and Democrats are hearing very different news about the economy:

In this example there are more possible explanations than last time:

• They really are hearing different news, because local conditions vary.  This one can’t really be true, because the geographical polarisation of voters isn’t strong enough
• They really are hearing different news, because they get it from different sources. In some ways that’s the most worrying possibility — a massive breakdown in the effectiveness of journalism.
• They are hearing the same news, but it has different implications.  For example, perhaps Republicans think the prospect of higher tax rates on income above $250,000 is bad economic news and Democrats think it is good economic news.  I don’t think this can explain such a big and recent difference.
• They are exposed to the same news, but only really hear the bits that confirm their beliefs.  Quite likely, and worrying.
• They don’t really believe what they are saying. The most positive interpretation, except if you’re in the survey business.

Via Stuff:  The Economist has released its World in Figures book as a free iPad and iPhone app.

Now what we need is an iPhone-friendly interface to Stats New Zealand’s Infoshare.

Stuff’s story starts out

Half of all Kiwis like to change jobs regularly, with 51 per cent of people surveyed by online recruiter Seek starting their current role less than two years ago.

I don’t see why “like to change jobs regularly” is remotely the same as “have changed jobs recently”, and I’m sure people who were laid off in the recession or lost jobs to the ChCh quake would agree.  But, more importantly, Stats New Zealand collects real data on changes of employment, so why not use that rather than a non-random sample from what Seek has in previous years described as “a broad online audience”. 

In fact, Seek doesn’t do too badly in estimating: the true figure is 54%, with the difference being only about twice the margin of error for a random  sample of the size of their previous years’ surveys.

As usual, I’m having to rely on previous years’ press releases for any methodology information, since Seek hasn’t posted this year’s one and Stuff isn’t giving any details.

A respectable survey in the US state of Ohio reports that Obama is still polling well. But it’s one of the secondary questions that is especially interesting: from Ezra Klein’s blog at the Washington Post

PPP asked voters who they thought deserved more credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden: Obama or Romney. 63 percent said Obama, 31 percent weren’t sure, and 6 percent said Romney.

The results for Republican voters were even more astonishing. 38 percent said Obama, 47 percent weren’t sure, and 15 percent said Romney. What the heck is going on?

As they go on to explain, this is an example of one of the big problems with opinion polls in situations where the respondents know what you are doing.  The tendency is for people to answer in the way that represents their political affiliations rather than their actual opinions.

Two stories  based on exactly the same data from the Real Estate Institute.

Modest revival for housing market: Stuff

Big jump in house prices: Herald

“Modest revival” is the press release description. The Herald has more sources and pretty interactive graphics showing more details.

The disagreement isn’t necessarily a bad thing: journalists should be doing interpretation, not just copying press releases.  What is a bad thing is that no-one mentions inflation adjustment — Auckland’s ‘record’ median price is still way down from the peak when measured in constant dollars.

The Herald’s clicky poll accompanying the story on Kiwi self-satisfaction is a nice illustration of the unreliability of bogus polls (they’re only using it for entertainment, so that’s ok).

If the clicky poll was a real random sample, its margin of error would be about 1%. It isn’t, and it’s not.

Congratulations to Nick Iversen for her fantastic nomination of a “clinical trial” conducted by Dr. Oz with a great link to Science Based Medicine debunking the study.

James Curran noted that “it’s easy to loose 5lb in water even in the course of a day (on some bike rides in summer I will lose as much as 3-4kg on a 3 hour ride, and usually 1-2kg)”