Posts filed under Just look it up (284)

The Herald has a story headlined “The high cost of shoplifting in NZ“, which is very similar to the story in Stuff in May that we commented on back then.

We get the figure for total theft from the Retailers Association again, with a similar lack of detail as to what it measures and how, but now without even the estimate of what proportion of it is shoplifting vs theft by staff that was provided in May.  Again there is a set of high-profile or high-value examples given, but now two of the five are from other countries.

The other change is that we now are told that prosecutions for shoplifting have fallen by 20-25% over the past four years, but there is no information on how this relates to the Retailers Association estimate — do they think theft has gone down, and if not, why not?

There’s been a lot of discussion on the internet and in the UK media about  the Royal Statistical Society’s poll on widespread misbeliefs in the UK, which we covered about a week ago.

One useful response is from Alex Harrowell at The Yorkshire Ranter

The deficit model of ignorance defines ignorance to be a deficiency disease, in which individuals lack facts and are therefore prone to believing nonsense. Ignorant individuals know fewer facts than non-ignorant individuals. This is true as far as it goes. The problem arises when you try to determine causes or prescribe treatment. The deficit model leads to the conclusion that you should, somehow, give them fact pills. Once supplemented with facts, they’ll be OK.

The problem, though, is that this doesn’t actually work, and raises the question as to why they got like that.

We haven’t had a good denominator post in a while, but I was struck by Stuff’s story on ‘social lending’.  By next April, an NZ company hopes to be able to start up peer-to-peer lending here, after changes in the law, and we’re told

“This will be a way for individuals to play alongside the big institutions,” Milsom said

Just how that can happen – and the scale that is possible – is shown from what has happened in the UK, where the largest peer-to-peer lender has lent more than £330 million since it launched in 2005.

That’s an average of just over £40 million per year over 2005-2012, or about 66p per capita per year in the UK.  On the same scale in New Zealand, that would come to perhaps $6 million per year in loans.  The UK lender in question appears to be Zopa, and they make their money by charging a 1% borrowing fee and 1% lending fee.  Under the same setup, $6 million per year in loans would mean $120 000 per year in income for an NZ equivalent, before paying any costs.

It’s certainty possible that peer-to-peer lending will take off, and it might not be long before it exceeds 1% of all unsecured consumer debt. But the idea makes more sense spun as ‘room for expansion’ not as ‘look at the scale in the UK’.

From @LIVENewsDesk on Twitter, and then Stuff, we have record nominal prices for petrol.

Adjusted for inflation, the price is still definitely lower than in mid-2008, when it got to $2.18, which is $2.41 in today’s money, and driving is much cheaper than in was in the mid-1980s.

Also, neither Stuff nor the AA still seem to know about the government’s independent petrol-price monitoring system. Their estimate of the importer margin has been stable since May, but is well above recent historical levels.

The Royal Statistical Society has just commissioned an opinion poll to look at beliefs about policy-relevant issues and how they relate to reality.  The first few results:

1. Teenage pregnancy: on average, we think teenage pregnancy is 25 times higher than official estimates: we think that 15% of girls under16 get pregnant each year, when official figures suggest it is around 0.6%.
2. Crime: 58% do not believe that crime is falling, when the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that incidents of crime were 19% lower in 2012 than in 2006/07 and 53% lower than in 1995. 51% think violent crime is rising, when it has fallen from almost 2.5 million incidents in 2006/07 to under 2 million in 2012.
3. Job-seekers allowance: 29% of people think we spend more on JSA than pensions, when in fact we spend 15 times more on pensions (£4.9bn vs £74.2bn).
4. Benefit fraud: people estimate that 34 times more benefit money is claimed fraudulently than official estimates: the public think that £24 out of every £100 spent on benefits is claimed fraudulently, compared with official estimates of £0.70 per £100.

You might look up what the actual figures are in New Zealand. To get you started, Paula Bennett claimed about $200 million in benefit fraud in 2010/11 (and about 10% of that was prosecuted) from about $9 billion, or about 22c per $100.

Stuff has a story with the headline “More kids committing sexual abuse” and the lead

Easy access to increasingly hardcore pornography and the sexualisation of childhood are being blamed for a rise in the number of children sexually abusing each other.

However, if you actually read the story, the only real information is on number of prosecutions, and

 Police say the jump in prosecutions was due to better knowledge and increased reporting of sexual abuse, rather than a rise in incidents.

No other evidence or expert opinion is given to support the claim of a real increase in abuse, which seems to be entirely made up.

And while on the subject of factchecking, Netsafe chief technology officer Sean Lyons is quoted as saying

“You type ‘kiwi chicks’ into Google and the images that come back won’t be small feathered birds.”

