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Uses the example of health treatments to illustrate some of the problems with using the average

Every year in Australia, the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results show Indigenous school students are well behind their non-Indigenous peers. Reducing this disparity is a vital part of Australia's national Closing the Gap policy. ... Using an updated version of our equivalent year levels metric, introduced in Grattan Institute's 2016 report Widening Gaps, we estimate year nine Indigenous students in very remote areas are: five years behind in numeracy six years behind in reading, and seven to eight years behind in writing. In other words, the average year nine Indigenous student in a very remote area scores about the same in NAPLAN reading as the average year three non-Indigenous city student, and significantly lower in writing. But it would be a big mistake to see this only as a problem for isolated outback communities. Most Indigenous students live in cities or regional areas. So, even though learning outcomes are worse in remote and very remote areas, city and regional students account for more than two-thirds of the lost years of learning.

For the 11 million Australians with private hospital cover, premium rises are nothing new. The 3.95% average increase on April 1, 2018 will be the seventeenth consecutive year in which insurance premiums have been hiked up. Health insurance premiums have increased by an average of 5.35% per year since 2000, which is significantly more than wage growth, meaning that households are spending a larger share of their income on health care.

"Between 2000 and 2015, nearly every African country improved childhood nutrition, especially in reducing stunted growth caused by malnutrition" .... " national averages do not tell the full story. In Kenya, for example, rates of wasting in children under 5 were below 6% on average nationwide in 2015, yet in certain regions plagued by several years of poor rains, crop failure and disease outbreaks, estimated levels of wasting reach as high as 28%."... "Such fine-grained insight brings tremendous responsibility to act. It shows governments, international agencies and donors exactly where to direct resources and support."..."This shows how crucial it is to invest in data. Data gaps undermine our ability to target resources, develop policies and track accountability. Without good data, we're flying blind. If you can't see it, you can't solve it."

Interesting discussion of how we perceive risk, and the risks of everyday activities! So let's answer the first question: how likely is a fatal shark attack for an Australian? To get a crude estimate of this, averaged across the whole population, you would divide the number of people who have died due to a shark attack each year (on average three to four each year based on recent data) by the population of Australia (approximately 24 million). This yields a risk of approximately one in eight million per year, which is thankfully very low. Does this assuage your fear? If not, the reason is probably that the imagery of a shark attack is so terrifying. Any unusual and dramatic event has a huge impact on our psyche and this distorts our perception. Also, it's not that easy for us to interpret what a risk expressed as a relative frequency truly means.

Some great quotes in this piece! The language of politics warps our democracy again and again, as in this tax calculation. The media must unpack statistics Last week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Health Foundation published a report on funding for health and social care. One figure from the report was repeated across the headlines. For the NHS to stay afloat, it would require "£2,000 in tax from every household". Shocking stuff!If you're sitting at a bar with a group of friends and Bill Gates walks in, the average wealth of everyone in the room makes you all millionaires. But if you try to buy the most expensive bottle of champagne in the place, your debit card will still be declined. The issue to be addressed, and one to which there is no fully correct answer, is how we can put numbers into a context that enables people to make informed choices. Big numbers are hard to conceptualise - most of us have no intuitive understanding of what £56bn even looks like.

Christopher Pyne has overstated how well Australia is performing on jobs and growth compared to other major economies. IMF estimates for 2016 on GDP growth had put Australia ahead of the G7 countries. But the latest available data - which are actual figures as of the third quarter of 2016, not estimates - show that Australia's cumulative growth in 2016 so far is at the level of the G7 and not higher. So Australia is performing in line with the G7 and slightly worse than the OECD average.

How does the "smashed avo" hook shape this discussion? Look at how statistics are used in this report to inform the debate and critique a narrow perspective. There's no doubt there are differences between the experiences and opportunities of young people compared to their parents. But when you enter the smashed avocado debate of baby boomers versus millennials, you overlook the inequality between members of the same generation. This also misses other ways inequality is perpetuated, such as through the intergenerational transfer of wealth. It's uncomfortable for many to admit but Australia is a hugely unequal society, both in terms of incomes and wealth. Australian households in the top 20% account for half of the income stream, that's about 12 times more than the bottom 20%. At the far ends of the distribution, the average weekly after tax income of the top 5% is 13 times that of the bottom 5%. But this isn't just an artefact of wealth in different generations. There are multiple ways we can glean this, most notably in relation to poverty.

