Nov. 2nd, 2007

tablesaw: My apperance on Merv Griffin's Crosswords (Let's Do Crosswords!)
It's really a few different posts, but I'll only subject you to my smug Crosswords mug the once.

[livejournal.com profile] ojouchan has come down with the . . . something. It's very likely the flu (since she visited [livejournal.com profile] isako earlier this week), but she doesn't have any cough or sinus symptoms. She does have a fever though. And it's possible she picked up the whatever at the big sweaty Halloween party she went to.

Regardless, I spent most of yesterday getting things ready to take care of her, and to avoid getting sick myself. She's a bit peeved that one of the main ways I'm staying uncontaminated is by mostly staying away from her.



Spin check.

Here are the opening lines from an Next Generation article about videogame console sales in Japan:
PS3 Trims Wii Lead in Japan Again

Nintendo's Wii may have outsold the PlayStation 3 two-to-one during October in Japan, but its lead over Sony's next-gen console shrank for the fourth consecutive month.
The original Reuters article has an even more confusing Headline ("Wii trims lead over PS3 in Japan "), but the first paragraph is about the same. It also has this line:
The Wii's narrowing lead in Japan is a welcome sign for Sony as the electronics and entertainment conglomerate heads into the crucial holiday season.
I'm trying to get a handle on what's going on here, in the intersection between linguistics and statistics (linguististics). I want to say that the headline is inaccurate, or at least misleading, but I'm not sure. Specifically, I think that using "lead" when actually comparing rates doesn't accurately convey the original information.

Here's a basic outline of the data according to Wikipedia (because I'm lazy): Since they both launched last year in Japan, Nintendo has sold more than twice as many Wiis (over 3 million) as Sony has PS3s (about 1.5 million). In October, twice as many Wiis were sold (110,415) than PS3s (47,183). As a final point of comparison given in the two articles, "in June the Wii outsold the PS3 by more than six-to-one."

But I'm wondering about comparing the monthly rates and using the word "lead." So the difference in monthly rates is certainly getting smaller. But does it actually make sense to use "lead" when talking about rates of sale? Using the word "lead" suggests more strongly to me the actual overall sales of the consoles. When talking about total sales in Japan, the Wii's lead is growing, it's merely growing more slowly.

By analogy, imagine that Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. are racing. Dale Sr. has in front of Junior by a large margin. At one point, he is going six times faster than his son. Later on in the race, Senior is even further ahead of Junior, but Dad is only going twice as fast as his son.

Is his "lead" being trimmed? The distance between the two continues to grow.

Language Log covers bad statistics in science reporting, who does it for business journalism?



Ojou and I signed up for Loscon, getting in just before the rate hike. It's been a while since I went to an honest-to-goodness sci-fi/fantasy convention, and now that we'll be in LA for Thanksgiving, we thought we'd go. Fun for all.

Note to puzzlers: don't look at the "Riddle Quest" unless you feel you haven't shuddered enough today.



No puzzle times today, I kept forgetting to stop the timer when I got up to do other things.

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