Quotes About Statistics

But raw numbers can be misleading. In the Middle East heartland of Islam, the Shia are closer to fifty percent, and wherever oil reserves are richest—Iran, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf coast, including eastern Saudi Arabia—they are in the majority.

According to a new survey, people who get divorced die early. People who stay married live longer. The difference is they just wish they were dead.

They say there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in this country. But if you ask a native American, that number is more like 300 million.

New York City has 2 million rats. We used to have 8 million rats. Now we're down to 2 million. You know what that means? We lose four electoral votes.

It's true," Eliot said. "Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life decisions based on its horoscope in USA Today would be right more often than you. But in this case, yes, you were right. Don't spoil it.

It's called Littlewood's law.

As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation's educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.

We've got to use every piece of data and piece of information, and hopefully that will help us be accurate with our player evaluation. For us, that's our life blood.

There are games where the striker will be useful for the team in terms of creating space and being involved in the game, without necessarily scoring, but he'll have played an important role for the team. But, of course, over the course of a season, I have to score goals, as that's what statistics reflect.

Averages are useful because many traits, behaviors, and outcomes are distributed in a bell-shaped curve, with most results clustered around the middle and a much smaller group of outliers at the high and low ends.

The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be.

Rob Engle and I are concerned with extracting useful implications from economic data, and so the properties of the data are of particular importance.

The opinions of a convenience sample... may not represent all users.

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts - for support rather than for illumination.

He uses statistics like a drunk uses lamp-posts, more for support than illumination.

Political linguists have argued that the right often uses stories to make an argument, while the left falls back on facts and statistics.

Big data is mostly about taking numbers and using those numbers to make predictions about the future. The bigger the data set you have, the more accurate the predictions about the future will be.

We all know that players will hit a few more home runs than usual in some years and a few less in others. But the mathematics of chance also predicts that some years they'll hit a lot more, and some years a lot less.

The risk of getting Hep B from a blood transfusion is a tiny number, but it's a bigger number than the risk of side effects from the vaccine.

Information: the negative reciprocal value of probability.

Moneyball' doesn't have anything to do with on-base percentage or statistics. It's a constant investigation of stagnant systems, to see if you can find value where it isn't readily apparent.

The 10 countries with the most people (over 100 million each) are, in descending order of population, China, India, the U.S., Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. The 10 countries with the highest affluence (per-capita real GDP) are, in descending order, Luxembourg, Norway, the U.S., Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, Austria, Canada, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The only country on both lists is the U.S.

An alternative way of expressing births is by what's called the total fertility rate: i.e., the total number of babies born to an average woman over her lifetime. For the whole world that number averages 2.5 babies; for the First World countries with the biggest economies, it varies between 1.3 and 2.0 babies (e.g., 1.9 for the U.S.). The number for Japan is only 1.27 babies, at the low end of the spectrum; South Korea and Poland are among the few countries with lower values.

Though they are only 12 percent of the population, blacks commit more than half of all rapes and robberies and 60 percent of the murders in America.6