Quotes About Statistics

A Standish Group study found that 45 percent of features in a typical system are never used and 19 percent are rarely used.

The Bureaus of Prisons in states across America know this well; many of them project the number of prison beds they will need in the future based on third- or fourth-grade reading statistics.

I craved knowledge. I craved facts. I searched for them like lifebuoys in the sea. But statistics are tricky things.

A million people a year kill themselves. Between ten and twenty million people a year try to. Worldwide, men are over three times more likely to kill themselves than women.

Curiously, for instance, the drop in violent crime is most pronounced in cities with high immigrant populations.

Ces déclarations doivent décrire sans dissimulation les effets du tabac sur la santé des fumeurs et mentionner le fait que le tabagisme tue en moyenne plus de 1 200 Américains par jour, plus que les meurtres, le sida, le suicide, la drogue, l'alcool et les accidents de voiture réunis1382

le tabagisme tue près de 6 millions de personnes chaque année.

11 % des décès chez les hommes et 16 % chez les femmes pourraient être évités par une réduction de la consommation de viande rouge1356.

The Russians eventually killed more than 4.5 million German soldiers, while American and British ground and air forces accounted for only about 500,000.

of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 percent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 percent of the Waffen SS.

One Russian soldier in four died, against one in twenty British Commonwealth combatants and one in thirty-four American servicemen.

no statistical prediction can or will ever be 100 percent accurate—because human beings are not and never will be statistics.

a principle called the unreasonable effectiveness of data.

Data journalism is the practice of finding stories in numbers and using numbers to tell stories.

Statistics show this isn't a reasonable incentive. According to the website Publishing Explained, more than one million manuscripts are currently searching for a U.S. publisher. One percent of these will get the nod. Nor

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.

The younger the Jews, statistics showed, the shallower their religious roots.

Could we ignore it instead? The chance that a stranger will try to abduct Norm or any other young child is on average extremely small; the chance that the stranger will succeed is far lower than that. The chance that someone will murder your child is smaller again. For murder by a stranger of a child under five, even that risk drops 97 percent. If you are a parent, by far the biggest violent risk to your child, on average, is you.

But caution can have unintended consequences. After the 9/11 attacks in New York, many people felt more nervous of flying and took to their cars instead. Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer states that 1,500 more people than usual were killed on US roads over the following year.10

One accident that kills, say, 10 people gets far more attention than 10 accidents that kill 1 each. The 876 people each year who die on US tracks usually have little publicity, but imagine if they all occurred at once. . . .

The country now has the second highest GDP per capita in the world after Luxembourg, and Luxembourg is hardly a proper country.

Michael," he said, with that wolfish Nicholson grin, "it has been proved that people who are left-handed die earlier than smokers. I am right-handed, so I am ahead of the game.

In a study of great white shark behavior by George Burgess and Matthew Callahan using data from the International Shark Attack File, no other humans were within ten feet of the victim in 85 percent of the attacks.

If our neighbors were white, they'd be victims of the same crime that plagues black folk. You are right, however, about those proportions. Ninety-three percent of black folk who are killed are killed by other black folk. But 84 percent of white folk who are killed are killed by other white folk. It's not necessary to modify the noun murder with the adjective black. It happens in the white world too.