Nate Silver joins Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian to talk about his new book “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t” and answer Googler questions.
More than four in ten UK parents say that their children have been exposed to internet porn, an official survey reveals.
In the fifth paragraph we find
The Daily Mail is campaigning for an automatic block on online porn to protect children
which should make any reader sceptical about the numbers. This is a scare story from a foreign source notorious for its creative use of numbers and its obsession with sex, and a story where they actually admit they are lobbying. It’s bad enough getting science stories from the Daily Mail; this sort of thing really suggests a news shortage.
We don’t get told what actual questions were asked, how the sample was gathered, or any of the other basic survey details. More importantly, we don’t even get told anything about the age range of the children, which makes a big difference in this case. We do learn
Almost a third say their sons or daughters have received sexually explicit emails or texts and a quarter say they have been bullied online or on their phones.
Neither of these issues would be affected by the proposed internet filtering, and both are very different from internet porn in that they are almost exclusively between kids who know each other in real life.
Perhaps the journalists are too young to know that porn existed before the Internet, and teenagers were occasionally exposed to it. You can get a more useful perspective from danah boyd and from a report from Harvard’s cyberlaw clinic that contains actual research.
I’ve been away or busy for a couple of weeks, so here are some collected links on statistics, graphics, the media, and risk
Thanks for your nominations last week in our Stat of the Week competition. We’ve selected Daniel Croft’s nomination of fascinating text message statistics on the advent of 20 years of text messaging:
“Wednesday was the 20 year anniversary of the first text message to have been sent, and so in response both Telecom and Vodafone have released some surprising information.
“Vodafone users sent 7.3 billion texts last year while Telecom was just under 7 billion. Thats 14,000,000,000 plus texts a year. Thats 38,000,000 a day spread between a population of 4,400,000… 8 texts per person a day. Or 2920 texts per person a year.
“A statistic that I would love to hear on this would be just how many of those 14 billion texts are just ‘LOL’.”
(A reminder that in our competition fine print, we state that we will not award Stat of the Week for a statistic coming from anyone at the University of Auckland outside the Statistics department. You can still nominate and discuss them, but the nomination won’t be eligible for the prize.)
This summer, we have a number of fantastic students who received a Department of Statistics scholarship to work on fascinating projects with our staff members. We’ll be profiling them here on Stats Chat and we’d love to hear your feedback on their projects!
Joshua explains:
“David Scott has been predicting the outcome of rugby union and rugby league games using an exponential smoothing method. The predictions have been posted on Stats Chat and his Super 15 predictions have also appeared in the New Zealand Herald. Whilst the predictions have been quite successful and David was equal best amongst the NZ Herald tipping panel in predicting Super 15 games in 2012, it is likely that the method can be improved.
“The project will investigate some possible improvements:
“If time permits, the problem of automatic updating of fixture lists from websites will also be considered. The data analysis and optimisation will be primarily carried out using the statistical programming language R. I have taken a couple of computer science papers and I use R a fair bit in statistics courses, which will be a big help with this project.”
More about Joshua:
“I’m just about to finish a Bachelor of Commerce degree where I majored in finance, but also studied several statistics papers as well, enough to gain entry into the Bachelor of Science (Honours) programme in statistics for 2013. During 2012, I had the opportunity to work for the Department of Statistics, both marking assignments and tutoring in the computer labs. This has been an incredibly worthwhile experience, and I plan to do it again next year.
“As a lab demonstrator, students ask you for help with concepts and assignments. I feel because the tutors in the labs are students themselves, they are able to explain concepts in a way that the students can relate to, which makes their learning experience much more enjoyable.
“I like statistics because of its applicability to a huge number of problems. In almost any situation where data is involved, statistics can be used to increase efficiency, improve profitability, make predictions, and help to provide insight into many other areas. It’s also reassuring, in terms of job prospects, that with the heavy use of computers and the internet today, corporations are collecting more data than ever before. Somebody’s got to analyse it!
“In addition to focusing on this project, over summer I will be learning how to program in SAS (a major commercial statistics package), studying for the CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) exams, and trying to find undervalued stocks to buy on the New Zealand and Australian stock markets. You’ll also find me mountain biking on the weekends, building a petrol-powered bike in the garage, and heading to the Coromandel for New Year.”
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:
Next Monday at midday we’ll announce the winner of this week’s Stat of the Week competition, and start a new one.
If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!
This summer, we have a number of fantastic students who received a Department of Statistics scholarship to work on fascinating projects with our staff members. We’ll be profiling them here on Stats Chat and we’d love to hear your feedback on their projects!
