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."

Comments

Pi

[savagedome]

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.

I see plenty of cautions

[Anonymous Coward]

The Numbers Guy says, "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."

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.

It happens every day

[DavidBrown]

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.

Re:So...

[fred fleenblat]

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.

Here's a classic: about marriages and divorce

[jwd-oh]

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.