Posts from August 2014 (52)

You have probably seen the graphic from vox.com

There are several things wrong with it. From a graphics point of view it doesn’t make any of the relevant comparisons easy. The diameter of the circle is proportional to the deaths or money, exaggerating the differences. And the donation data are basically wrong — the original story tries to make it clear that these are particular events, not all donations for a disease, but it’s the graph that is quoted.

For example, the graph lists $54 million for heart disease, based on the ‘Jump Rope for Heart’ fundraiser. According to Forbes magazine’s list of top charities, the American Heart Association actually received $511 million in private donations in the year to June 2012, almost ten times as much.  Almost as much again came in grants for heart disease research from the National Institutes of Health.

There’s another graph I’ve seen on Twitter, which shows what could have been done to make the comparisons clearer:

It’s limited, because it only shows government funding, not private charity, but it shows the relationship between funding and the aggregate loss of health and life for a wide range of diseases.

There are a few outliers, and some of them are for interesting reasons. Tuberculosis is not currently a major health problem in the US, but it is in other countries, and there’s a real risk that it could spread to the US.  AIDS is highly funded partly because of successful lobbying, partly because it — like TB — is a foreign-aid issue, and partly because it has been scientifically rewarding and interesting. COPD and lung cancer are going to become much less common in the future, as the victims of the century-long smoking epidemic die off.

Depression and injuries, though?

Update: here’s how distorted the areas are: the purple number is about 4.2 times the blue number

To complement the Herald’s flying Air New Zealand vs driving costs for various NZ cities, I thought I’d work out similar comparisons for the Pacific Northwest, where I used to live.  It’s a reasonable comparison — both have relatively sparsely spaced cities, though the roads are better there.

I used Alaska Airlines for the flying costs; they are the main local airline in the region. The costs are the cheapest flight on a random weekday in September — there will be some days and seasons when it’s cheaper or more expensive.  The driving cost  is based on the actual driving distance, not the straight-line distance, and uses the cost per mile specified for business tax deductions.

The results aren’t that different from NZ, except that the impact of competition is clearer: the Seattle–Calgary flight is much less expensive that you’d predict from the others, probably because there lots of one-stop alternatives via Vancouver.

On the positive side: there’s a conference of science advisers and people who know about the field here in Auckland at the moment. There’s a blog, and there will soon be videos of the presentations.

On the negative side: Statistics Canada continues to provide an example of how a world-class official statistics agency can go downhill with budget cuts and government neglect.  The latest story is the report on how the Labour Force Survey (which is how unemployment is estimated) was off by 42000 in July. There’s a shorter writeup in Maclean’s magazine, and their archive of stories on StatsCan is depressing reading.

This is a good illustration of why they’re meaningless…

A recurring issue with trends over time is whether they are ‘age’ trends, ‘period’ trends, or ‘cohort’ trends.  That is, when we complain about ‘kids these days’, is it ‘kids’ or ‘these days’ that’s the problem? Mark Liberman at Language Log has a nice example using analyses by Joe Fruehwald.

If you look at the frequency of “um” in speech (in this case in Philadelphia), it decreases with age at any given year

On the other hand, it increases over time for people in a given age cohort (for example, the line that stretches right across the graph is for people born in the 1950s)

It’s not that people say “um” less as they get older, it’s that people born a long time ago say “um” less than people born recently.

‘Dodgy use of data’ edition [Background: the Washington Post is the serious DC paper. The Washington Times, not so much]

• From the Washington Post  “But really, is it possible that more than 1 in 6 people in France could “back” Islamic State? When you look at the numbers closely, something doesn’t add up.”

• From journalism/editing blog HeadsUp: “Too bad a clear conscience and a pure heart can’t turn correlation into cause, no matter what your first named source says.”

• From economics blog TVHE:  “For example, [Tourism Industry Association New Zealand] claims that 15%of Upper Hutt residents’ jobs depend on the tourism industry, while only 9% of residents’ jobs in Queenstown-Lakes District depend on tourism.”

• From linguistics blog Language Log: “I’ll merely observe that the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution scores 68% on the Latinometer, well over the “probably lying” threshold. “

Team Ratings for Round 25

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 176 matches played, 99 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 56.2%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 25

Here are the predictions for Round 25. 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

Team Ratings for Round 3

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 3, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

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 14 matches played, 10 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 71.4%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 3

Here are the predictions for Round 3. 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.

Team Ratings for Round 4

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 12 matches played, 11 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 91.7%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 4

Here are the predictions for Round 4. 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.

Infographic edition

1. Thomson Reuters illustrated the importance of fine detail in graphic in one of their ads. It looks like a Venn diagram. Oops.

Removing the transparent overlap and changing the colours makes it less Venn-ish

2. Kevin Schaul in the Washington Post came up with this neat graphical summary of state data

Because the basic outline of the US is so familiar (especially to people who live there), the huge spatial distortions aren’t actually all that disturbing.  Mark Monmonier, a geographer, seems to have been the first person to move in this direction (eg). I suggested to Kevin, on Twitter, that this technique would also allow Alaska to be moved from the tropical Pacific to its proper home in the north, and he agreed.

3. That’ll wake you up

Jawbone, who make products that tell you if you are awake and walking around, looked at the impact of this week’s Napa earthquake. The data resolution isn’t quite fine enough to see the time taken for the ground waves to propagate — compare XKCD on the Twitter event horizon