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POPSIs bicycling safer than driving? On this forum, a participant misuses statistics to show that bicycling is safer than driving. These statistics do not prove anything about the inherent safety of either mode of transportation. (the first comment is a sarcastic response by an anti-bicyclist commenting on a Philadelphia bicyclist who got critically injured by a car on a busy intersection).
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POPSAre Republicans More Likely to Have Affairs and Get Divorces? No. We see the ecological fallacy appear here on Clipmarks all the time 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] usually by people who want to say "conservatives are more/less _____ because red states are ______, liberals are less/more_______ because blue states are ________." Here is an example of how that logic can result in the WRONG conclusion.
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POPSDisingenuous statistics on support for overhauling health systems Look at the original Health Affairs article. Percentage of USA adults who say that their health system needs either "fundamental change" or "complete rebuilding": 48+34 = 82%. Comparable percentages for Canada: 60 + 12 = 72% For UK: 57 + 15 = 72% For Germany: 51 + 27 = 78% For Australia: 55 + 18 = 73% For New Zealand: 56 + 17 = 73%
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POPSDo Facts Matter? "We also hear that it is the free market that is to blame. But the facts show that it was the government that pressured financial institutions in general to lend to subprime borrowers, with such things as the Community Reinvestment Act and, later, threats of legal action by then Attorney General Janet Reno if the feds did not like the statistics on who was getting loans and who wasn’t. Is that the free market? Or do facts not matter?"
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POPSFrom the horse's mouth: McCain's health-care advisor's personal blog McCain's health-care advisor, John Goodman, thinks we should deal with the problem of uninsured Americans by ordering the Census Bureau to stop calling people "uninsured." I kid you not. He says that since pretty much everyone ends up getting the medical care they need somehow or other, no one's really uninsured. If you read the whole post, you'll also see that Goodman is a little confused about how employer-provided health plans work in real life. This is also the same guy who recently said, commenting on health disparities between whites and nonwhites in the U.S., that "doctors just don’t control our over-eating, over-smoking, over-drinking, and shoot-outs in the hood." (http://snipr.com/3kuaa) Nice, dude. Nice.
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POPSStatistics and the Dancing Cockatoo "On each trial he actually dances at a range of tempos," says Patel. But in each case the slower end of Snowball's range seemed to correlate with the tempo of the music. "When the music tempo was slow, his tempo range included slow dancing. When the music was fast, his tempo range didn’t include these slower tempos," Patel explains. A statistical check on these variations showed that the correlation between the music’s rhythm and Snowball’s slower movements was very unlikely to have happened by chance. "To us, this shows that he really does have tempo sensitivity, and is not just ‘doing his own thing’ at some preferred tempo," says Patel. Via Andrew Sullivan
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POPSUnemployed, and Skewing the Picture ...you can be sure of one thing: Politicians will be quick to point out that joblessness remains low by historical standards. “Five percent is still a low unemployment rate,” Ed Lazear, the chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, said recently. “It’s below the average for the last three decades.” The president and Senator John McCain also recently noted that unemployment remained low. Senators Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and Johnny Isakson of Georgia, both Republicans, have said the economy continues to be at “full employment.” Two Democratic governors, Christine Gregoire of Washington and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, have bragged that their states recently recorded their lowest unemployment rates in history. Statistically, all this is true enough. But it’s also deeply misleading.
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POPSDaily Attacks in Iraq Hit New High But don't worry! Peter Pace, chairman of the JCS, says that Iraq has undergone a "sea change " in security, and David Petraeus told Hugh Hewitt that "(W)e have achieved what we believe is a reasonable degree of tactical momentum on the ground"
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POPSHmm: Internet porn prevents rapes (Slate, Oct 2006) The article has an interesting couple paragraphs on porn: "Similarly, psychologists have found that male subjects, immediately after watching pornography, are more likely to express misogynistic attitudes. But as professor Kendall points out, we need to be clear on what those experiments are testing: They are testing the effects of watching pornography in a controlled laboratory setting under the eyes of a researcher. The experience of viewing porn on the Internet, in the privacy of one's own room, typically culminates in a slightly messier but far more satisfying experience—an experience that could plausibly tamp down some of the same aggressions that the pornus interruptus of the laboratory tends to stir up. In other words, if you want to understand the effects of on-screen sex and violence outside the laboratory, psych experiments don't tell you very much. Sooner or later, you've got to look at the data."
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POPSRising Support for Government intervention to help poor I am guessing for the top panel, the differences between 2007, on the one hand, and 1994 & 1997, on the other, are statistically significant. For the second panel, I assume the differences between 2007, OTOH, and 2002, 1999, 1997, and 1994, OTO, are statistically significant. Via Ezra Klein
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POPSVerizon Doesn't Know Difference Between Dollars and Cents This is a recording of a man who was quoted a rate of .002 cents per kilobyte for voice & data transfer on his cell phone. It turns out the actual rate is .002 DOLLARS. He calls Verizon intending to get his bill corrected (after all, Verizon provided the wrong quote) but he spends 20 minutes trying to explain the difference between .002 CENTS and .002 DOLLARS to TWO customer service reps. This one of the funniest and most aggravating things I have heard.
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POPSGun-Policy Advocates on Both Sides Push Dubious Figures Carl Bialik, the "Numbers Guy" at the Wall Street Journal, reports on a number of dubious statistics in the gun control debate. Here I clipped one used by gun control proponents. Here is another dubious statistic pushed by gun control opponents: Meanwhile, opponents of gun control have written online commentaries claiming that Americans use guns 2.5 million times yearly in defense against crime. The number originates in research, more than a decade old, conducted by Florida State criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. They conducted a phone survey of defensive gun use, asking respondents if they, or members of their household, had used guns in self-defense... Prof. Kleck cites as corroboration for his findings a 1994 survey conducted by Profs. Cook and Ludwig...Yet those two researchers concluded that their own numbers and Prof. Kleck's are inflated.
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POPSMcCain hires Nixon's Jew counter John McCain hires Fred Malek as his national finance co-chair. Turns out Malek worked in the Nixon administration, and worked to identify Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whom Nixon thought were conspiring against him. There is some evidence that Malek's work resulted in the demotion of a couple of the individuals he identified as Jewish. In 1988, when George Bush pere installed Malek as deputy chairman for the Republican National Committee, Woodward dusted off his notes and, with the Washington Post's Walter Pincus, further revealed that two months after Malek filed a memo on the matter--he'd counted 13 Jews, though his methodology was shaky--a couple of them were demoted. (Malek denied any role and said Nixon's notions of a "Jewish cabal" were "ridiculous" and "nonsense.") The 1988 story raised a predictable ruckus, and Malek beat a hasty retreat from the RNC.
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POPSDo anti-drug ads cause teenage drug use? Probably not, but they sure as hell don't reduce it either. Note how the y-axis of the right chart is blown up so the decline in teen drug use looks to be of the same magnitude of the decline in the drug czar ad budget. But the decline in teen drug use is pretty modest, from 19.4 % to 14.9%. Via Mobius at JewSchool
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