Hi Allan,
You may want to consider putting this forward to the RSS statistic of the year competition. It is clearly not a winner but it is definitely worthy of public comment on how it should have been presented. The RSS got it wrong last year with the Kim Kardashian when they allowed that to be seen at the stat of the year when in fact it was worthy of comment but on the grounds that there were problems with her stats and it was an educational example of how to get things wrong.
Regards
Nigel
-----Original Message-----
From: A UK-based worldwide e-mail broadcast system mailing list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Allan Reese
Sent: 6 October, 2018 11:51 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Question about presentation - opinions please
The Big Butterfly Count is citizen science in the UK. Butterfly Conservation recently published the results, from which I extract four rows:
species Abundance % change from 2017
1 Small White273,650161%
2 Large White210,665 104%
3Gatekeeper72,877-54%
...
15 Silver Y11,580256%
My question is, although the %change is correctly calculated, is this a sensible presentation for a lay readership? The text is clearer:
"Numbers of both [Large and Small White] were more than double that seen ... in 2017."
I think I'd be less puzzled if the change was shown "+161%" but suspect anyone (apart from accountants?) needs to do mental arithmetic to see
161 as more than double, and 256% as three-fold increase. In a sense, -54% is the inverse of +104%, but again not intuitive?
Please send direct to me any opinions of what presentation you would suggest for these data. The full table can be seen at https://www.bigbutterflycount.org/2018mainresults
A further suggestion could be to put this annual survey into a longer perspective than just year-on-year. These counts began in 2010 and the text includes comments such as "The Silver Y moth also had a good summer, with its highest number per count since 2013."
Allan
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