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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.
During one of the 2004 presidential debates: "We increased federal wetlands by 3 million!" -- GWB
I'm still not really sure what that means.
This thread provides and excellent opportunity to bash Bush, America, Corporations and Fox News!
I am very excited about the forth coming insults, unfounded claims, personal attacks and general hyper polarization this thread promises!
Go Slashdot!
The first installment lets us know that somewhere between 0 and 1 Billion (or more)
Excellent, it's nice to know that a negative number of people won't die.
and of those, a further 13% are made up, he's going to have no shortage of material;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
...83% off all statistics quoted are made up on the spot!
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.
Free XBox, PS2
...somewhere between 0 and 1 Billion (or more) people...
Is that zero , or zero billion ?
[...head explodes...]
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
1/3 of all auto accidents involve people who test positive for marijuana use.
This means that 2/3 of all auto accidents are cause by people who are not high.
We sober people are KILLING each other while the stoners are not.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Hopefully this will bring more visibility to the issue. It's always bugged me the way the media, governments, etc. misrepresent numbers so often. Too bad it wasn't around in time for the elections; there couldn't be more abuse of numbers than there.
- AMW
You are so funny "Shadow Wrought" ;-*
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."
Yeah, those folks at the Wall Street Journal are nothing but a bunch of crazy liberals.
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.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." - Mark Twain
Of course 70% of statistics are indeed made up.
Like Bush winning the 2004 election with 0-60,608,582 votes.
And I get a kick out of the illustrations by Irving Geis, even though (or maybe because) they are rather dated in style.
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.
Zero is used to getting treated like he's nothing.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Yeah. Conservative backlash aside, he does have a point in that I do not think there has been a single thread on Slashdot in 2 years where some bitter chucklehead hasn't interjected GWB somehow. Getting a little tired of it, I must say.
Trolls: The high-tech version of those morons that scrawl obscenities in public bathrooms.
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.
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
Bush, America, Corporations and Fox News leave themselves open to bashing when they say things that totally contradict math and science. They are not the first to do this and they are not the only ones to do this but they are able to take it to the farthest and get away with it. They don't even attempt to explain their fuzzy science. They just belittle critics of their policies like they did the "armchair general, liberal pundits and anti-american's" leading up to the war in Iraq. Many people forget to notice those people were right and the Bush administration has been wrong at every step. I think it's time we listen to the intellectual elite instead of the intellectually and morally bankrupt.
t ml
http://wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,62339,00.h
100% of all the replies to this article is worth reading.
100% are caused by humans. That's why I let my dog drive me everywhere.
But perhaps, statistically speaking, a negative number of people *could* die. How? Statistically speaking, a birth would be the inverse of a death, eh?
What if one or more people get sick with a particular pathogen and end up having to go to the hospital. In the end, the doctors save the day, and all the ill folks leave feeling much better, thank you. Now, suppose a few of the formerly hospitalized fellows (or females) fell in love and made little ones with special someones (to be sterotypical, nurses) they met while incapacitated...
TADA! A statistcally negative number of deaths attributable to the pathogen. (Admittedly, this counts indirect results of the infections, but hey, the statistics often do.)
Agreed, but this guy is now just inviting even more of that tripe.
Walt Mossberg (their tech columnist) was advocating the use of Firefox (and OS X) in his column well before the ad in the New York Times. Just saying.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
During communism (Bulgaria), we had this joke. An American and a Soviet athlete competed in an official event of importance. The American won. Next day, the newspapers wrote: "The Soviet athlete took the second place, while the American only got the penultimate one". :)
I intended the above post as a joke, not as information. Really, now I think the fact that my blatant (and somewhat lame) joke got modded as informative is funnier than the joke itself.
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)
In fact, the original author of that quote is Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881). Just google the quote. It is also documented in Bartletts book of quotes.
http://www.bartleby.com/66/99/16799.html
I was not trashing the WSJ. It's a fine newspaper.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Just another day in Paradise
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.
"up to" includes zero.
If you read the WSJ you will find out about things that you won't find elsewhere.
