Iran Election Statistics
How do you detect election fraud? A recent article in the Washington Post describes a novel statistical idea. I wish I had thought of it.
Mind the Gap
Several years ago I posted a graphic plotting country’s GDP per head against mean lifetime and drawing attention to the tragic loss of life in southern Africa, mainly due to AIDS. There is a fantastic data visualisation tool called GapMinder that tells this story – and other stories- much more clearly. And it is really fun to play with.
GDP and aging
Below is a nice little graphic that I generated from an exploration tool provided by the good folks at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Developement. It shows the relationship of population distribution and GDP per head. Each point is a country. The axes are % of population below 14 and above 50. So countries in the top left endure the terrible aging armageddon that Australia is supposedly heading for (lots of old people and few young people). Bottom right countries are (dynamic?) youthful countries. The GDP per head is measured by the size of the blobs.
Elsevier’s bogus journal
Merck are currently defending a civil suit filed by an Australian who suffered a heart attack in 2003 while on Vioxx, an anti-inflammatory. Merck has been strongly criticized for distorting early scientific findings which showed cardio-vascular risk was higher for Vioxx patients than for those using a competiting drug Naproxen. They claimed that this was explained by Naproxen actually being protective against heart attack. This post is not about Vioxx however. It is about what arose in testimony concerning the relationship between the esteemed publisher Elsevier and Merck.
The answer is 42
Last week the eccentric genius Stephen Wolfram released his new intelligent search engine WolframAlpha. The idea is to provide a search engine that takes questions in ordinary language. The ever humble Wolfram reports to the world
I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work…
Expert witness
A few months ago I posted a query to anzstat about difficulties that I have found in providing expert witness advice to legal teams. Accoding to this Code of Conduct, the primary duty of an expert witness it to the court not to the legal team who are paying you. You are a witness - but you are paid. This inevitably sets up some tension.
The Expert Witnesses Institute of Australia has plenty of general information including their own Code of Practice. I think it is helpful to cite this code, with a link, whenever taking on a consulting job of this nature. It lets the lawyers know, right from the start, that you are not a soft touch.
I received replies from several respondents and have condensed their replies below, without specific attribution.
Rooned. We’ll all be rooned.
There is something about the way real estate trends are reported that borders on the irresponsible. OK. Real estate is the single biggest exposure that Joe and Jill Average have to the economic cycle and people are naturally interested. I get it. But bearing in mind the level of herd behaviour involved in any market, media exaggeration of any figure that can be converted into a sensational headline can only fuel irrational exuberance and despair.
Correlation Cartoon
This cartoon has been discussed by ANZstat recently and also appeared on CoreEcon via Andrew Leigh. but it is a good one so I thought I would post it here anyway. A nice way to start or end a lecture on correlation I have found. Enjoy.
Concoction, inaccuracy and irrelevance
We all know the adage that 57% of statistics quoted in an argument are made up and the other 44% are inaccurate. The third member of the holy trinity of misuse of statistics to my mind is irrelevance. And wrong headed conditioning is usually the best way to end up with an irrelevant statistic. To whit
“Domestic violence is the single most likely cause of preventable death for women under the age of 45”.
This week in class, I had an interesting discussion about this statement, which I have heard or seen many times. A few years ago it appeared on billboards around Melbourne and it was in a Green Left Weekly editorial last December.
Business Confidence
One of the better known surveys of business confidence is NAB Business Confidence index which is part of their monthly business survey. I have a few gripes about how it is used and reported and an interesting observation about how you should respond if you are ever surveyed.