OOXML Vote and the CPI Corruption Index 190
Tapani Tarvainen writes "It turns out there's an interesting correlation between Transparency International's 'corruption perceptions index' and voting behavior in ISO's OOXML decision. Countries with a lower score (more corruption) on the 2006 CPI were more likely to vote in favor of OOXML, and those with a higher score were less likely. According to the analysis, 'This statistics supports with a P value of 0.07328 the hypothesis that the corrupted countries were more likely to vote for approval (one-tailed Fisher's Exact test). In other words, simplified a bit: the likelihood that there was no positive correlation between the corruption level and probability of an approval vote, that is, this is just a random effect, is about 7%.' Of course, correlation doesn't prove causality."
Strange (Score:3, Informative)
Re:.07 is not significant (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, having read TFA, I'm pretty sure that correlation isn't appropriate at all here. The corruption scores are discrete, categorical values, rather than continuous values. This calls for nonparametric methods. Start with chi-square and move on from there. You can't do correlation with a straight face if your variables are discrete, since there's no guarantee that the "distance" in corruption between 2 and 3 is the same as the distance between 4 and 5.
Re:Evidence of causality (Score:3, Informative)
No, the article doesn't say that. It says "We found that more corrupted the country is, the more likely it was to vote for the unreserved acceptance of the OOXML standard proposal."
Good that you mention Sweden though. The "irregularities" you mention were that Microsoft Sweden offered bribes to close business partners to vote "yes" to accept a suggested standard SIS had carefully evaluated over months and decided was worthless.
Re:Thanks, Intarweb reporter (Score:4, Informative)
Correlation would be: 85% of the kids 16-18 attending school drink large amounts of soda, whereas only 40% of those who do not attend school drink large amounts of soda. That is an example of correlation.
A good bogus example would be: People who wear suits to work have on average a higher income then people who wear work clothes, there is therefore a correlation between how nicely you dress to go to work and your salary. Therefore the way you dress to work has an impact on your salary.
Please note that the correlation in itself is not the bogus part of the example, the bogus part is the conclusion made by myself. Statistic themselves are rarely bogus, and if they are they can clearly be shown to be bogus, the conclusions drawn are the problematic part.
Re:Lies or Truth from Microsoft? (Score:1, Informative)
Apple - iWork'08 under Tiger can import OOXML documents, but it does so in a roundabout way. It imports OOXML files into it's native format (.pages, etc), but it can't write OOXML. (Not to mention you have to export the document back to office format, rather than save as). TextEdit under Leopard is said to be able to read/write OOXML as well as ODF, but I can't confirm this. The iPhone is also said to be able to open OOXML as well.
Novell - Novell's OpenOffice is said to be able to handle OOXML (according to wikipedia [wikipedia.org]), but I have not tried it myself. According to the same article, OO.o 2.3 (not Novell) is said to have an OOXML importer [openoffice.org] - so I guess that could cover Linux as well.
Palm - Datavitz DocumentsToGo [dataviz.com]
Java - No clue.
IP Issues - No clue
Easy to work with - Not my area of expertise.
Re:Poster needs course in stats (Score:2, Informative)
Re:.07 is not significant (Score:3, Informative)
7% is 7%. Labeling that "signficant" or "insignificant" doesn't change anything.
5% (Score:1, Informative)