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Lies, Damned Lies and Cat Statistics
spopepro writes "While un-captioned cats might be of limited interest to the /. community, I found this column on how a fabricated statistic takes on a life of its own interesting. Starting with the Humane Society of the United States' (HSUS) claim that the unsterilized offspring of a cat will '...result in 420,000 cats in 5 years,' the author looks at other erroneous numbers, where they came from and why they won't go away."
When I was a kid, I used to sit there smashing mosquitoes that bit me. Every time I smashed one fat with blood, I relished the idea that I had just killed a female mosquito who was about to lay thousands of eggs. And those mosquitoes would in turn breed and lay thousands of eggs and I had essentially just ended the lives of an infinite number of mosquitoes!
Please, just let me have this -- your environmental constraints and logical reasoning be damned!
My work here is dung.
That just means we have the opportunity to make our own captions!
i can haz kitenz?
Go Go Gadget Pointless Thread:
With all the fucking bullshit that ends up on the front page. All the iPhone astroturfing, all the Android FUD, all the iPhone FUD and Android astroturfing, all the dupes and tripes and all the dopes. All the ridiculous "Ask Slashdot"s that could have been solved with 2 minutes Googling...
This ends up in idle? Mis-reporting of unsubstantiated facts by news-outlets may not be news, but it's stuff that matters, and if ever there was an example of something that shouldn't have been consigned to the idle bin, this is it! Adding some stupid allusion to lolcats does not make it idle-worthy. If someone submitted a story about the pope dying and added "His hat looks a bit like a wang! LOL" does it follow that the story should go on the Funny Pages?
Pidoma == Pulled It Directly From My... uh... Mid Air.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
People who prefer dogs to cats are 4.8 times as likely to prefer Scotch to vodka, but people who prefer cats to dogs are equally likely to prefer Scotch or vodka.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Actually, if you actually read the article to the end, they do say it applies to just about any kind of statistics. E.g., an example they use is a statistics which supposedly said that men prefer dating secretaries than female managers -- and you can see how that helped fuel that prejudice that women who pursue a that kind of career won't get laid, and probably are cold hearted bitches who don't have time for love anyway -- but then when someone actually got to the bottom of it, the poll didn't actually ask that.
Or you can take the myth that a woman who's not married by 35 is even less likely to marry than to be killed by a terrorist. Not only it turns out it was BS unsubstantiated hyperbole, but the perpetrators actually eventually apologized for it. Hey, better a few decades later than never, right? To get an idea how bogus that was, not only didn't the calculated numbers add up to "less likely than being killed by a terrorist" (they even admitted they made that up for sensationalism sake), but it was based on the critically flawed assumption that a woman would _only_ marry older men. But it's been echoed all over the place and taken for a fact.
And what they say is that basically not only some numbers pulled out of some PR bullshitter's ass get taken for gospel, but basically they become nearly impossible to debunk. You'd have to spend the equivalent of several episodes to debunk one sound bite that takes just 5 seconds to mindlessly repeat all around. And even then, you won't get as much exposure as the mass of idiots repeating the falsehood because they heard it somewhere, and even to a lot of those who hear you debunking it, you'll just sound like some conspiracy-theorist for attacking what they know for a fact.
And I think that shouldn't be dismissed as just some idle lolcat joke. Especially in IT and CS, we see the same phenomenon every day. There are a ton of "X is better than Y" or "A is 10% more scalable than B" pseudo-facts thrown around, that everyone just repeats and nobody questions them.
Especially almost nobody in management who heard it in some IT-for-managers ragazine _and_ from the nice salesman using it to sell his snake oil. So it must be true, right?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Now, if one starts with two cats however, the number could well be higher...
Age to maturity: 6 to 10 months
Litters per year: 0 to 3
Litter size: 1 to 8
so, using a changing multipler for newborns of
year1= 0 to 12 offspring
year2,3,4,5 = 0 to 24 offspring
i get values around
end year1: 1 to 25 cats
end year2: 1 to 300 cats
end year3: 1 to 3900 cats
end year4: 1 to 54k cats
end year5: 1 to 835k cats
So it pretty much stands as a useless range
I just got the results from the latest survey, they say it's actually 103.7%.
Right, and 5/4 people have trouble with fractions....
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
More Or Less is off air atm, but is a wonderful podcast that is probably best described as "Myth Busters for Statistics". Highly recommended.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They never (and can't) account for population restrictions. That could include...
Food supply. If there are too many cats, not enough food, some cats die of starvation.
That's a nice textbook analysis of natural limits to population.
But you are totally ignoring the reality of a very specific situation - feral cats in urban areas. What exactly is the natural control at work? Cats are wary, not many are killed by accidents. There is abundant food in an urban environment thanks to dumpsters. Furthermore, cats are great natural predators and left unchecked will decimate a bird population. You seriously think "birds of prey" in a modern city are enough to do ANYTHING to a feral cat population? If you don't care about any other wildlife then ignoring wild cat populations is a great way to see most of it decline.
People taking feral cats out of the population to make fixed house pets out of them.
A really feral cat CANNOT be made a pet. If you get them really, really early as kittens (a few weeks old) you can, but after that - forget it.
Not to mention shelters have to kill plenty of cats that are not feral to begin with, because there aren't even enough people to take cats simply abandoned...
The truth is more of a range but the reality is on the high end of the range, in any modern city. The groups posting these figures may be giving you a number somewhat too high but they are not as far off as you and other people thinking of statistics in simple terms seem to think.
The best solution is to trap cats, spay/neuter, and then release them. This keeps cat populations at a much lower natural limit, as the cats will still keep other cats out of a territorial area but cannot produce new kittens that keep a colony growing and then go out to form new colonies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A healthy female cat is going to have a littler every year. A litter is going to be greater than one cat, guaranteed.
The low end of your range is thus not realistic.
To give only the upper end of that range is misleading but not as bad as your range, which hides a real problem by saying that there may not be one.
What you should really do is use an average figure as a base, which is four cats per littler (of course for the purposes of growth you would use something like half that number to account for only the female cats producing offspring).
Also cats can have up to four litters per year. Winter is actually not much of an impediment in urban areas where cats can readily find warm spaces.
So you get something more like:
year 1 - 12 cats, six female. (assuming 3 litters on average with four cats each)
year 2 - 72 new cats, 42 female (leaving in previous female cats)
year 3 - 504 new cats, 294 breeding females
year 4 - 3528 new cats, 2052 breeding females (assumed first six are dead now).
year 5 - 24k cats
The problem is not on the same order of magnitude as the high end, but is probably a realistic model of feral cat population growth. The reality is that in urban environments feral cats really are everywhere. The truth is that controlling feral cat populations does make an impact, if nothing else it helps out other species like birds that cats hunt.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I used a spade on one I found in my garage last month.
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