I tried this. On the first page of results, eight links and the only image displayed were for small feathered birds, one was to a museum project “‘Kiwi Chicks: New Zealand Girl History/Ngā Kōhine Kiwi: He Hitori Taitamāhine o Aotearoa’”, and one was to a page at TheRockFM, which might offend some people but is not anything shocking for kids.

I got basically the same page using lmgtfy.com in a browser not logged into any Google services, so it isn’t just my pure and innocent search history that’s biasing the results.

Update: here’s the first screenfull of results from a Google image search for ‘kiwi chicks’

On Stuff’s front page there’s a headline “Life expectancies heading down.” Clicking through gives “Kiwi kids destined for shorter lives than parents”.

Here’s the New Zealand life expectancy over time, from StatsNZ, first by gender, then (for a shorter time period) by gender and Maori/non-Maori ethnicity

Life expectancy has been increasing for a long time, and over the past 25 years (a reasonable definition of a generation) there has been an increase of about eight years.

The story is saying that this increase may soon start to slow down and reverse. That’s possible, and even plausible, but it hasn’t started to happen yet, and it would take a lot for life expectancy curves to not just flatten but to decrease fast enough to give an eight-year reduction, so that kids born today have a shorter life expectancy than their parents’ generation.

From itnews

A mobility programme using Apple iPhones and iPads has changed the way New Zealand Police officers work, and the force is partly attributing a sharp drop in crime to the rollout of the devices.

According to figures published by NZ Police, using the devices within the Policing Excellence programme [PDF] has contributed to a 13 per cent reduction in crime for the year to May 31.

The Police press release is here, and you can see that they are the source of the claims. But if you look at the linked PDF, the 13% reduction is based on comparing (partly provisional) data for June 2012-May 2013 and June 2008-May 2009.  Crime has been decreasing steadily over this time: here’s the graph for 1995-2012 from NZ police (PDF, p16)

The decrease from fiscal year 2008/9 to fiscal year 2011/12 (before the iPads) is from 1031.9 per 10,000 population to 891.9 per 10,000 population, or just over 14% — slightly larger than the decrease claimed when the iPad revolution is included.

It’s not surprising that the new mobility initiative isn’t showing up clearly in crime figures yet — the devices are still being rolled out. In fact the NZ Police report is talking about their whole modernisation initiative (started in August 2010) , though it’s still not possible to say how much of the 13% decrease is due to the changes, and the overall downward trend in crime would be sufficient to explain the entire decrease.

Via BetterPosters, a site devoted to graphics showing the US rank in international comparisons on a range of things.  Some of the graphs are misleading because they look at totals rather than some per-capita quantity and so the US ranks high because it’s a big country.

Others …well, see for yourselves.

In a Stat-of-the-Week nomination, Nick Iversen points out a Herald story about the convention centre deal, under the headline “Support disappears for convention deal”

Public opinion has turned against the Government’s SkyCity international convention centre deal just days before it is due to be signed off, allowing for 230 extra poker machines at the downtown Auckland casino.

The latest Herald-DigiPoll survey shows 61.5 per cent of those polled disapprove of the deal while 33.8 per cent approve.

That’s a sharp turnaround from a year ago when a similar poll found 40.3 per cent disapproved and 57.3 supported it.

As Nick and the SkyCity spokesperson point out, the poll last year had a ‘conditionally approve’ option, so they aren’t really comparable. In fact it’s worse than that. the Herald’s headline last year was “Public opposed to SkyCity deal — or want conditions“, so it’s not just a matter of interpreting last year’s data; the story isn’t even consistent with last year’s headline.

Last year, the poll found 40.3% disapproved, 37.7% approved if the total number of gaming machines across Auckland decreased, and 19.6% approved.   This year 61.5% disapprove and 33.8% approve. It’s hard to decide how the 37.7% of conditional approvals should be apportioned, since the number of machines is going down, but it’s going down for reasons basically unrelated to the SkyCity deal.

Some possibilities

• All the conditional approvals should be treated as approvals. That’s the Herald’s current interpretation and gives 57.3% approval last year, and a roughly 25% decrease in approval
• All the conditional approvals should be treated as disapprovals. That was the Herald’s interpretation last year, and gives 19.6% approval last year and and a roughly 13% increase in approval
• The conditional approvals should be ignored, and we should look at the proportion of approval among those approving or disapproving.  That gives 32.7% approval last year, almost identical to this year.

It’s clear that you really can’t say anything very useful about the change using the two different sets of questions.  On the other hand, it’s also clear that the majority in Auckland is currently opposed to the deal, and if public opinion was relevant to the decision-making process, that, rather than the change since last year, would be the important fact.