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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.
...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
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.
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"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.
With normal peoples' allergy to thinking about anything, it doesn't matter much how much effort is put into trying to educate them.
They still will not think critically enough to protect themselves from being fooled, on top of which they'll continue to believe whatever makes them comfortable at the moment.
So it'll continue to be more effective for people with an agenda to distort facts and figures, or even simply lie.
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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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
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". :)
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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?
97% of all statistics are made up on the spot.