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Australia should revamp how it selects major transport projects, so that governments can better know which new roads and railways are worth building and avoid squandering billions of dollars of public money on the wrong projects. The 'discount rate' Australian governments have applied to assess the value of proposed projects has been stuck at 7 per cent since at least 1989, even though the price of money has fallen from about 8 per cent to 1 per cent since then.

Last week, the American Cancer Society published new guidelines that call for colorectal cancer screening to begin at age 45 - five years earlier than the group had previously recommended. But some experts are saying not so fast. The new recommendation was made in reaction to increasing rates of colorectal cancer among people younger than 50. But while the rise in cancers among this younger age group is troubling, this new recommendation was made before we know what's behind the new trend. And it's not clear that screening can help.It makes intuitive sense to respond to increasing rates of colon cancer among young people by lowering the screening age, said Michael Hochman, director of the the Gehr Family Center for Health Systems Science at the Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles. "But if I had a quarter for every time in medicine that we were tricked by an idea with intuitive appeal, I'd be a rich man," Hochman said.

I set out to discover which Harry Potter actors have had the best careers since the franchise kicked off in 2001 - similar to the analysis I did of people who've acted in the Star Wars franchise. How many other movies did they make, how good were those movies and how much money did they bring in? To find out, I turned to IMDb. For every actor who was credited in one of the eight Harry Potter movies, I pulled every full-length feature film2 that he or she was credited in, as well as the ratings for each film and its box-office take, if IMDb had it.

Argument: Because deductions (the amount of income you can claim is not-taxable) will be reduced, even though the tax rate will go down, the richest will not in fact see an absolute reduction in tax paid. Counterargument - looking at the data, this is in fact not the case...

The public understandably focuses on polling results and how much these results seem to vary. Take two presidential approval polls from March 21. Polling firm Rasmussen Reports reported that 50 percent of Americans approve of President Donald Trump's performance, while, that same day, Gallup stated that only 37 percent do. In late February, the website FiveThirtyEight listed 18 other presidential approval polls in which Trump's approval ratings ranged from 39 percent to 55 percent. Some of these pollsters queried likely voters, some registered voters and others adults, regardless of their voting status. Almost half of the polls relied on phone calls, another half on online polling and a few used a mix of the two. Further complicating matters, it's not entirely clear how calling cellphones or landlines affects a poll's results. Each of these choices has a consequence, and the range of results attests to the degree that these choices can influence results.

University students, like many in society, demonstrate bias against women and particularly women from non-English speaking backgrounds. That's the take home message from a new and comprehensive analysis of student experience surveys. The study examined a large dataset consisting of more than 500,000 student responses collected over 2010 to 2016. It involved more than 3,000 teachers and 2,000 courses across five faculties at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney.

Use of mean and median to analyse the paygap at The Guardian group. The gender pay gap at Guardian News & Media is 11.3% - calculated by mean hourly pay - the company has reported as part of the government's compulsory gender pay gap initiative.Across GNM, the median pay difference, which takes the mid-point when all wage rates are lined up from the biggest to smallest - which reduces the impact of one-off outliers - is wider, at 12.1%. The figure for non-editorial is 18.2%, and nearly 9% in editorial.

An introduction to a set of deep dive articles an important issue....When we tell people that we work at the intersection of statistics and human rights, the reaction is often surprise. Everyone knows that lawyers and journalists think about human rights problems … but statisticians? Yet, documenting and proving human rights abuses frequently involves the need for quantification. In the case of war crimes and genocide, guilt or innocence can hinge on questions of whether violence was systematic and widespread or one group was targeted at a differential rate compared to others. Similar issues can arise in assessing violations of civil, social, and economic rights. Sometimes the questions can be answered through simple tabulations, but often, more-complex methods of data collection and analysis are required.

"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."

