Posts from June 2013 (39)

Allan Hansen sends in this infographic from Greatist, showing the benefits of quitting smoking

He points out the non-linear time scale — equally spaced intervals range from 20 minutes to five years.  It’s also a bit strange that time progresses in the opposite direction to the burning of the cigarette — perhaps it should have been flipped left to right.

Other versions of this information are common, and they nearly all have the same nonlinear time scale

One notable exception is from Blisstree, where the evenly-spaced text is linked to accurately-scaled times by lines.  This graphic also avoids the direction-of-burning problem, using comments from former smokers as the background.

We keep going on here about the importance of publishing clinical trials.  Today (in Britain), the BBC program Panorama is showing a documentary about a doctor who has been running clinical trials of the same basic treatment regimen for twenty years, without publishing any results. And it’s not that these are trials that take a long time to run — the participants have advanced cancer. If the treatment was effective, it would have been easy to gather and publish convincing evidence by now, many times over.

These haven’t been especially good clinical trials by usual standards — not randomized, not controlled — and they have been anomalous in other ways as well. For example, patients participating in the trial are charged large sums of money for the treatment being tested (not just for other care), which is very unusual.  Unusual, but not illegal.  Without published evidence that the treatment works, it couldn’t be sold outside trials, but it’s still entirely legal to charge money for the treatment in research. It’s a bit like whaling.

According to the BBC, Dr Burzynski says it’s not his decision to keep the results secret

He said the medical authorities in the US would not let him release this information: “Clinical trials, phase two clinical trials, were completed just a few months ago. I cannot release this information to you at this moment.”

If true, that would be very unusual. I don’t know of any occasion when the FDA has restricted scientific publication of trial results, and it’s entirely routine to publish results for treatments that have not been approved or even where other research is still ongoing. The BBC also checked with the FDA:

But the FDA told us this was not true and he was allowed to share the results of his trials.

This is all a long way away from New Zealand, and we can’t even watch the documentary, so why am I mentioning it? Last year, the parents of an NZ kid were trying to raise money to send him to the Burzynski clinic, with the help of the Herald.   You can’t fault the parents for trying to buy hope at any cost, but you sure can fault the people selling it.

Wikipedia has pretty good coverage  if you want more detail.

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 7 2013.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of June 1 – 7 2013 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.

(more…)

If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!

A guide from the UN Economic Commission for Europe

1. A guide to writing stories about numbers
2. A guide to presenting statistics
3. A guide to communicating with the media

And for local examples, check the @StatisticsNZ Twitter feed

[update: link fixed]

The Herald, writing about Hamilton’s pending removal of fluoridation from their water supply

A Hamilton City Council tribunal examining the topic has re-ignited intense public debate on the issue, with 89 per cent of the 1,557 submissions made to it in favour of stopping fluoridation. In 2006, 70 per cent of residents who voted in a referendum backed fluoride.

This actually isn’t evidence or even a suggestion of a change in opinion. All we can tell from the numbers is that 1386 people now want fluoride removed.  Public submissions are useful qualitatively, not quantitatively.

It may be true that the people of Hamilton don’t want fluoride in their water, in which case I think they are unwise, but it’s their problem. Confusing self-selected numbers with referendum votes  isn’t going to help determine what they want, [and neither is the exclusion from voting of three of twelve council members on the grounds that they also sit on the DHB and so have thought about the issues before]

Andrew Dillnot has the dream job for a statistics blogger — he is responsible for telling British MPs and government departments that their misrepresentations of official statistics are naughty.  From a Guardian story

But the big number was – there is no other word for it – a lie. Dilnot, now responsible for protecting the integrity of official statistics, exposed it as a lie this week, albeit using mild Whitehall language in letters to Shapps and Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary. The 878,300 alleged malingerers had never received incapacity benefit. They were new claimants, aggregated over three-and-a-half years. Many (probably most) withdrew their claim because they recovered from their condition or found a new job. In 2011-12, out of 603,600 established benefit claimants referred for the new medical tests, just 19,700 (3.3%) withdrew before taking them. That figure – which most of us would think small – represented the true scale of people pretending to be sick.

From BBC Radio: listen online

On Start the Week Emily Maitlis talks to the Executive Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt about the digital future. A future where everyone is connected, but ideas of privacy, security and community are transformed. Former Wikileaks employee James Ball asks how free we are online. The curator Honor Harger looks to art to understand this new world of technology. And worried about this brave new world? David Spiegelhalter, offers a guide to personal risk and the numbers behind it.

(via @cjbayesian)

Science communication fightback edition

• “Archaeologists Officially Declare Collective Sigh over Paleo Diet” –FRANKFURT- In a rare display of professional consensus, an international consortium of anthropologists, archaeologists, and molecular biologists have formally released an exasperated sigh over the popularity of the so-called “Paleo Diet” during a two-day conference dedicated to the topic.
•  Technocrats and Big Data:  It was especially interesting to see how this second guy reacted when the single somewhat thoughtful and informed Congressman, whose name I didn’t catch because he came in and left quickly and his name tag was miniscule, asked him about whether or not he taught his students to be skeptical. The guy was like, I teach my students to be ready to deal with big data just like their employers want. The congressman was like, no that’s not what I asked, I asked whether they can be skeptical of perceived signals versus noise, whether they can avoid making huge costly mistakes with big data. The guy was like, I teach my students to deal with big data.
• Artist Creates Portraits from DNA. Scientists say “That’s Impossible”. But though our genetic privacy may not be safe, our faces probably are.  Dewey-Hagborg’s portraits may rarely resemble the people whose DNA she’s using to generate them. The whole thing — most disturbingly the fact that she’s been contacted by law enforcement officials — shows how ill-prepared we are for dealing not only with what biotech may do in the future, but for what biotech can do now. She needs to work at making her message clearer.