Search results for lotto (43)

This year the visits to StatsChat have been about 1/3 for rugby prediction, about 1/3 for other posts, and about 1/3 for the home page. We had a slight increase in page views over last year.

Some specific things I’d like to highlight:

• The first week of Currie Cup predictions was one of the most popular posts, and judging from the time of day there were also a lot of South African readers of the Super 15 prediction posts.  Haere mai. Welcome. Welkom. Siya namkela nonke. Ngiyanemukela.
• One of the top non-rugby posts was based on a Herald story about Len Brown with an almost incomprehensibly inaccurate result from a real survey.  Hat tip to Lennart Nout.
• Three of our posts on the lottery keep being popular, but I suspect it’s because people think we’ll help them beat the Optional Stopping Theorem.
• Some people have footnotes. I have Wikipedia links. This year the pages I’ve sent reasonable numbers of people to include: the Optional Stopping Theorem, list of IARC Group I carcinogens, the endowment effect, Betteridge’s Law, British Chiropractic Association vs Simon Singh, and Radio Yerevan jokes
• Our top referrers (apart from Twitter and Facebook) include Kiwiblog, Simply Statistics,  Reddit, Andrew Gelman, and Lindsay Mitchell. I was glad to see Public Address moving up the list this year.
• If you want my Q&A dialogues, you can get them all with this search

I’m glad to say it’s been quite a while since we’ve had this sort of rubbish from the NZ papers, but it’s still  going across the Tasman (the  Sydney Morning Herald)

If you’re considering buying a lottery ticket, you’d better make sure it’s from either Gladesville or Cabramatta, which are now officially Sydney’s luckiest suburbs when it comes to winning big. 

…

NSW Lotteries has released statistics that show the luckiest suburbs across all lotto games in NSW and the ACT, as well as other tips for amateurs hoping to ring their bosses tomorrow morning to say they wouldn’t be coming in to work. 

Of course, the ‘luckiest’ suburbs are nothing of the sort: just the ones where the most money is lost on the lotteries. Cabramatta has improved a lot in recent years, but it’s still not the sort of place you’d expect to see called ‘lucky’.

• A Lotto story in the Herald that isn’t untrue or importantly misleading. Yay!
• The Art of Risk: videos from Leeds University
• “Incidentalomas“: the problem with new medical screening technologies

• The Herald

“It’s gettable, but it’s hard – that’s why it’s five million dollars.”

• Stuff

“The chances of picking every game correctly were astronomical”

• NBR (paywalled)

“crystal ball gazing of such magnitude that University of Auckland statistics expert associate professor David Scott doesn’t think either will have to pay out.”

• One News

“quite hard to win  “

“someone like you [non-expert] has as much chance  because [an expert] wouldn’t pick an upset”

• Radio Sport NZ (‘Crowd Goes Wild’ breakfast)

“An expert is less likely to win it than someone who just has a shot at it.”

“It’s only 64 games and, as I say, there’s only 20 tricky ones I reckon”

 

Yeah, nah.

From Stuff, on this week’s Lotto

The winner chose the six lucky numbers they played regularly but, in a clever move, chose to play the same numbers on 10 different lines with each Powerball number. That way they were ensured to win Powerball if their lucky numbers came up.

This strategy doesn’t increase the chance of winning Powerball, because you can’t increase the chance except by cheating or magic.   If they match the six numbers they are certain to win Powerball, rather than having only a 10% chance, but this is exactly compensated by their ten-fold lower chance of having a ticket that matches all six numbers.

The strategy does reduce the chance of winning the first division, by a factor of ten, but increases the fraction of the first-division prize that they snag (in this particular win, from 1/4 to 10/13). Over all, the strategy reduces expected winnings compared to ten random picks. On the other hand, if you cared primarily about average expected return you wouldn’t be playing Lotto.

