Archives (4)

According to the Herald, the ACC wants us to be careful about weddings — about getting injured at them, that is.

Weddings are supposed to be the happiest day of your life – try telling that to the hundreds of people who make ACC claims for injuries at ceremonies.

From tripping on the bride’s dress to swallowing the ring, nuptials can be surprisingly hazardous.

New figures show at least 600 people made claims to the ACC between 2010 and 2012.

So, how does the 600 claims over three years compare to what you’d expect from an average day?

The ACC accepted 1.7 million new claims last year, which gives about 0.4 claims per person per year, or about 0.001 per person per day.

There were about 20 000 marriages in New Zealand last year, so about 60 000 over 2010-2012, giving about 0.01 ACC claims per marriage.  The 600 reported claims would then be about what you’d expect if there were 10 person-days of exposure per marriage.

My experience is that wedding celebrations typically involve more than ten people, and, with setup and rehearsals, often more than one day.  It looks as though weddings, like Christmas, are actually safer than ordinary days.

An interesting piece in Slate on longevity (via @juhasaarinen).  Unlike the typical story using life expectancy, it’s by someone who seems to understand what it means. There’s also an interactive graph of how causes of death have changed over time, which is notable for having the best use of a creative y-axis scale I’ve seen in a long time.

If you look at ‘influenza and pneumonia’, there is a general decrease with a dramatic spike in 1919. It’s so dramatic that it pops out of the top of the lower panel and spikes into the upper panel. This is the famous Spanish Flu pandemic — the same  rate in today’s New Zealand would mean over 25000 deaths.  Fortunately the three flu pandemics we’ve had since then have all been much less nasty.

It’s also worth noting that nearly all the decline in infections as a major cause of death happened before antibiotics became widely available in the mid-1940s. That’s the reason I’m not really convinced that antibiotic resistances is going to kill us all, though it’s certainly worth avoiding.

Last night’s edition of Our Changing World had two segments by University of Auckland statisticians called James.

Allison Ballance and James Russell talked about seabirds and rat eradication

Ruth Beran and James Curran talked about forensic statistics

From this morning’s Twitter feed

• An animated GIF (click on it to wake it up) showing how to improve a barchart by removing junk. [from Darkhorse Analytics: Data looks better naked]

• Data journalism: how the data sausage gets made.  Jacob Harris describes how he collected and summarised data on meat recalls in the US
• The Royal Statistical Society has repeated the simple maths test they gave politicians last year, this time for senior professionals and managers. Less than half of them could give the probability of getting two heads from tossing two coins.
• However, the same Royal Statistical Society news item ends “The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+)”. This seems to me to fall in the “not even wrong” category. The target group aren’t remotely representative of all British adults, and I’d be surprised if it was even possible to reweight them to the national age distribution.
• Cathy O’Neill (mathbabe.org) asks why rankings of eg, cars or universities don’t allow the user to change priorities for different attributes (as the OECD Better Life Index does, for example)