January 9, 2025
Briefly
- The top baby names from New Zealand last year are out. As we’ve seen in the past, the most-common names keep getting less common. “Noah” came top for boys, with only 250 uses, and “Isla” for girls, with only 190 uses.
- The Daily Mail (because of course) has something purporting to be a map of penis sizes around the world, credited to this site, which gives no sources for the data. Wikipedia points out that a lot of data on this topic is self-reported claims. Wikipedia (possibly NSFW) notes thatMeasurements vary, with studies that rely on self-measurement reporting a significantly higher average than those with a health professional measuring. Even when it’s measured, it tends to be on volunteer samples, and there isn’t good standardisation of measurement protocols across sites.
- If you live in one of these Aussie suburbs buy a lottery ticket NOW, says the headline on MSN.com, from the Daily Mail (Australia version). This is a much more extreme headline than the NZ versions I usually complain about, and the text is more measured. Of course, there are two reasons why a suburb will see more lottery wins. The first is just chance, which doesn’t project into the future like that. The second is that these are suburbs where more money is lost on the lottery. Those trends probably will continue, but lottery advertising stories never seem to print the amounts lost on lotto.
- We’ve seen a number of times that salary/wage ranges generated from advertising at Seek are not very similar to those reported from actual payments by StatsNZ. This is worse: via Carl Bergstrom and Eduardo Hebkost, on Bluesky, apparently ziprecruiter.com will (in the US at least; not in NZ) give you salaries for any job you ask about, if you just forge a URL pointing to where the graph should be
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 »