A psychologist compared online reviews of three medical products with results from clinical trials, and found the reviews are skewed towards the positive. The author of the study, Dr Micheál de Barra, wanted to look into whether people who have had good outcomes from treatments are more likely to go online and give positive reviews than people who have had average or poor outcomes. As such, the product reviews provided by online retailers may be distorted. The author looked at Amazon.com - the US version of the site - and analysed two cholesterol-reducing products and one weight loss treatment. In general, he found the extent of cholesterol reduction or weight loss reported by online reviewers was substantially greater than that demonstrated in randomised controlled trials, a more reliable source of evidence on effectiveness.

But shouldn't there be some kind of accountability when you're talking about public money? My response would be what kind of accountability do we have now? Our schools are graded by test scores, and half the schools are doing worse than the other half and nobody does anything about that at all. This is the advantage of letting parents control the venue for education. And Michael Gove (excerpt at) https://twitter.com/Annelies_Leeuw/status/851945727110643717/photo/1

As an epidemiologist, I am interested in disease - and more specifically, who in a population currently has or might get that disease. What is their age, sex, or socioeconomic status? Where do they live? What can people do to limit their chances of getting sick? Questions exploring whether something is likely to happen or not can be answered with quantitative research. By counting and measuring, we quantify (measure) a phenomenon in our world, and present the results through percentages and averages. We use statistics to help interpret the significance of the results. While this approach is very important, it can't tell us everything about a disease and peoples' experiences of it. That's where qualitative data becomes important.

Interesting links to different sources discussing data on teacher pay, and what it shows in relation to different things that stakeholders might care about. educator pay varies significantly across states, from an average of $44,921 in Oklahoma to $77,957 in New York. Why should school administrators and government leaders care about teacher pay - beyond wanting their employees to be able to afford their living expenses? Below, we present research that examines this issue. What scholars have found is that teacher salaries are linked to employee retention and that better pay seems to draw smarter people to the field and into the classroom. It's not clear, however, whether higher salaries result in higher student achievement.

Excellent analysis from the FT (you'll need to login to view via the link) that uses knowledge of the Mean and Median to show that some companies have reported incorrect (fabricated?) pay-gap information! One in 20 UK companies that have submitted gender pay gap data to the government have reported numbers that are statistically improbable and therefore almost certainly inaccurate, a Financial Times analysis has found. Sixteen companies, each with more than 250 employees, reported that they paid their male and female staff exactly the same, that is they had a zero average gender pay gap measured by both the mean and median. Experts on pay said that it was highly anomalous for companies of that size to have median and mean pay gaps that were identical because the two statistics measure different things. The mean gap measures the difference between the average male and female salary while the median gap is calculated using the midpoint salary for each gender.

Say you have a 3,000-person presidential election survey from a state where 3 percent of the population is black. If your survey is exactly representative of reality, you'd end up with 90 black people out of that 3,000. Then you ask them who they plan to vote for (for our purposes, we're assuming they're all voting). History suggests the vast majority will go with the Democrat. Over the last five presidential elections, Republicans have earned an average of only 7 percent of the black vote nationwide. However, your survey comes back with 19.5 percent of black voters leaning Republican. Now, that's the sort of unexpected result that's likely to draw the attention of a social scientist (or a curious journalist). But it should also make them suspicious. That's because when you're focusing on a tiny population like the black voters of a state with few black citizens, even a measurement error rate of 1 percent can produce an outcome that's wildly different from reality. That error could come from white voters who clicked the wrong box and misidentified their race. It could come from black voters who meant to say they were voting Democratic. In any event, the combination of an imbalanced sample ratio and measurement error can be deadly to attempts at deriving meaning from numbers - a grand piano dangling from a rope above a crenulated, four-tiered wedding cake. Just a handful of miscategorized people and - crash! - your beautiful, fascinating insight collapses into a messy disaster.

Really good video illustrating how (a) gathering data, and (b) understanding the shape of that data can give us insight onto real world issues, and help us to target approaches to tackling them "Britain has carried out one of the biggest data-gathering exercises on the gender pay gap, exposing large disparities between the average pay given to men and women in some of the country's best-known companies. We dispel some of the myths around the gap, and explain what it really means and why it matters"