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."
Also, in his diary, the following excerpt was found:
11:15, restate my assumptions: 1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.
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My favourite is "fastest growing." We're always hearing about something being the "fastest growing" but, unless I know whether this is in percentage terms or absolute numbers, I have to write it off as a useless statement.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
The 100 million figure was reported widely, including in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal Online, CNN, Newsweek and the U.K.'s Observer; but without much caution about how arbitrary it is.
...Once again showing that the media aren't really that smart. Sources should be check for accuracy in any case, especially where these people are misinforming hundreds of thousands. Maybe this sort of story isn't an issue, but what if something more important to the readership were to be published erroniously?
Even slashdot can make mistakes. But at least we subject our stories to critical opinion.
Quoth the server, "404."
So I looked and I couldn't find a single article supporting his claim that it was reported as fact.
Maybe it's The Numbers Guy who abusing facts.
I have read (sorry, cannot cite source) that the claim that 100,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq is based on a statistical survey that says somewhere between 5,000 and 100,000 civilians had been killed.
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Reminds me of an anti-speeding promotion run by the Government of British Columbia a few years ago. They distributed flyers at malls and meetings that contained, among other things, a pie chart with the various causes of accidents broken down by percentage and accordingly sized pie wedge with a large bolded heading, "Speed Kills" or somesuch. The "speeding" wedge was colored red and greatly blown up for dramatic effect, while such other causes as "following too closely" and "unsafe lane changes" remained normal sized even though their percentages were GREATER than the "speeding" category.
I pointed this out to the police constable attending the display and he came back with the excuse that, "Speed exacerbates these driving behaviors", which I have to concede is true but it's impossible and simplistic to say that speeding was the cause of the accident, otherwise why would these other categories exist?
There is a great book by A. K. Dewdney called, "200% of Nothing", that talks about chart abuse and other statistical ills. I found it quite an interesting read as it turned a few of the rusty mathematical gears and made me think. You can find it at Amazon or any good library.
However, he does not rule out fractional numbers of dead people.
When I'm in the mood to tweak, I'll bring up the idea that deaths should be scaled by life expectancy. An extreme example would be that maybe the death of a 90 year-old guy with cancer should only count about 1% as much as the death of a healthy college kid.
This is at first a bit horrifying, but it changes the perception of health risk a bit. A car accident can strike at any time no matter your health or life-expectancy, but the flu is far harsher on the very young and the very old. Heart attacks quite rare for the under-30 crowd, become very common in the 50's and 60's and start tapering off since people who are susceptible have already had them. Various other ailments have other relationships to life-expectancy, both for susceptibility and for impact.
The logical conclusion I always get to is that we should focus a lot more health resources on the very young, i.e. pre-natal and neo-natal care, free vaccinations, healthy childhood diets and exercise, lifelong sunscreen habits, semi-intentional exposure to a variety of colds and flus in the teens and 20's, and moderation of alcohol and fatty foods after that.
It's all common sense stuff and would pay off 100:1 compared to after-the-event treatments for things like heart attacks and cancer.
The often quoted statistic:
In the US, 1/2 of all marriages end in divorce.
The correct statistic:
In the US, the annual divorce rate is 1/2 the annual wedding rate.
These are extremely different.
Come on, SARS was a flu. The normal flu kills more people each year on average than SARS. No matter the mortality rate, SARS was a two-bit flu with a good measure of histeria.
It's the same reasoning that will allow a smoker to buy a gun because he wants to pretect himself. I think you are much more likely to die from smoking than from getting shot. This is a great example of an irrational decision.
Like giving the people who failed to protect us on 9/11 more power rather than just firing them.