Quotes About Statistics

There is no way to know precisely how many men deserted. The official count from the U.S. provost marshal's report was 103,400. This was out of a total of 750,000 to 850,000 men listed as in the army by the end of the war.

Africa at the start of the twentieth century, Christians were only 9 percent of the population; today they are 44 percent.

Georgie) Did you know that a woman's life is shortened by thirty-four weeks for each boy baby she gives birth to?

statistics, like any tool, don't work well in all cases and conditions and like any tool can be used well or badly

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

For the record, the average penis is about 4 inches long when flaccid, 5.7 inches when erect. That's a bit bigger than the gorilla's 3-inch erection, but then there's the blue whale, the world's largest mammal, who has, yes, a 10-foot pole.)

the great statistician Frederick Mosteller had a point when he said, "It is easy to lie with statistics, but it is easier to lie without them." Nevertheless, there are some steps you can take to, as Huff put it, "talk back to a statistic." Among the biggies recommended by many scientists is to ask a simple question: Does the figure, finding, or correlation make sense, that is, accord with what you know of objective reality?

When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.

I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.

Americans now eat more than one million chickens per hour.

According to the detailed US census of 1860, which enumerated slaves and slaveholders in its "Agriculture" supplement, the 347,525 owners of one or more slaves constituted only 4.3 percent of the 8,039,000 "whites" in the fifteen slaveholding states (eleven of which would shortly secede) and 2.86 percent of the population of those states as a whole.

The next five decades would each show a growth of the enslaved population of never less than 24 percent—

We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.

But statistics, like any other technology, has a tendency to run out of control, to occupy more of our mental space than it warrants, to invade realms of discourse where it can only wreak havoc. When it is out of control, statistics buries in a heap of trivia what is necessary to know.

The number of hours the average American watches TV has remained steady, at about four and a half hours a day, every day (by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in front of the TV).

Indeed, the uncertainty principle ensures that in the nature of things physics is unable to do more than make statistical predictions.

people born in Cuba represented less than 1% of the U.S. population but committed 41% of Medicare fraud.

The United States also has fewer hospital beds per capita than other industrialized countries; the U.S. has 2.9 beds per 1,000 people, whereas South Korea has 11.5, Japan has 13.4, Italy has 3.4, Australia has 3.8, and China has 4.2.

Singapore Health Department in April, for example, I was astonished to learn that they employed five thousand contact tracers in a population of about five million people. One person per thousand in their whole nation was employed for this purpose alone. At the time, Singapore had accumulated just 9,125 cases. In our country, this would translate into having 330,000 people engaged in this work.

Reducing intelligence to the statistical analysis of large data sets "can lead us," says Levesque, "to systems with very impressive performance that are nonetheless idiot-savants.

Surveys suggest that about one third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home. Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined.

The implication of the sex ratios, Professor Sen found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for 'missing women' of between 60 million and 101 million. Every year, at least another 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination.

To be born poor in America today is to have a much smaller chance statistically of entering the middle class than was true a generation ago.