Congratulations to Eva Laurenson for her excellent nomination of the NZ Herald’s article entitled “Manukau ‘luckiest’ place for Lotto”:

What does ‘luckiest’ in this title mean? Well to the average person ( I asked a few) they interpreted that title as ” I would have a higher chance of winning Lotto if I bought my ticket from a Manukau store compared to another store from a different suburb in Auckland.” Is this really the case? I doubt it. The article ranks Manukau ‘luckiest’ because it is the suburb with the highest total paid out first division amount. However no where did they take into account the total sales of Lotto tickets in each suburb. I think if you took this into account you’d see that Manukau sells alot more tickets than some of these other suburbs in Auckland. So even though Manukau can boast 55 mil in first division prizes we have no idea whether that is 55 mil out of 100 mill worth of ticket sales or 55 mil out of 1 bill worth of ticket sales. Some of the other suburbs may have a lesser amount of first division payouts compared to Manuaku but could have a greater proportion of first division payouts compared to ticket sales. Hence if that was true, your chance of winning first division given that you bought your ticket in that other suburb would be greater than (the same probability measured for) Manukau. Therefore I think there isn’t sufficient information provided to make this claim.

What I think the article could say is ‘given I won first division, the chances that I bought my ticket in Manukau are ____ times the chance that I bought it somewhere else.’ Something to this effect could be derived from the information presented by the herald article and it makes a bit of sense. Is this what the article wrote though? Not at all. They summarised this finding into “Manukau is the luckiest Lotto suburb in Auckland.” Please! This screams misleading. As discussed above, there simply isn’t enough information to justify labelling Manukau the ‘luckiest’ suburb for Lotto. People have a clear idea of what it means to be lucky and that generally is that they have an increased chance of winning. This is not the conclusion you can draw from the information they provided and in this case I believe the herald got it wrong.

I also think, although probably not the authors intentions, labelling Manukau as the ‘luckiest’ suburb has the danger of enticing people to spend more on Lotto. This article published earlier in the year by the NZ herald noted that “Many South Auckland suburbs featured among those which gambled away the most money. Mangere Bridge, Flat Bush, Manukau and Manurewa were in the top dozen suburbs.”
Even though the article was talking about the pokies, Lotto is just another form of gambling. We shouldn’t be condemming one and sending a rosy message about another, especially to communities who are struggling as it is.

Overall I think this should be the Stat of the week because using ‘lucky’ was a nice little pun but in effect mislead people regarding their chances of winning first division depending on where they bought their ticket.

Secondly it seems wrong to label a suburb ‘luckiest’ and potentially encourage a community to spend more on Lotto there when it is known that it is a compartively poorer area than other Auckland suburbs and spends alot of money on gambling as it is.

Thomas expanded on this, saying:

This looks as if it’s claiming that tickets bought in Manukau have been more likely to win. If this was true, it would still be useless, because future lotto draws are independent of past ones.

It’s even more useless because there is no denominator: not tickets sold, not people in the suburb, not even number of Lotto outlets in the suburb.

What the statistic, and the accompanying infographic, really identifies is the suburbs that lose the most money on Lotto. That’s why Manukau and Otara are ‘lucky’ and Mt Eden and Remuera are ‘unlucky’, the sort of willfully perverse misrepresentation of the role of chance that you more usually see in right-wing US outlets.

The Herald (as our Stat-of-the-Week nomination points out) is claiming

Manukau is the luckiest Lotto suburb in Auckland, the Herald can reveal.

This looks as if it’s claiming that tickets bought in Manukau have been more likely to win.  If this was true, it would still be useless, because future lotto draws are independent of past ones.

It’s even more useless because there is no denominator: not tickets sold, not people in the suburb, not even number of Lotto outlets in the suburb.

What the statistic, and the accompanying infographic, really identifies is the suburbs that lose the most money on Lotto.  That’s why Manukau and Otara are ‘lucky’ and Mt Eden and Remuera are ‘unlucky’, the sort of willfully perverse misrepresentation of the role of chance that you more usually see in right-wing US outlets.

