Category: Numbers & Statistics

Fudging The Numbers

Lies and Untruths, Numbers & Statistics

Oops. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been caught with its dirty little fingers in the fudge drawer… again.

NOAA has been cooking the books. Yet again – presumably for reasons more to do with ideology than meteorology – NOAA has adjusted past temperatures to look colder than they were and recent temperatures to look warmer than they were.
We’re not talking fractions of a degree, here. The adjustments amount to a whopping 3.1 degrees F. This takes us well beyond the regions of error margins or innocent mistakes and deep into the realm of fiction and political propaganda.

This all started when some smart guy looked at the raw data covering the recent polar vortex storms in the Northeastern United States, and found the disparity as noted above. The data had been “smoothed” (weasel statistician word meaning “altered”) and guess in which direction? Why, to support the Glueball Wormening narrative, of course.

And by the way: you know how the Arctic ice cap is at its lowest level in history? Ummm not so.

And you know how it never snows in Rome? Also not so. And Naples?

And you know how The Independent said that British children will grow up never having seen snow? Not this generation, anyway.

Enjoy the read.

Just To Mess With Ya

Lies and Untruths, Numbers & Statistics

Here’s an interesting math situation, wherein I prove that 2=1:

1.) Suppose you have quantities A and B, and suppose they are equal. That is,
A = B

2.) Multiply both sides by A:
A^2 = AB

3.) Now subtract B^2 from both sides:
A^2-B^2 = AB-B^2

4.) Factor both sides:
(A+B)(A-B) = B(A-B)

5.) Divide both sides by the common factor (A-B):
A+B = B

6.) Now, remembering that A=B, we have
B+B=B, or 2B=B

7.) Divide both sides by B:
2=1

And now, children, you will understand how Congress creates the national budget.

/Lewis Carroll

 

Random Fact

Culture, Numbers & Statistics, Politics

I read somewhere recently that about a quarter of the world’s prisoners are incarcerated in America.

Non-Americans are going to draw all sorts of conclusions about this, and most of them will be wrong. Here are the facts.

All the stupid surveys apart, the United States is one of the most free countries in the world — which by the way is why so many inhabitants of shithole countries (to quote some famous guy) want to come and live here.

We take our freedoms seriously, and one of the freedoms we cherish is the freedom to fuck up. Fucking up can be the result of larceny, or failed experimentation, or any such human endeavor which falls outside the usual norms and conventions. This is why we are a leader of innovation in the world — pick an industry, and we’re in there kicking ass — and it’s also why we throw more people in jail: because we are a nation of laws. (Too many laws for my liking, but that’s a rant for another occasion.)

Here’s the best example. Want a gun? Go ahead and get one: there’s a special on S&W revolvers at Academy Surplus. Use it in any way you want: self-defense, plinking at tin cans, target competition, whatever. You’re free to do all that, and except in Euro-style shitholes like New York and California, you don’t have to be licensed or belong to a club or any of that jive. Go ahead and enjoy your gun; it’s your individual right, the second-most important right in our Constitution.

However: use your gun to commit a crime, and it’s to jail you’ll be going. And we Americans don’t issue sentences of just a few years for that kind of crime either (unlike some countries I could name). No, we slam you in a cell for decades or the rest of your life (sometimes we even shorten your life if you shortened somebody else’s).

That’s why we have so many people in jail. They were all free to choose, and they chose poorly. On the whole, it’s a better system than all the others, unless of course you’re a control freak who wants to do what’s best for people because you know what’s good for them, better than they do. (These assholes we call “Democrats”, and this is why they’re trying to turn the U.S. into Europe. But that too is a rant for another time.)

By the way: the reason that China, with its enormous population, doesn’t have as many people in jail as we do is that their people aren’t free. Another reason is that the Chinese summarily execute more people than we do, thus helping their incarceration numbers. Ditto North Korea, a shithole to beat all shitholes.

“Take Away Their Guns”

Bad News, Numbers & Statistics

…and they’ll just use something else. Such as knives:

London saw four fatal stabbings on New Year’s Eve, taking the total of such knifings in the capital to 80 for the whole of 2017.
And the use of knives in general is now a serious problem all over the country. In June 2017, the Office for National Statistics listed thousands of ‘blade offences’ in the previous 12 months, including 214 killings, 391 attempted murders, 438 rapes, 182 other sexual assaults, and 14,429 robberies.
There were also more than 18,500 assaults involving an injury or intent to inflict harm with a blade and 2,816 threats to kill with a knife.

So much for taking away guns to reduce crime. But that’s not the worst part of the linked article. This is:

I have long known that crimes which would once have been classified as murders are often now downgraded to ‘manslaughter’. This is done to save money and time, and to make it easier to release the culprits early to stop the prisons from bursting. But in most cases it is legally difficult to point this out.
The Johnson case is different. He is a murderer, but people who should be alive are now dead because he was wrongly convicted of a lesser crime.
In 1981, Johnson pushed his wife Yvonne off the balcony of their ninth-floor flat, after first hitting her with a vase and an ashtray. He was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of ‘provocation’. She had, he said, been arguing with him.
She was, of course, not there to give her own version of who did the provoking. He was sentenced in 1982 to three years in prison. That’s right. Three years, though in those days it really meant three years. He was out by 1985.
In 1992 Johnson strangled another woman, Yvonne Bennett, with a belt. She had annoyed him by refusing to accept a box of chocolates which he had bought her to try to win back her affections.
He tried to hang himself from a tree, but the string snapped. String? Yes, string. He was much better at killing others than at killing himself. Doctors decided he was suffering from a ‘depressive illness’ and he was sent ‘indefinitely’ to a secure hospital.
Not indefinitely enough. He was out and under ‘psychiatric care’ after two years. He went on to kill a third woman, Angela Best, by beating her with a claw hammer and throttling her with a dressing-gown cord.
As after his second killing, he tried and failed to commit suicide afterwards, this time by jumping in front of a train.Now, having first tried the manslaughter plea again, on the grounds of ‘diminished responsibility’, he has pleaded guilty to murdering Angela Best.
His injuries from the attempted suicide have left him in a wheelchair, though I wouldn’t like to guarantee that he is harmless even now. Far too late, the courts have sentenced him to 26 years, which might just be enough.
Once, I would have said this was all evidence of a system which had lost all force since it stopped treating murder as a specially hideous crime. So it is. Once, I would have said that we should restore the death penalty for heinous murder. Now, I know this cause is lost. So I can only urge you to take care.
The law refuses to protect you. Those in charge of it lack the courage or the resolve to do so. Get used to it.

