Slashdot Mirror
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."
This column is just an superficial attempt by the WSJ to combat the "news is junk" meme that's been building over the last few years. They're trying to make it look like: "hell, we've got people who write fricking columns about statistical manipulation!" so that you don't think the rest of their paper prints it.
But odds are that in todays super-competitive least-necessary-change news market the WSJ has done nothing substantial to improve the accuracy of their paper and instead just inserted a column to improve the image.
I've heard of the book, but have not actually read it personally. I remember reading something in 4th grade or thereabouts that talked about how advertisers used numbers to make their product seem better with things like 3 out of 4 doctors surveyed, etc.
Also, there is a popular quote that goes "Lies, damn lies, and statistics".
Similar to the article, there is a strange number game that was done a while back when the SARS "epidemic" hit the world. A total of about 850 people died from the thing, yet annually 10,000 or so people die from influenza. SARS is an epidemic, influenza not.
However, people have heard of influenza and not SARS, so I guess it makes for better headlines.
I do hope that less than 1/3 of the population uses marijuana, as it's illegal.
Legality is not morality.
People used to drink also. They drank before prohibition, they drank during prohibition, and they drank after prohibition. The law didn't really change much, other than the fact that the same people went from being law abiding citizens, to criminals who supported the Kaiser (the same old Communist/Terrorist enemy tactic used forever) back to law abiding citizens.
Laws such as this are mainly academic in my opinion.