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Newsy Numbers
EriDay writes "The Wall Street Journal has a new feature called The Numbers Guy about "the way numbers and statistics are used - and abused - in the news, business and politics". The first installment lets us know that somewhere between 0 and 1 Billion (or more) people will be killed by Asian bird flu."
First published in 1954: How to Lie With Statistics
Good book, recommended reading, if you like the above article.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
And I get a kick out of the illustrations by Irving Geis, even though (or maybe because) they are rather dated in style.
The article reminded me of 'A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper' by John Allen Paulos. A great read for those interested in the mangling of science and numeracy by the media and politicians.
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er, click on your own link - the first article has the 100 million figure in it.
Unless you want to debate the meaning of the word "fact".
Skippy
The BBC has an excellent radio series called More Or Less" that unpicks the numbers and statistics that are bandied about in the news. It is authoritative, interesting and a remarkably good listen (available on demand using Real Audio)
I do hope that less than 1/3 of the population uses marijuana, as it's illegal.
:)
Yes, because everyone who has half a brain and can think critically knows how dangerous marijuana can be, and that the government would never make illegal something that wasn't dangerous. They're fully acquainted with what should be illegal and what shouldn't.
Is it me, or is HTML like the PERFECT language of sarcasm??
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
The article is about H5N1, better known as "bird flu." Some important things to know about avian influenza: in the small number of cases we've seen of it, it has a 75% or higher mortality rate (as opposed to 2.5% for the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918); it is remarkably difficult to create vaccines for it, because it kills the eggs used to create traditional influenza vaccines; the variants we see are amantadine/rimantadine resistant, limiting antiviral treatment options and suggesting significant exchange of genetic material with human influenza viruses; it is pantropic (capable of infecting tissue across the body) in some animals, and both pneumotropic (as all influenza are) and neurotropic in others; and H5N1 is epidemic in Asia amongst many different waterfowl.
So, what we know is that if an H5N1 variant emerges that is human-infectuous and easily transmissible, the chances are very, very high that the resultant pandemic would burn through populations like a wildfire. Furthermore, the chances of this happening are greater than either the appearance of or the damages from various high-profile, high-budget "homeland security" scenarios, such as smallpox (unlikely to occur) or a dirty bomb (more panic than damage).
So, what are the right risk factors? That's hard to say, since it depends on the right mutations being hit. But what we do know is that H5N1 represents at least as dangerous a threat as al-Qaeda.
This reminds me of a straight dope question/response:
For years those sugarless gum commercials have said, "Sugarless gum is recommended by four out of five dentists for their patients who chew gum." What does the fifth dentist recommend? Gum with sugar? --Elizabeth E., Towson, Maryland
Cecil replies:
Oh, sure, Elizabeth, why not? It's like tire dealers scattering tacks on the road. Fact is, the fifth dentist usually recommended no gum at all. Not the kind of advice a chewing-gum company wants to play up real big. The Warner-Lambert Company, makers of Trident sugarless gum, commissioned a market research firm to survey dentists in July 1976. The research people came up with a list of 1,200 dentists who were supposed to represent a cross-section of their profession. The dentists were asked what they recommended to their gum-chewing patients--sugared gum, sugarless gum, or no gum at all. Sugarless gum won with 85 percent. Nobody seems to remember exactly how many votes sugared gum got, but I figure there had to be at least one. Cast by the same guy that in a real election always votes for Donald Duck.
The 100,000 deaths from the war in Iraq figure was published in the British medical journal, the Lancet.s a
http://www.thelancet.com/search/search.i
(registration required)
From the article:
"We estimate that 98000 more deaths than expected (8000-194000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included. The major causes of death before the invasion were myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accidents, and other chronic disorders whereas after the invasion violence was the primary cause of death. "
"Interpretation: Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. "
Check this.
the idea that deaths should be scaled by life expectancy
This concept is used all the time in the field of public health. The term used is DALY (disability adjusted life-years), and basically is a measure of healthy years lost (whether due to illness or premature death).
Thus the death of a 90 year old male is thus nothing in comparision to a 6 year old child contracting malaria.
I recall that statistic, and it's not quite right (though your joke was appreciated nonetheless). That stat, I believe, was that 1/3 of people tested for drugs after a traffic accident tested positive for MJ. That's a bit different.
So, really, what that was testing was the ability of cops to tell what drivers were stoned. And, in this case, there were 2x as many false positives as actual positives.
That stat, brought to us by anti-drug people, was totally misleading, and pretty damn funny I think.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Why was SARS so significant?
So you've got a new, disease with unknown agent, few treatments, high mortality, and a large impact on healthcare infrastructure. Not a good sign.
The extent to which cases and deaths due to SARS were minimized is not an indication that the disease was overblown, but that the response to it was highly effective. Remember that there was a massive quarantine effort made. Again from Wikipedia:
SARS was a very close call, and a big wakeup alert.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?