Even if you aren't a business man don't discount what they print.
For example the shell game that venture firms play with healthcare companies can be intuited from reading their finance pages. Try to find a decent article on the subject. Basically there is enough money being spent on healthcare, but a large part is bled off to shell companies. I was able to conclude this by reading the WSJ.
Eddie Izzard:
"Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people.
We can't even deal with that!
You know, we think if somebody kills someone, that's murder, you go to prison.
You kill 10 people, you go to Texas, they hit you with a brick, that's what they do.
20 people, you go to a hospital, they look through a small window at you forever.
And over that, we can't deal with it, you know?
Someone's killed 100,000 people.
We're almost going, 'Well done!'"
Th
Much cooler than just being a know-it-all.
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.
Kent: Mr. Simpson, how do you respond to the charges that petty vandalism such as graffiti is down eighty percent, while heavy sack-beatings are up a shocking nine hundred percent?
Homer: Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that.
Kent: I see. Well, what do you say to the accusation that your group has been causing more crimes than it's been preventing?
Homer: [amused] Oh, Kent, I'd be lying if I said my men weren't committing crimes.
Kent: [pause] Well, touche'.
...who are obviously all above criticism by any true American, regardless of what they say or do!
Where I live (Pennsylvania, USA), it is illegal to drive under the influence of proscribed medications too. If you drive while impaired by prozac, you can get arrested, fined, and jailed.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
Doesn't that pretty much cover most things?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I think the WSJ is valuable precisely because it doesn't succumb to the sensationalizing impulse that seems to infect so many media outlets today. Many of its stories are informative, balanced and nuanced. For example, see the series of stories on rising health care costs and who gets hurt by them or their series on the working poor.
If you think the WSJ is inaccurate, please cite specific examples instead of making generalized accusations. I'd love to see your evidence.
A statistician discovered that the probability of a bomb being on board a given aircraft was alarmingly high. But he realized that the probability of two bombs being on board the same aircraft was reassuringly low.
So these days, whenever he flies, he carries a bomb with him.
---- ____ ----
A university surveyed its graduate students, and found that the male students averaged 1.8 children each, while he female students averaged 1.4 children each. Therefore men have more kids than women.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I must inform President Kerry!
I metamoderate, therefore I am
;{)
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
But of course! Iraq owns the oil! US only rebuilds several $bln worth of destroyed country's infrastructure (which they have destroyed themselves), and they will have the operation of rebuilding the country paid in oil.
A perfectly legal transaction. Like a doctor breaks your leg and then charges you for putting it back together...
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True curiosity requires me to ask what gramar rules define data as plural? I have to agree with http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=data where it list usage as singular as a set. Much like the herd is grazing rather than the herd are grazing because it is a single set of animals. This is a singular term describing a plural item.
"It is not my intent to offend, but if offense is taken, the fault lies with the audience." attributed to Patrick Henry
From Red Dwarf: Rimmer describes Nazi Germany as "the runners up" of two World Wars.
I remember reading a book about statistics. The author talks about how he had a student come in and give a paper and one of the statistics mentioned was (something along this meaning ) "The number of children that die from guns has doubled every year since 1970". This was given in the late 90's or around 2000. Now, assuming that ONE (1) Child had died in 1970 due to a gun, that would mean that 1,000,000 would have died in 1990. And that by the time this book was published, over 1,000,000,000 each year.
The Original Original Original source of this was misquoted at some point on this and the misquote had been repeated while the correct version had not. I forget what the original quote was.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
between 0 and 1 Billion (or more) people
Erm, is this not a hard way of saying "some people"? 0 - 1bn would be a pretty wide estimate to say the least, but adding a "or more" after the billion is non-sensical.
And most of the rest get misinterpreted - sometimes deliberately, sometimes just ignorantly.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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
The scientific method has been supplanted by
the statistical method. I really don't know
exactly when this happened, but I know it did
because I can see the results all around me.
A) accounting
This used to be all about hard, crunchy
numbers -- numbers that you could chip
a tooth on. Now it's like gummy bears --
sweet & gooey & sticks to your teeth &
filled with artificial flavor that leaves
a sickly after-taste.
