Stats Chat

From Food Network magazine, via Twitter, via Julie Blommaert

There’s no more detail than “Kellogg’s” as the source, and the Kellogg’s website is very sensibly not admitting to anything.

Some more Google finds two stories from September last year — getting the factoid into a real paper magazine, because of the publication time lag, gives it another chance to roam the earth looking for brains.

Even though it has to be the same survey, the story from Vice says “a full one-fifth of Americans are using orange juice in their cereal instead of milk,” though Bustle says “More than 10 percent of Americans admitted to using orange juice or coffee”.   It’s not just that the numbers are inconsistent, the phrasing in one case suggests “do you usually?” as the question, the other “have you ever?” It matters, or at least it would if anything about this mattered.

We’re also not told whether these are really supposed to be proportions of “Americans” or of “Americans who eat cereal”, or “Americans who eat cereal for breakfast”, or whatever.

Usefully, the Vice story does give a bit more detail about the survey

Two thousand US consumers and college students from all over the country participated in the study, with about 30 percent male subjects and 70 percent female. The participants were of all ages, with half being college students and the rest varied (14 percent between the ages of 25 and 34 years old, 16 percent between 35 and 44 years old, about a quarter between 45 and 54 years old, and the rest scattered in older or younger age groups). 

They don’t say how the participants were recruited or surveyed, but there’s enough information there to make it clear the data would be meaningless even if we knew what the questions were and what percentages the survey actually found.

• Locksmiths gaming Google and Google Maps: from the New York Times. 

• We have “lead generation systems” here too, but I haven’t seen any suggestion that these are scams, just somewhat misleading advertising aiming to look local. Eg, from a site that’s appealingly honest about how it works

If your business covers the whole of Auckland for example then we would set up 200 websites for you which is one for every suburb in the city covering 6 districts

• What’s the first word that comes to your mind starting with SUPP? If you said “SURGERY”, you’re not alone — or maybe you’re not real. “Disturbing oddities” in a research paper.

• Identifying the gender of fictional characters (without cheating and using the pronouns, names, etc).  (via Richard Easther)

• A map of the longest flights — Auckland-Houston and Auckland-Vancouver don’t make it.

• A list of things that can be wrong with data, by and for data journalists. I may have posted this before, but it’s good enough to repeat.

• Herald Insights has an exploration of unemployment rates over the recession and recovery, by census ethnic group and age.

• A company that may be taking measurement too far: “Any meeting of at least three people is expected to hold at least one poll.”

Soon after Twitter polls were introduced, Al-Jazeera News used one to poll its followers about US intervention in Syria. Fortunately, it seems to have been a failed experiment (the poll, that is).

Now, Nature News is doing it:

Twitter polls can work as jokes and commentary, and they might work for gathering opinions from your friends. They shouldn’t be allowed to masquerade as data collection.

So, the Herald has a story headlined Men’s DIY skills ‘dying out’ – study. Here’s the first three paragraphs

Men are no longer able to carry out traditional DIY – with most now opting to call in tradesmen, research shows.

Most men cannot change a tyre, while only half can wire a plug and just one in five are able to fix a dripping tap.

Three in five men would need to call in a plumber to unblock a toilet, while only a third feel confident about putting together flat-pack furniture.

You might think this raises some questions. For example:

• Is there any information in the story suggesting the numbers are reliable? (not really)
• Do they have comparable data from the past to support the ‘dying out’, ‘no longer able’ and so on? (no)
• Isn’t this whole gendered housework thing mildly offensive and about five decades out of date? (yes)
• Hasn’t it been a cliche since flat-pack furniture was invented that most people don’t feel confident assembling it? (yes)

A question that might not spring immediately to mind: “What country are these numbers from?”

The stock photo isn’t much use. It shows a man carrying a plank while smiling — maybe one of the other dying skills?  Google Image Search finds a vendor who has it tagged as Calgary, Alberta (Canada).

However, there are two clues in the text I’ve quoted.  The first clue is that there aren’t any specifically NZ journalistic cliches — it’s hard to imagine a Kiwi writing this sort of crap without referencing, say, number 8 wire.

The second clue is more subtle: “only half can wire a plug”.  Until 1992, appliances in the UK were often sold without plugs attached, and wiring a plug was a more important household skill than in the rest of the world.

