How long till Q&A-gate dies down? Yesterday’s episode of Q&A brought us former Liberal leader John Hewson replacing Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and another round of Q&A-controversy-themed pieces in the mainstream press.

Of course, in the four weeks since the Zaky Mallah kerfuffle started, The Australian has been leading the charge. Data whiz Rupert Hanson tried to figure out how long until the Oz stops running Q&A-themed pieces, based on the trend up to yesterday. The answer: in about eight weeks.

It’s worth pointing out an R-squared of 0.166 is nearly useless as a means of prediction — a perfect positive correlation between time and the decrease of Q&A thinkpieces would be signified by an R-squared of 1, and statisticians generally dismiss as weak any correlation with an R-squared of less than 0.5. Crikey pointed this out to Hanson, who responded that the Oz‘s hate for the ABC “defies simple statistical models”. Well, we can’t argue with that … — Myriam Robin