Posts from May 2014 (77)

Team Ratings for Round 14

The basic method is described on my Department home page. I have made some changes to the methodology this year, including shrinking the ratings between seasons.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 81 matches played, 54 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 66.7%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 14

Here are the predictions for Round 14. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

From the Herald

Housing Minister Nick Smith has revealed that Government held data on the proportion of New Zealand homes owned by offshore buyers, which he says is very low compared to other countries.

It turns out that the Government actually has data on the proportion of rental landlords who are overseas. Not the proportion of all homes, and not even the proportion of all rental homes. And even then, the proportion is based on whether the landlords are currently offshore, not whether they were offshore at the time of purchase, which is the topic of controversy (as the Herald does note).

It’s hard to do anything about the landlords vs rentals difference, but if the proportion of rentals owned offshore was also 11%, that would translate to about 4% of New Zealand homes, based on the home ownership figures from the Census.

Two new(ish) interactive visualisations

• From Harkanwal Singh, in the Herald, a map of the new edition of the NZ deprivation index
• From Stats New Zealand, the national progress indicators

Q: Did you see “Cocaine now on tap in British homes” in the Herald

A: Yes.

Q: Is it true?

A: Not so as you’d notice.

Q: Didn’t they find traces of cocaine in drinking water?

A: Up to a point.

Q: You mean no?

A: I mean they found traces of the chemical that cocaine gets broken down into

Q: And is that a drug?

A: Not really. It was one component of an unsuccessful treatment for back pain. It is restricted, because it can be turned into cocaine.

Q: How much of this stuff did they find?

A: Almost none. A few nanograms per litre

Q: What’s that in real numbers? If it was really cocaine, how long would it take you to get one dose if you drank  eight glasses of water a day like the doctors recommend?

A: That isn’t actually what the doctors recommend.

Q: Well, then, “like the doctors don’t recommend?”

A: Several centuries.

Q: How can they detect such tiny amounts?

A: They use liquid chromatography to separate out each chemical, and then mass spectroscopy to basically count the molecules.

Q: Ok, impressed now.  The story also mentions “significant amounts of caffeine”. What does that mean?

A: It means “insignificant amounts”, about a million times lower concentration than in a cup of decaffeinated coffee.

Q: At least this is new, though?

A: The same agency reported finding the cocaine metabolite in drinking water in 2011, based on measurements in 2009-10. (PDF, Table 6)

Q: Why is there a video of a drug bust in Spain embedded in the story?

A: Because technology.

Attention conservation notice: I have to write this post because I’ve spent too much time on it otherwise. You don’t have to read it.

There was an episode of “Yes, Prime Minister” where the term “Human Resource Rich Countries” was being posed as a replacement for “Less Developed Countries”, meaning “poor”. “Resources” is a word that can mean lots of different things, which is why I spent more time than was strictly sensible investigating the following graph

The graph appeared in my Twitter feed last Monday. It’s originally from a campaign to give Australia a school funding model a bit more like NZ’s decile system, as recommended by a national review panel, so it is disturbing to see New Zealand almost at the bottom of the world.

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Via Stuff and the DimPost

Tens of thousands of well-off pensioners are claiming up to half a billion dollars in superannuation every year.

With government debt at more than $60 billion, critics say the wealthy are asking their children and grandchildren to fund their so-called retirement.

Ministry of Social Development figures revealed more than 26,000 people with total income of more than $70,000 a year claimed superannuation last year. At current rates, this could add up to $570m a year before tax..

From last year in the Herald via me

Imagine the public outrage if it were discovered that more than 80,000 New Zealanders were receiving wages, salaries and investment incomes of more than $6 billion a year, but were also receiving a benefit from the Government.

…

Income figures this week from Statistics NZ show more than 80,000 New Zealanders over the age of 65 receive wages, salaries and investment returns of more than $6.5 billion a year while claiming NZ Super.

The benefits to those 80,000-plus seniors are costing poorer taxpayers at least $1.3 billion a year. Many of these beneficiaries will be retired judges, politicians, chief executives, doctors, diplomats and lawyers who are well able to look after themselves.

It seems the problem is only half as bad now, without any policy changes.  Either that, or people really don’t know where they would like to draw the line.

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 May 16 2014.
• Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
• The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of May 10 – 16 2014 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.

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

• New York Times: In addition, however, “we are able to identify gay bars in Tehran. Moscow too,” said Pete Warden, a co-founder of Jetpac. The company does not want to do that, he added, but he does think it’s important that “we make people aware, get people talking about this.”
• US spending on science, space, and technology correlates with Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation (correlation 0.992)
• Can you stop the Internet knowing you’re pregnant. Maybe?
•  “I’m still a little embarrassed and feel it should be up to the scientists themselves to present the arguments for science.” Bill Bryson

When you hear a car alarm go off, do you even think that someone might be stealing a car? Frequent false positives undermine credibility.

— Stat Fact (@StatFact) May 6, 2014

From One News and  a Colmar Brunton poll about Judith Collins and the Oravida affair

Which of these statements best describes how the issues will influence your vote in the upcoming election?

23% These issues will be a factor in your decision about who to vote for 
75% These issues will not have much influence on your vote 
1% Don’t know/won’t vote

Graeme Edgeler pointed out on Twitter that it matters what starting position people are being influenced from.  That information wasn’t in the Colmar Brunton summary, because reporting it would also involve reporting the split of party affiliations in the sample, and the poll wasn’t designed for that split to be a reliable estimate.

I’m not going to report the split, either, but you can get it from the detailed poll report.  I do think it’s reasonable to note that among people who identified as Labour/Green voters, about 1/3 said it would influence their vote, and among those who identified as National voters, less than 10% said it would influence their vote. The difference is more than twice the margin of error estimated from those proportions and numbers. Looked at the other way, three-quarters of respondents said the issue would not make much difference to their vote, and three-quarters of the rest were Labour or Green voters.

It’s not impossible for Labour or Green supporters to have their votes influenced by the Oravida affair. You could imagine someone with a long-term philosophical or emotional attachment to Labour, who had been thinking of voting National at this election, but who decided against it because of the scandal. But if there are enough people like that to show up in a poll, the left-wing parties are in real trouble. It’s more likely that most respondents said whatever they thought would make their side look good.