Advancement toward gender equality at work has slowed since the 1990s for three major reasons: people's attitudes stopped becoming more gender egalitarian, occupations stopped gender integrating, and the gender wage gap began decreasing at slower rates. Sociologist Paula England has called this phenomenon an "uneven and stalled" gender revolution, and there have been dozens of studies showing how the progress in gender equality experienced during and immediately after the feminist movement of the 1970s has not been sustained through the 1990s and 2000s. Does this stalled revolution play out in management positions, too? And if so, how? To explore this, I used data on full-time managers obtained from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey for the years 1980 and 2010 to examine three major factors that contribute to gender equality in the labor force: women's representation in management, the occupational gender segregation among managers, and the gender wage gaps that vary across managerial occupations.

In our teens and early twenties, we're still figuring out what we want to be when we grow up. As we get older, we start to settle into a career. In between, we switch jobs in the search. Based on data from the Current Population Survey, this is when people make the switches and the jobs they switch to.The chart above shows the rate by age, relative to the total number of people who switched to each job. So you see a lot of switching in the early years, and then things seem to settle down at older ages. If someone takes a new job when they're older, it tends towards management or jobs that require more education.

On the importance of having data, in order to understand and tackle an issue... The most recent U.S. estimate...concluded approximately 513,000 women and girls at risk of genital mutilation...But that number should be taken with a big grain of salt...the data doesn't account for immigrants from countries where female genital cutting isn't studied or widely practiced...."You also can't assume that people who come to the U.S. are a representative sample of their country of origin," Clark said. That's especially problematic for estimating rates of female genital cutting, since it's not practiced uniformly within countries. It's also possible, he said, that some immigrants abandon the procedure as they assimilate....some advocates point out that although the estimates focus on immigrants, ...female genital cutting isn't new to the U.S. Female circumcision was performed as a treatment for masturbation by American physicians as recently as the mid-20th century...

ASCO's news release about the screening study laments the "unfortunate" low rate of lung cancer screening and calls for an awareness campaign to encourage more smokers to get screened. Missing is discussion of legitimate reasons smokers might have to decline screening including substantial harms and a modest benefit. Following ASCO's lead, Bloomberg and HealthDay both echoed dramatic language about the finding without providing any perspective from independent experts who might voice reservations about screening.

Wrapping your head around the scale of a global pandemic is not easy, and the volume of stats and data can be bewildering. What, for instance, are we to make of the fact Australia recorded just 109 new cases in its daily count for April 6? Given this figure peaked at around 400 new cases per day, does this mean the rate of infection is now tapering off? And what, apart from sadness, are we to make of more gruesome statistics, such as the 969 COVID-19 deaths reported in a single day in Italy on March 27? To help interpret and understand the mountains of COVID-19 data, we'll look at five commonly used methods, and explain the pros and cons of each.

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.

A list of "happy data stories" or stories related to the arts...including: Pup Inflation: Good Dogs Getting Better. "Oh, but for a much purer example of silly data journalism that I remembered as soon as I hit send, earlier this year I scraped and analyzed the dog ratings from the Twitter account WeRateDogs." -David Henry Montgomery Sneakin' Toward the Weekend, Workers Fill Roadways "How about using hourly traffic counting stations to show how people are cheating out of the office earlier and earlier on Fridays? Mental note: we're four years away from that link being older than my incoming freshmen. Also, note the wonder at phones able to receive email being someday widely available in the story." -Matt Waite

By pulling this chart apart and then helping you put it back together, this story aims to help you understand: how quickly coronavirus is spreading in different countries; where Australia fits into the global picture; what we can learn from countries that appear to have curbed the rise of COVID-19; and what you can do to help keep Australians safe. But first, one concept that's vitally important to understanding a pandemic is exponential growth. This is a pattern viruses tend to initially follow, due to the way they're spread. The result is that what might seem like a small difference in the rate of growth can actually have enormous impacts on how many people are infected overall.

By UTS' Stephen Woodcock. Statistics is a useful tool for understanding the patterns in the world around us. But our intuition often lets us down when it comes to interpreting those patterns. In this series we look at some of the common mistakes we make and how to avoid them when thinking about statistics, probability and risk.

When Ice Cream Sales Rise, So Do Homicides. Coincidence, or Will Your Next Cone Murder You?