Quotes About Statistics

In the United Kingdom, the Osteoporosis Society reports that more women die from hip fractures due to osteoporosis than from cancers of the cervix, uterus, and breast combined.

We spend more per pupil than any other country, but among industrialized nations, American students rank near the bottom in science and math. Only 13 percent of high school seniors know what high school seniors should know about American history.

We have not—contrary to the claims of so many elitist environmentalists—experienced substantially more wildfires in recent years. According to the National Interagency Coordination Center, which is responsible for tracking wildfires in the United States, there were more wildfires during the 2005–2009 period (406,614) than there were from 2010 to 2014 (324,762). And there were more wildfires from 2010 to 2014 than from 2015 to 2019 (315,953).

children not allocated their own seat do not appear in listed victim numbers in airline crash statistics.

The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.

Suddenly, I began to wonder: If one in three or four American women had an abortion at some time in her life--a common statistical estimate, even in those days of illegality-- then why, WHY should this single surgical procedure be deemed a criminal act?

Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road.

What if heterosexual male teachers were prejudged as sexual abusers of children, in the way that gay males often have been (which would make more statistical sense, since heterosexual males are the majority of abusers of both girls and boys)?

it will not be long before the Chinese brew more beer than anyone else. China's just a shade behind the United States, and its output has been growing a staggering 25 percent a year for the last decade, the fastest in the world.

I confess I began to grow incensed at this happy crowd streaming by, and to extract a sort of satisfaction from the London statistics which demonstrate that one in every four adults is destined to die on public charity, either in the workhouse, the infirmary, or the asylum.

The brain cannot reach its inner conclusions by any logic of certainty. In place of this, the brain must do two things. It must be content to accept less than certain knowledge. And it must have statistical methods which are different in kind from ours, by which it reaches its acceptable level of uncertainty. By these means, the brain constructs a picture of the world which is less than certain yet highly interlocked in its parts.

The United States now ranks twentieth out of twenty-seven OECD nations in the share of young people expected to finish high school.50

Singapore 92.6; Taiwan 89.7; Korea 83.3; Japan 82.1; West Germany 78.8; France 72.7; United States 70.3; Great Britain 40.4; Poland 33.3; Zaire 29.6; Chad 19.9. I have the others, but that's a sampling.

REFERENCE RANGES FOR RED BLOOD CELL COUNTS Category Normal RBC Count (cells/mcL) Men 4.7 to 6.1 million Women 4.2 to 5.4 million Children and Adolescents (under 18 years of age) 4.0 to 5.5 million Infants 4.8 to 7.1 million

REFERENCES RANGES FOR HEMATOCRIT Category Normal Hematocrit (%) Men 36 to 50 Women 34 to 44 Children and Adolescents (under 18 years of age) 29 to 40

So, early in the war, he created an entirely separate department outside the normal chain of command, called the Statistical Office, with the principal function of feeding him—continuously updated and completely unfiltered—the most brutal facts of reality.

It had been well known for twenty years that the distribution of large and small earthquakes followed a particular mathematical pattern, precisely the same scaling pattern that seemed to govern the distribution of personal incomes in a free-market economy.

So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy.

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases.

Of course, the entire effort is to put oneself Outside the ordinary range Of what are called statistics. —STEPHEN SPENDER

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

Indeed, eventually, random outcomes all revert to the mean, meaning that streaks eventually end. Understanding this is a key part of intelligent and rational investing.

I was in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I had some of the most brilliant mathematical statistical minds in the country, who would put together the modern technology, if you like, of understanding the economy and tracking it and trying to influence it.

Mark Labbett, maths genius as he undoubtedly is, has every statistic imaginable. There is a reason for that. All the stats make him look like a legend.