Its articles like these that lament people's basic misunderstanding of statistics. They use percentage of spam sent by countries in order to try to prove that spam is not being reduced in the United States. The problem is that simply relaying a percentage of total spam does not prove or disprove this point. It simply shows whether the US is changing more or less in proportion to other countries.
Did the total number of spam messages go up or down? What about the total number of bot nets? The reality is that the total numbers could have gone down, and the US percentage still could have gone up depending on whether other countries went down further than the US.
Percentages always add up to 100!
The "fact" that 100% of Google employee's use their own product is simply not true. I've seen hits on my site from Google employees, where they came from the Yahoo search engine. I even blogged about it here.
Here is the relevent excerpt:
I'll go one step further. Being a Software Engineer, I commonly have to deal with customers that are having problems with systems. One of the more common problems I face is what I call the "Make It Go Away Syndrome". This is where an error message pops up on the screen, and the user will simply click Ok, or Cancel, without even looking at the message or writing it down, just to make it go away. Could this not be happening when it comes to online registration forms? Even if users aren't trying to lie, they might just be filling in the bare minimum to continue. Since your sex is usually presented in a drop down combo box, with male usually being the first choice, a woman who just wants to get past the form may not change the setting, fill in the other required boxes, and click ok. Suddenly she is a man to that website collecting statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
Its articles like these that lament people's basic misunderstanding of statistics. They use percentage of spam sent by countries in order to try to prove that spam is not being reduced in the United States. The problem is that simply relaying a percentage of total spam does not prove or disprove this point. It simply shows whether the US is changing more or less in proportion to other countries. Did the total number of spam messages go up or down? What about the total number of bot nets? The reality is that the total numbers could have gone down, and the US percentage still could have gone up depending on whether other countries went down further than the US. Percentages always add up to 100!
The "fact" that 100% of Google employee's use their own product is simply not true. I've seen hits on my site from Google employees, where they came from the Yahoo search engine. I even blogged about it here.
I blogged on this myself after reading a different Wired News article on how the majority of online news readers are men:a re-supposedly-men.html
http://schweitn.blogspot.com/2004/08/web-readers-
Here is the relevent excerpt:
I'll go one step further. Being a Software Engineer, I commonly have to deal with customers that are having problems with systems. One of the more common problems I face is what I call the "Make It Go Away Syndrome". This is where an error message pops up on the screen, and the user will simply click Ok, or Cancel, without even looking at the message or writing it down, just to make it go away. Could this not be happening when it comes to online registration forms? Even if users aren't trying to lie, they might just be filling in the bare minimum to continue. Since your sex is usually presented in a drop down combo box, with male usually being the first choice, a woman who just wants to get past the form may not change the setting, fill in the other required boxes, and click ok. Suddenly she is a man to that website collecting statistics.
Any thoughts?