Unwise baby name claims
You’ve probably seen this map from Reddit: more people live inside the circle than outside it
Another map, at Stuff, claims to show the countries where “Sofia” and its variants ranks high as a name for new babies
Based on these rankings, we get
“The numbers have been crunched and the results are in. Forget John, Mohammed, Charlotte or Olivia: the most popular baby name in the world right now is Sofia.”
You can see from the map that more than half the world’s population is in countries labelled “No Data”. In fact, more than half the world’s population, plus Brazil and all of Africa. “Sofia” is the most popular baby name the way L&P is world famous in New Zealand.
But that’s not the worst bit. The first line of the story said “Forget John, Mohammed, Charlotte or Olivia”. The statistics on the map and on the linked website are for Sofia as a popular name for girls. Boys’ names aren’t in the comparison — Stuff did just ‘forget’ John and Mohammed.
You’ve got to respect Laura Wattenberg of BabyNameWizard, who does a great job getting her website into the news. Sites that take this sort of story and exaggerate it into obviously unfounded headline news, maybe not so much respect.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »