Physicians and scientists around the world even go as far as to state that smoking leads to premature death. Don’t we all know someone who smokes constantly, even heavily, yet is still living — or has lived — to the mature age of eighty, ninety, and older? Furthermore, the MDs and PhDs state that smoking causes cancer and emphysema. If this diagnosis were definitive, wouldn’t these afflictions affect all smokers equally, rather than the small percentage that it actually does affect?
posted by Eekacat on Mar 23, 2005 - 78 comments

Bush's latest accomplishment may not be one that he's willing to brag about. The Census Bureau is reporting that an additional 1.3 million Americans are now living in poverty. They also offer a number of pretty graphs (all in pdf).
posted by bshort on Aug 26, 2004 - 113 comments

85% of all email is spam. 83% of all email is spam. Between 80 and 90% of all email is spam. 80% of all email is spam. 76% of all email is spam. Between 64 and 78% of all email is spam. 64% of all email is spam. 63% of all email is spam. 60% of all email is spam. 52% of all email in 2004 will be spam. 50% of all email is spam. By 2006 98% of all email will be spam.
posted by Mo Nickels on Jul 6, 2004 - 38 comments

Why Stock Markets Crash : Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems. Professor Didier Sornette of UCLA has some very interesting things to say about stock markets. In his book, he explains how his "theory of cooperative herding and imitation [...] has detected the existence of a clear signature of herding in the decay of the US S&P500 index since August 2000 with high statistical significance, in the form of strong log-periodic components." Although his timing has been just a bit early, the theory, the predictions to date and the pictures are all pretty uncanny. This is easily the most interesting book on the stock market I have ever read and provides interesting and believable hypotheses about things I never imagined could have rigorous explanations. For an overview, here is an interview with the author.
posted by muppetboy on May 14, 2004 - 19 comments

Understanding polls. For those of us who slept through statistics.
posted by skallas on Apr 23, 2004 - 10 comments

Prayers for peace. I'm agnostic and my feelings on the current Iraq crisis are confused. However, one thing is almost certain: many innocent people will die in the following weeks (months, years), most of them relegated to statistics. The future is uncertain.
posted by poopy on Mar 17, 2003 - 24 comments

More pedestrians died in traffic accidents in the US in the year 2000 than all of the people who died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11. 10 times the number of people killed in 9/11 attacks died due to motor vehicle attacks that same year. And yet some say the US government is on a course that will take away many of our civil rights in order to protect us from the boogie-monster terrorists. OF COURSE, the terrorist attacks were a horrible nightmare, and of course we want our police forces to prevent even worse attacks in the future, but before we start thinking about creating a Brave New Police State, maybe now is a good time to have a little perspective.
posted by crunchland on Jun 10, 2002 - 66 comments

Utah Leads Nation in Rate of Anti-Depressant Use. It is interesting (to me) in that the people doing the study credit a "Mother of Zion" syndrome of married Mormon women putting on the happy face regardless of how happy they truly are. My state is up at the top also. Could be all the rain I guess. . .*sigh*
posted by Danf on Feb 20, 2002 - 45 comments

Harpers April Index Some interesting stats here, especially on energy-related items.
posted by Postroad on Apr 21, 2001 - 11 comments

Going down? NPR's Savvy Traveler did a bit on this site; apparently it tells you the odds of a crash on your chosen flight. Question is, do I want to know?
posted by stevis on Mar 3, 2001 - 2 comments

statistics on the death penalty Statistics which suggest that the death penalty does not accomplish what we expected of it. Unless, perhaps, we like revenge.
posted by Postroad on Feb 13, 2001 - 76 comments

Statistical Dead Heat May Result in Ping Pong Match Tie-Breaker So says Ken Layne in his tale of obscure lore and presidential politics.
posted by josholalia on Nov 7, 2000 - 2 comments

Hey, kids! Statistics is cool! (Amazing introduction to the concept of estimation, and error computing.)
posted by rschram on Oct 24, 2000 - 2 comments

This information was supposed to be private, wasn't it?
posted by thirteen on May 29, 2000 - 12 comments

Internet use has reached one billion page views per day. Does this statistic mean anything to anybody? In reality, if more sites were designed better, this number would drop by half because people would be able find the information they were looking for twice as fast.
posted by grant on Nov 22, 1999 - 1 comment

Eric Schulman from the Annals of Improbable Research asks, Can Fame Be Measured Quantitatively?.
posted by tdecius on Oct 9, 1999 - 0 comments