September 17, 2022

Briefly

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  • From Radio NZ’s series on the lotto: “When contacted by RNZ, Lotto said it would now no longer claim that there were lucky stores. “We recently carried out a piece of work looking at the use of the word ‘luck’ in relation to our products and as a result of this work have decided we will not in the future put ‘lucky stores’ or ‘lucky regions’ in press releases,” head of corporate communications Lucy Fullarton said.”.  As StatsChat readers will remember, we’ve been attacking this use of “lucky” for a while.
  • On the other hand, Lotto doesn’t need to specifically make these claims any more, since they’re already  well known. For example, see today’s Herald, “Kiwis are rushing into lucky Lotto stores ahead of tonight’s $20 million jackpot draw”, naming the same Hastings pharmacy as the Radio NZ story did.
  • Good article by Jamie Morton in the Herald on interesting clinical trials in New Zealand.
  • The UK Office of National Statistics has a life expectancy calculator — if, to pick an example almost at random, you wanted to find out how long a 73-year old man would be expected to live
  • There’s a claim out there that the median book only sells twelve copies.  As you’d expect, it’s more complicated than that
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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 »

Comments

  • avatar
    Steve Curtis

    I liked the UK life expectancy calculator as they not only gave the average life expectancy for the age chosen but also included a longer life span that could be a 1 in 4 chance and a little bit more is a 1 in 10 chance.
    Stats NZ gives the same, but via a bit more messy method with an xlsx file to download and then enter current age into spreadsheet.
    Cant be too hard to embed into the web page ?
    NZ ‘ers seem to have a few extra years than UK
    https://www.stats.govt.nz/tools/how-long-will-i-live/

    2 years ago