The next time some idiot tells you that the death penalty doesn’t prevent murders, feel free to use the above example to show that the death penalty applied to this asshole after his first murder would indeed have prevented two more.

Fortunately, we in the United States don’t have to “get used to it”; it’s our criminals who have to get used to the fact that a career of crime might be deadly — to themselves.

Carry a gun, and make sure you know how to use it. The life you save might well be your own, or of your loved ones. The life you take will be of no consequence to anyone except the goblin’s future victims.

Remember: when anyone asks you if your wallet is worth a life, remind them that that decision was not yours, but your assailant’s. He made the decision that your wallet was worth taking a life (yours), and all you did was go along with his decision, simply substituting his life for yours.

And be glad that you live in the U.S. and not in Britain, where you would face imprisonment for self-defense, instead of congratulations.

In The Red

Business, Numbers & Statistics, Politics

In the Daily Telegraph, Matthew Lynn explains what happens when the coffers start to run dry across Europe:

[Last Tuesday] was the day when France ran out of money. As of Nov 7, all the money the government raises through its taxes – and this being France, there are literally dozens of them – had been spent. The rest of the year is financed completely on tick [credit].

In other words, for the French government to continue to function, the rest of November and all of December requires that they borrow money — i.e. run a current account deficit.

Most governments these days do the same, of course: the article goes on to point out that Spain likewise ran out of money on Saturday Nov 11, Romania on Nov 13, Poland will be broke on Nov 21, and Italy on Nov 26. The UK, astonishingly, will run out of money on December 7, while of the other large numbers, only Germany (duh) and Sweden (!!!) will be funded into the new year from their current tax incomes.

So, you may ask, how does the U.S.A. stack up against these spendthrift Euro countries?

We ran out of money in mid-October.

Feel free to write to your Congressweasel, or else sharpen the pitchforks, pluck the chickens and heat up the tar. Guess which action I prefer.

 

Not Science

Lies and Untruths, Numbers & Statistics

An Initial Association Test (IAT) purports to signal whether the testee (I nearly wrote something else) displays an inherent bias against something or someone. It’s called “science” (mostly by the charlatans who dreamt it up) but it isn’t, as the redoubtable Heather MacDonald writes in City Journal:

There is hardly an aspect of IAT doctrine that is not now under methodological challenge.
Any social-psychological instrument must pass two tests to be considered accurate: reliability and validity. A psychological instrument is reliable if the same test subject, taking the test at different times, achieves roughly the same score each time. But IAT bias scores have a lower rate of consistency than is deemed acceptable for use in the real world—a subject could be rated with a high degree of implicit bias on one taking of the IAT and a low or moderate degree the next time around. A recent estimate puts the reliability of the race IAT at half of what is considered usable. No evidence exists, in other words, that the IAT reliably measures anything stable in the test-taker.

And it gets better:

But the fiercest disputes concern the IAT’s validity. A psychological instrument is deemed “valid” if it actually measures what it claims to be measuring—in this case, implicit bias and, by extension, discriminatory behavior. If the IAT were valid, a high implicit-bias score would predict discriminatory behavior, as Greenwald and Banaji asserted from the start. It turns out, however, that IAT scores have almost no connection to what ludicrously counts as “discriminatory behavior” in IAT research—trivial nuances of body language during a mock interview in a college psychology laboratory, say, or a hypothetical choice to donate to children in Colombian, rather than South African, slums. Oceans of ink have been spilled debating the statistical strength of the correlation between IAT scores and lab-induced “discriminatory behavior” on the part of college students paid to take the test. The actual content of those “discriminatory behaviors” gets mentioned only in passing, if at all, and no one notes how remote those behaviors are from the discrimination that we should be worried about.

In other words, the stats don’t add up, and the subject of the test (racial bias) cannot be established beyond cooking the numbers and faulty projection.

Sound like global warming theory.

If you read the whole piece — it’s long, like all City Journal articles — what will strike you the most (as it did me) was not the bullshit of the IAT, but the degree to which the IAT has become embedded in government and the corporate world.

This is yet another reason why I could never find employment in today’s business world: not only would I refuse to take the test, but I’d also pour scorn on the whole process, loudly. Exit Kim, on Day One at Global MegaCorp, Inc. And I wouldn’t even get a chance to be fired for complimenting some harpy on her outfit, or for carrying my 1911 into the office.

But I digress.

Once again, as with global warming “science”, this whole IAT thing smacks of people having a theory (people are prejudiced / the Earth is over-heating because of SUVs), then creating the pseudo-science underpinning to support and prove the theory. So it’s complete bullshit, just like Glueball Wormening. (Of course, the appearance of “Harvard” in the credentials of one of the IAT’s developers should have been a warning to everyone.)

I should also remind everyone that Heather MacDonald is a statistician, not just a journalist. Hers is the scientific method; what those other two tools are doing is selling snake oil.