B) government
The government used to rely upon staid,
solid numbers -- numbers that could put
a non-beauracrat to sleep. Now everything
from "inflation" & "unemployment" to
"crime" & "immigration" all go through a
"feel good" politically correct filter.
Don't like some numbers that might hurt
politically? That's okay, just file a
memo that the definition of that statistic
has been modified, and crank out a "better"
number.
C) marketing
Good grief! You didn't really expect any
self-respecting Madison Avenue type to
ever issue numbers without a couple of
coats of "spin shellac" on it, did you?
One of the problems with modern society is that
the definition of "truth" has been changed.
There is always some alternate reality where
the PC numbers that have been spewed out must
be real. It effects everything from new drugs
the pharmacutical companies tout, the quarterly
reports that corporations and their accountants
quote, to the ststs the government releases to
raise or lower the status of a public issue.
In a not-so-delicate word: KAKA!
Legality is not morality.
He didn't say it was. There are reasons for obeying the law that are far better than the mere assumption that they codify morality (though, in fact, they sometimes do). The most important reason, in societies like ours, is that there is a social compact that is binding on those that live in a democracy/republic. That compact requires us to submit to the will of the majority (of the people or of its representatives). Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, such as when the majority would require you to do something evil, but that isn't applicable to the case at hand.
In other words, if you don't like the rules, leave.
Oh well. At least we have the government looking out for us.
A common statistic you frequently see thrown around in the popular press is that 300,000 preventable deaths in the US per year are caused by obesity.
You even see this statistic being used in supposedly serious scientific and medical journals. So what's the problem?
The original study from whence this figure come from actually says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimating that poor diet and lack of physical activity contribute to up to 300,000 preventable deaths per year
Note is says "contribute" - not "cause".
Note it says "poor diet" not being "obese".
Note how "lack of phyisical activity" frequently gets ignored entirely.
By the way, the revised version of the study now says up to 400,000 deaths, comparable to smoking related deaths at 430,000, so expect to see inflated misrepresentation at a media outlet new you some time soon.
I had planned on linking to some references, but unfortunatley all the sites that debunk these figures are blocked from work, where sites that use the 'caused' version are freely accissible. Go figure. Here's a reference on who frequently the figure is bandied around, and here's one on the recently revised figures.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
But while the life of a 90 yr old has little productive time remaining in it, the life of a child has had little resources invested in it. It seems like the best payback on care would be in helping people young enough to have a long work life ahead of them (20-30) but old enough to have been trained to do a productive job (>15). The caveat is that people are worth more than their economic output, but this is just looking at the math.
More like a mugger beats you up and then robs you.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Good thing I've always been too depressed to get a driver's license... *smirk*
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?
Q: How many statisticians does it take to change a light bulb? A: Only one, but he/she has to do it ten times! ---a statistician
97% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
In other words, if you don't like the rules, leave.
So I guess all the black people in the USA back in the 1950's should have just left. The (segregation) laws discriminated against them, most of the (white) public was against them, and there was really no reason for them to stay in a democracy where most people didn't want them around, right?
Wrong. Just because the majority disagrees with you doesn't mean you're wrong. Sometimes they're just biased or being lead down the wrong path in life.
I think they did the right thing and resisted, and eventually they got the rules changed in their favor. They sure wouldn't have accomplished that if they just sat there silently and took it.
You're right about that, but in reality it essentially banned all alcohol. That was mostly a grandfather clause for people who had a few bottles still in their possession when the law took effect.
If you couldn't buy liquor or import it, how could you possess it in your own house and consume it throughout prohibition? It would have ran out fairly quickly.
And if you did have a big enough stockpile in your house to last throughout prohibition, you'd probably get busted for intent to sell, because seriously, who keeps a 13 year supply of booze at their house?
federal law (which permits assisted suicide)
Sorry, I means "prohibits", not "permits".
...and bombing all that oil refineries, factories, airports, sea ports and generally everything of financial value was of essence to winning the war.
You can't make an omlete without breaking a few wagons of eggs?
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