Reading on, the fourth paragraph confirms that this is a UK story. It’s from the Daily Mail and it exists to advertise a UK men’s clothing company.  If you found the story annoying, I would encourage you not to investigate their blog further.

A modest proposal: it appears that news sites have to publish a certain number of these surveys. Maybe they could trim out the name of the sponsoring company, and just provide it in a link for readers who really cared? Then the story could be assessed on its true news (or perhaps entertainment) value.

Returning-from-travel edition

• Wordbank is an open database of information about children’s vocabulary growth. With pointy-clicky apps.

• The Ethical Data Scientist. Cathy O’Neil, writing at Slate. “As long as our world is not perfect, and as long as data is being collected on that world, we will not be building models that are improvements on our past unless we specifically set out to do so.”

• Billboards that use DNA on discarded cigarette butts or gum to recreate images of the litterer. “Obviously we have no photos of the original litterers to compare the sketches to, but according to Oglivy, the results are accurate.” [trust us, we’re an advertising agency]

• Headline: Revealed: The drug that keeps you young. Story: “Experts say they had extended the lifespan of mice by 35 per cent” and “The one used on mice is not suitable for people”

I think this is just a typo in the Herald story about testing for methamphetamine in state houses:

Forensic scientist Dr Nick Powell said any meth contamination above 0.5mcg per 100sq m of surface risked headaches, coughs and sleeplessness, and poorer appetite and infant brain growth.

The NZ standard for cleanups is 0.5μg per 100cm², which is designed to be safe, rather than just on the borderline of danger, so even with square centimetres this is a strong claim. Changing the denominator to square metres makes the claim ten thousand times stronger.

Jack Scanlan, at Lateral

Steps could be taken to reduce the hype associated with every tiny step towards curing a disease or developing a new technology, but the trade-off would be a reduction in the amount of science making its way to the public.

From What World Are We Building?  by danah boyd

One of the perennial problems with the statistical and machine learning techniques that underpin “big data” analytics is that they rely on data entered as input. When the data you input is biased, what you get out is just as biased. These systems learn the biases in our society, and they spit them back out at us.

Every summer, the Department of Statistics offers scholarships to a number of students so they can work with staff on real-world projects. Xiangjie, right, is working on vector generalized linear and additive models (VGAM) for R with Dr Thomas Lee. Xiangjie explains:

“I am trying to help Dr Yee to improve the functionality of the VGAM package. This includes writing some functions from scratch, improving the efficiency of the existing functions and testing functions. To do this, I will need to learn the underlying structure of R and write or translate some functions from other computing languages to C or R.

“I came to the University of Auckland to do my undergraduate Applied Mathematics and Operations Research in 2012.

“After I finished, I received offers to do both Applied Mathematics and Statistics. When I was trying to decide the topic of my Honours project, I realised that Statistics covers a very broad range of topics and that they are very closely related to each other – I could learn data analysis, computing or probability theory and stochastic processes. All of these topics are really useful in our daily lives. I was really fascinated by this, so I decided to study Statistics instead of Applied Mathematics. I am thinking about pursuing a masters degree or a PhD in Statistics this year.

“This summer, I am hoping to travel more in New Zealand. In fact I went camping recently with my high-school friends in Whangarei and the Bay of Islands region and I had a great time. Besides travelling, I’d like to spend some time relaxing at home, watching my favourite shows.”

• New progress in awful graphs, via Andrew Gelman

• Scientific American‘s predictions for the future, from 2005

• “Claims that forensic experts can match a bullet or shell casing found at a crime scene to a specific weapon lack a scientific basis and should be barred from criminal trials as misleading, a D.C. Court of Appeals judge wrote this week.”  The judge objected to claims that the evidence proved a ‘unique’ match. And quite right, too.

• You can prove that a treatment works without knowing how it works, but it’s much harder to find treatments that way. Lithium for bipolar and other mood disorders is an excellent example

• You might have heard of CRISPR in the news and wondered what exactly it was.  It’s a technique for cutting DNA at very easily customised locations, for example, to allow for new sequences to be inserted. Good references
  • Wired
  • Gizmodo (more comparison with other gene editing techniques)
  • New York Times (more on implications)
  • Wikipedia (more technical)