Of the scholarship, Liza says:
“I am delighted to have this opportunity over the summer, as I’m in love with mathematics and statistics (my two majors in a Bachelor of Science) and was keen to sink my teeth into learning Java. The opportunity to solve problems, sometimes completely abstract, and sometimes with very relevant practical importance, has always drawn me to these subjects. I’ve just completed the second year of my BSc and hope to go on to Honours after my undergrad, before working for a while, and then probably finding my way back to further study.”
Liza explains what the research project is about:
“Imagine you’re on a balcony, looking down on a crowded public square. Below you there’s a sort of multi-party political expo going on. The east wall has a line of Labour Party supporters against it. There are National Party supporters lined up against the west wall, and a line of Green Party supporters on the north wall.
“Do you have that picture in your head? Now, these people lining the walls of the square are never going to change their mind about who they want to vote for. But next, imagine that all the other people in the square (it’s absolutely packed, people are shoulder to shoulder) are far more malleable in their political views. In fact, each person might change their opinion based on the people around them. To stretch the allegory just a little, you can tell that all this is happening from your perch up on the balcony because people are wearing coloured hats to show their party choice, and change to a hat of their new party’s colour when they change their mind.
“Now, political opinion is more complicated than the scenario above, but I hope this might help you picture the actual process of what I’m getting up to this summer. I’m working on creating an interactive simulation of interacting particle systems with Dr Mark Holmes.
“Instead of people, in a square, with peculiar party-appropriate headwear, think instead of a grid with each square (or particle) in the grid a colour. In each time step, one of the squares in the grid is randomly selected to change colour, based on the colours of the squares with an edge adjacent to it. If a blue square is going to change in a particular time step, and has two red and two green squares next to it, it is with probability 0.5 that it will change to green, and likewise to red. And just as with the people you can choose to line the sides of the grid with squares that will not change colour.
The goal for this research is:
“To create a Java applet that people can interact with online that exhibits this idea and also communicates what is going on in a way that will be widely accessible. By the end people will be able to play with this applet, select the colour and position of invariant squares however they like, and watch the system progress through time. Hopefully, it will be a fun little way to create patterns and watch them form, and allow for a basic introduction to the complex and fascinating world of interacting particle systems.”
When Liza’s not going square-eyed staring at grids this summer …
“… I’ll be wearing the hat of Chief Operations Officer for P3 Foundation, a completely youth-lead non-governmental organisation working to empower Kiwi youth to eradicate extreme poverty in the Asia-Pacific. I’ll be doing a bit of work for Teach First NZ, an organisation working to tackle educational inequality in New Zealand, and the family holiday programme at the Voyager Maritime Museum, too. And of course, eating ice cream, reading good books, watching Vlogbrothers and hanging out with my lovely whānau.”
The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a usual monthly State of the Climate Global Analysis in October 2012 which was anything but usual. Buried in the report was this astounding factoid: “This is the 332nd consecutive month with an above-average temperature”. What that means is, if you’re 27 or younger, you’ve never experienced a colder-than-average month. I find that phenomenal, a trend which if it continues might allow many to become ‘old timers’ who can “recollect the ‘good old days’ when a monthly temperature could be below average” (i.e. prior to March 1985).
This statement is certainly headline-grabbing, although there is some devil in the detail. Specifically, what is the ‘average’ which the NOAA benchmark against? A bit of research reveals that the NOAA use a reasonably robust 3-decade (1981-2010) average for their graphics, but the phrasing of the paragraph in question suggests that in this case they are comparing to the 20th century average. If it was the 3-decade dataset then the months Jan 1981 – Feb 1985 would have had to have been exceptionally cold to skew the average so low that it could be exceeded 332 times consecutively.
The field of time series and calculating moving averages (and variabilities) is fascinating, and no doubt with sufficient data-mining, as in any field (imagine sporting statistics), a number of other shocking statistics could be extracted. Nonetheless a 332 month run is still impressive (or incredibly concerning). Interpretation of climate change will more and more require punters to be comfortable with interpreting both running averages and changing variabilities. We can have extremely cold snaps in a month (variability) while still having an above average month for temperature.
From the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, at Columbia University, a new report: “Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present”
This essay is written for multiple audiences–traditional news organizations interested in adapting as well as new entrants (whether individual journalists, news startups or organizations not previously part of the journalistic ecosystem)–and those organizations and entities that affect the news ecosystem, particularly governments and journalism schools, but also businesses and nonprofits.
We start with five core beliefs:
- Journalism matters.
- Good journalism has always been subsidized.
- The internet wrecks advertising subsidy.
- Restructuring is, therefore, a forced move.
- There are many opportunities for doing good work in new ways.