From the Herald

It’s almost as good as claiming Lotto’s first-division prize – the winners in Auckland’s frantic housing market are selling their properties for hundreds of thousands of dollars above their official valuations.

Statistics show that in the past six months there have been at least nine properties that sold for $500,000 or more above their CV

My first instinct is to look up the number of houses listed for sale in Auckland over the past six months, and point out that this is about 0.025% of listings, so it compares to winning the lottery on more than one dimension.

But more importantly, the council valuation is almost completely irrelevant to whether the seller has done well out of the deal.  The seller doesn’t pay the council valuation to anyone. The costs to the seller (after taking inflation into account) are the purchase price, interest, maintenance, improvements, and rates,  and only the last is affected even slightly by the new council valuations.

There’s a been a lot of coverage around the world of the Oksnes family in Norway: three of them have won significant sums in the lottery, all three at times close to when one family member, Hege Jeanette, was giving birth.

We’ve been asked what the probability was.  This isn’t even really a well-defined question, because it’s hard to say what would count as the same event.  Presumably a different Norwegian family would still count, and probably a Chilean family.  What if the family members won near their own 30th birthdays rather than near the time their child/niece/nephew was born? Or if they’d each won on the day they graduated college? If we can agree on what counts as the same event it’s then hard to work out the probability because we’d need data on number of lottery players all around the world, and on how many of them had children.

There are some things we can compute.  Suppose that there is one lottery prize a week in Norway, and that about 1 million of the country’s 4.9 million people play.  Divide them up into groups of six people.  The chance that three prizes end up in the same group of six people over ten years would be about 1.5 in ten thousand. Extending this to the whole world, it’s pretty likely that three people in the same family have won. That doesn’t cover the pregnancy, which restricts us to three periods of a few weeks in the ten years. Suppose we say that it’s three three-week periods that would give a close enough match.  The chance of all the wins lining up with the births would be about five in a million.  So, if we specified that the coincidence had to be about giving birth, it’s pretty unlikely.

Alternatively, we could ask how likely is it that a coincidence remarkable enough to get reported around the world would happen in a lottery.  The probability of that is pretty high, and we can tell, because lots of unlikely lottery coincidences do get reported.

Finally, we could ask what is the probability that the coincidence was really just due to chance. The answer to this one is easy. 100%.

Sometimes you just know that apparent associations just have to be spurious: the price of tea in China really doesn’t affect NZ violent crime rates, and you’re no more likely to win at lotto if you buy your ticket from a shop that’s sold winning tickets in the past.  There’s no way that one could affect the other.

The Herald has a story on functional foods that’s very similar to one I commented on in May.  Again, before even looking at the claims, how could it be true that the shape of a food was a guide to its function? It would be necessary for God to have set it up that way (and, apparently, without bothering to tell anyone).

Match foods to parts of the body for optimum health benefits:

Also, let’s look at some of the examples

1. Healthy Bones: Bony-looking foods such as rhubarb, rich in vitamin K, and celery, rich in silicon, are both good for bones and healthy joints.

Vitamin K was once suggested as involved in bone health, based on observational studies, but a large randomised trial didn’t find any beneficial effect.  Also, although raw rhubarb has moderately high Vitamin K levels (about half as much as cooked broccoli), cooked rhubarb has much less.

3. Sight for Sore Eyes: Slice a carrot and the round circle will show a likeness to an eye, complete with pupil and iris. They contain beta-carotene and antioxidants, both helpful for eyesight issues.

Parsnips have the same shape (as do many roots), but lack the carotenoids.  Orange/golden kumara and pumpkin, which don’t have the eye shape, do have the carotenoids.  And I’m sure you could think of other body parts with more similarity to the carrot than eyes…

5. Round Fruit: Lemons and grapefruit with limonoids and vitamin C are believed to be helpful in preventing breast cancer.

How about quinces, mangoes, coconuts, and melons, which all have historical and cultural support for looking like breasts (or, if we follow Biblical authority, perhaps venison is the relevant food)