Quotes About Statistics

Political analysts tend to overinterpret the results of isolated elections.

The E.U. imports more agricultural goods from developing countries around the world than does the U.S., Canada and Japan, combined.

The math is simple, and laid out in Table 5.6. From 20 million traffic stops, 2.4 percent lead to a search. Of those, just 33 percent led to contraband (0.8 percent of stops), and just 12 percent of the searches led to a contraband-arrest combination (0.29 percent of stops). That is, 99.7 percent of traffic stops fail to generate a drug or contraband arrest. The "sheer numbers game" the California trooper describes is a bad gamble.

Whereas 3 percent of traffic stops lead to a search, only about one-third of those searches lead to contraband. Further, only about half of those contraband hits lead to arrest, which is not surprising because when we look at the amounts of contraband found, it is typically that associated with a user, not a distributor, of the item in question.

Collectively, police have a contraband hit rate of 29 percent (or 12 percent, looking only at arrest-worthy contraband).

Traffic stops rarely yield contraband, and when they do, it is in such small amounts that the most common outcome is a ticket. Just 12 percent of searches lead to the discovery of a large enough amount of contraband to merit arrest.

The fact that Hispanic drivers are less likely to have contraband does not seem to stop officers from searching them much more than white drivers.

Most important is that in almost every year Hispanics are more likely than whites to experience these types of search and less likely than whites to be found with contraband

Altogether, fewer than 10 percent of citizen interactions with the police involve criminal investigations, and almost 60 percent involve traffic stops or accidents, with routine traffic stops by far the most common source of all police contact

Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no struck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes.

Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no truck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes. A particular stretch of water might have an average wave height of ten metres, but if you were hit by a one-off thirty-metre monster that statistically didn't exist, the average would be of precious little comfort: you would die.

Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?

Did you know the following surprising facts? "Surgery has been found to be helpful in only 1 in 100 cases of low back pain.

One can't say that figures lie. But figures, as used in financial arguments, seem to have the bad habit of expressing a small part of the truth forcibly, and neglecting the other part, as do some people we know.

It is easy to lie with statistics; it is easier to lie without them.

While it is easy to lie with statistics, it is even easier to lie without them.

In 1922, movies drew some forty million viewers weekly; by 1929 the number approached a hundred million—this at a time when the nation's population was 122 million and weekly church attendance was sixty million.

Coincidence", he finally said. "Statisticans looking for connections can always find odd coincidences and statistical anomalies, if they try hard enough.

Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.

There is a statistic I heard a number of years ago: if you know somebody who is 85 years old, that person was born into a world that had a third as many people as the world does today. The population has tripled in the past 85 years.

In 2007, a very inspired New York University Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four per cent, were non-white.

Cisco projects that in 2020, now just five years away, there will be seven billion people on the earth and 50 billion devices connected to the Internet. Six-and-a-half devices on average per person. As a father of five young adults and teenagers, I think we are - in my household, we've exceeded the 6.5 number.

In 1970, the average woman had her first child at 21.4; by 2012, it was almost 26, an age by which many young adults are at least a few years deep into jobs or careers.

I loved statistics from a young age. And I studied very much in Sweden. I used to be in the upper quarter of all courses I attended. But in St. John's, I was in the lower quarter. And the fact was that Indian students studied harder than we did in Sweden. They read the textbook twice, or three times or four times.