Quotes About Statistics

It's called Zipf's law, and it applies to résumés and college application rates and best-selling records and everything in between. Winners win big because the marketplace loves a winner.

Many of Ronald A. Fisher's ideas were solutions to computational problems caused by the limitations of the era's desk calculators.

You may be surprised to learn that it's been estimated to cost up to $635 billion a year in the United States alone,8 a figure greater than the costs associated with conditions like heart disease and cancer.

the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent.

It's hard to know exactly how many empty houses there are...the census placed the figure, in the United States, in 2000, at about 10.5 million housing units (including apartments, counting duplexes as two, and so forth). For comparison: less than a quarter million people lived in homeless shelters in 2000.

What if one of her father's soldiers panicked and fired for no reason? Though pilots were carefully trained, mistakes happened and she didn't want to be included in a statistics report under "uh-oh, my bad."' (Kiara)

New studies show that 100% of all smokers die.

The loss of innocent life is a tragedy for anyone involved in it, but the numbers are really very low.

I think that life expectancy over the last 10 years has increased dramatically. You're living longer.

nearly all studies consistently show that couples who live together before they marry are more, not less, likely to later divorce than couples who did not live together before their weddings.

The theoretical understanding of what was going on was developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century using statistical mechanics –an approach to thermodynamics that is based on applying the laws of statistics to the behaviour of large numbers of particles, such as the huge number of atoms or molecules present in a box of gas, each of them acting in accordance with Newton's laws.

In 1970 just 5 percent of the U.S. population was Hispanic. By 2013 this had risen to 17 percent, and population projections suggest that perhaps 28 percent of the population might be Hispanic in 2050, though, as discussed in chapter 2, the actual percentage will depend on how data are collected in the future and changing patterns of self-identification, especially among people of mixed-ethnic origins.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

Most hedge funds fail: 90 percent of all the hedge funds that have ever existed have closed or gone broke.

Yes there are psychos out there but not as many as you think. Paedos make the news because what they do is disgusting. The millions, billions or whatever it is, of men who aren't paedos don't make the news.

It is simply a fact that the birth rate of our illegal immigrants exceeds that of our legal residents.

About 200,000 academic journals are published in English each year. The average number of readers per article is five.   The average numbers of readers of any given published scientific paper is said to be 0.6.

There is no known scientific way of predicting earthquakes. The most reliable method is to count the number of missing cats in the local paper: if it trebles, an earthquake is imminent.

The Small Arms Survey is the most commonly-cited source for data on gun ownership rates. It has given support to the claim that the United States has by far the highest level of gun ownership, with 88.8 guns per 100 people.

The paper fails to report that in only 8 of these 444 homicide cases was the murder weapon the gun that had been kept in the home. Moreover, the number of criminals stopped with a gun is much greater than the number killed in defensive gun uses. In fact, the attacker is killed in fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 defensive gun uses.

Omitted is the fact that the UK's homicide rate rose after its gun control laws were enacted.8 The UK's homicide rate is lower than the US's, but this is despite the country's counterproductive gun control laws, not because of them. The UK's homicide rate was very low before it had any gun control laws.

My numbers show that at least 16.5 percent of attacks between 2014 and 2017 were stopped by concealed handgun permit holders. Back in 2015, when I pointed out errors in the first FBI report, the authors simply responded, "We acknowledge in the FBI report that our data are imperfect." But no correction was ever made.

Of those shootings, 53 occurred in the United States and 2,354 happened in the rest of the world. While the US had about 4.6 percent of the world's population during this period, it had just 2.20 percent of the mass public shootings.

Americans use guns defensively about 2 million times a year — about 5 times more frequently than guns are used to commit crimes.