A note on Stat of the Week topics
Most of StatsChat is just the opinion of its individual authors, who are identified on each post and can criticise anyone they feel deserves it. The Stat of the Week award is slightly more official and more closely connected with the Department of Statistics, so we are reluctant to award it to statistics about other parts of the University of Auckland. In particular, we won’t ever give the award to a bad statistic originating from an individual UoA staff member outside the Statistics department, and we will typically avoid giving a `bad statistics’ award to a statistic from any source that criticises the University or the staff union. You can nominate these statistics, and individuals may decide to write posts about them, but they won’t win the award.
The Herald story about the University travel budget was a borderline case: the statistical problem is not a University one, since the Herald is perfectly capable of dividing by 4.5, and even of finding out how many staff there are and dividing by that number, but there are also real problems with the interpretation of the number, and that’s where this starts to look like special pleading.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »