Posts tagged…Statistics
Trade ‘imbalances’ are misleading
Mon, Jul 12 2010Alexandro Jara, the Deputy Director-General of WTO
"[R]elying on conventional trade statistics gives a distorted picture of trade imbalances between countries. As we saw when looking at the Chinese content of the iPad, what counts is not the imbalances as measured by gross values of exports and imports, but how much valued added is embedded in these flows.
The WTO estimate, based on IDE-Jetro…
Read more…Offensive teenagers
Thu, Mar 18 2010
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics more than 1 in 12 teenage males commits an offense that comes to police notice.
Rahmstorf rebuffed
Tue, Jan 12 2010The Potsdam Institute physicist whose 2007 paper Ross Garnaut relied on for his assertion that "on the balance of probabilities" CO2-driven warming was accelerating dangerously, has been exposed as a scientific gadfly.
At the time of the publication of Garnaut's interim report, several well-qualified sceptics disputed Rahmstorf's projetions, including David Stockwell, Lucia Liljegren and Steve…
The ABS explains “trend estimates”
Fri, Jul 31 2009I've argued several times that the broadcast media has misrepresented quarterly unemployment by focusing on (the scarier of either) the raw or seasonally-adjusted data. Although there's a great deal to be said for just eyballing a trend when you have a long time-series that accurately samples an 'atomic' phenomenon, trends in a series with statistically simple ('normally distributed')…
U.S. and Global Temperatures: a correction
Fri, May 22 2009
Dr Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA and a principal author of the Real Climate weblog, has emailed me to point out an error (mine) in my review of Ian Plimer's Heaven + Earth.
I said that I had learned from Ian Plimer that NASA had reversed it's claim that the ten years following 1995 were the hottest ten years of the century when Steven McIntyre showed that the record belonged to 1934.…
Does the data show ‘epidemic’ obesity risks?
Tue, May 12 2009The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has just published the summary results of the National Health Survey for 2007-08. The interesting thing about this year's data is that it includes actual measurement data (as well as self-reports by survey respondents) of 'body-mass indices' (BMI).
Superficially the BMI data in the new ABS survey seems to show that the loud alarms about an 'epidemic of…
Media wrong on unemployment, again
Thu, May 07 2009I know it's not news that people writing for the 'mainstream' media these days either can't read or don't bother to do any research. I know it's not all their fault. If readers pay for sensation rather than sense, that's all the newspapers and TV need give them. But…
Just for the record: the ABC (in this case, expect the same elsewhere) has the story on the ABS unemployment data wrong again.…
The facts on flu
Wed, Apr 29 2009Most pandemics just aren't what they're cracked up to be.
Sandy Szwarc has published a fascinating dissection of the panic over Mexican 'swine' flu. She points out that if you check national health data, you'll find that influenza kills about the same number of people in pandemic and in non-pandemic years.
"In fact, most of us have lived through a flu pandemic and never even realized it. The Hong…
The truth about employment trends
Fri, Mar 13 2009There's a level of hysteria to the reporting of the February employment data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Better to look yourself at the ABS report (it's quite readable) where it is clear that, although unemployment is trending up after a long decline, there is no need for alarm about current levels. Australia still enjoys historically low levels of unemployment, while employment…
Staticulation on rainfall from the BOM
Tue, Feb 17 2009Dr David Jones, head of the Bureau of Meteorology's (BOM) National Climate Center, if accurately reported, relies on staticulation rather than evidence in remarks about drought and climate change:
"While climate scientists warn a single event such as Victoria's deadly bushfires cannot be blamed on climate change alone, Dr Jones said the conditions were 'totally typical of climate change at the…
Farmers unhappy about CSIRO drought ‘alarmism’
Thu, Aug 07 2008In my experience you can count on farmers to sniff out hype. Even before David Stockwell completed his statistical analysis, the NSW Farmers' Association President thought the CSIRO had exaggerated the problem.
"Association president Jock Laurie says while the Climate Report does say ‘exceptionally high temperatures’ are likely to occur frequently, this does not equate to drought. Alarmist…
CSIRO Drought Model ‘fails’
Wed, Aug 06 2008David Stockwell at Niche Modeling has completed his analysis of the CSIRO's Exceptional Circumstances Drought Report. His conclusion punctures the hyperbole of it's launch.
"In a statistical re-analysis of the data from the Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report, all climate models failed standard internal validation tests for regional droughted area in Australia over the last century. The most…