Comments on: In God we trust, all others bring data

By: Keith

Keith — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:20:45 +0000

I think the real issue is not the dificulty in finding good data. I think we need to address the obvious threat that is posed by deer in our country. The question we need to need to ask is, “what are our elected leaders doing to protect us from the deer threat?” Maybe these rogue deer need to be held accountable. I am personally a big fan of internment camps.

By: Kaj Samsom

Kaj Samsom — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:39:43 +0000

I love this post…and Keith’s comment! It demonstrates exactly what is wrong with policy in the USA. Very few people even understand the incredible degree to which data can be manipulated. Politicians take advantage of this and hence, we get the hallmark of our political environment: Platitudes and Oversimplified and Un-informed debate. Regarding Keith’s comments, one could almost imagine a kill the deer movement gaining momentum based on such data! Now all we need is a high profile celebrity to publicly claim a negative correlation between deer and freedom.
I love freedom, so I kill deer.

By: Sara Wood

Sara Wood — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:57:50 +0000

This is an excellent post describing a well-known but poorly addressed problem with data in general. That is why we have started Swivel. Our aim is to get data and tools into the hands of anyone and everyone to elevate not only the use of data, but also how it is analyzed, understood and, most importantly, discussed and debated. Ideas and suggestions welcome!

I did a very quick search on Swivel for some of the topics you mention above:

health insurance coverage:
http://swivel.com/data_sets/show/1000398

total expenditure on health care:
http://swivel.com/data_sets/show/1005230

farm subsidies:
http://swivel.com/data_sets/show/1002997

co2
http://swivel.com/data_sets/show/1002617
http://swivel.com/data_sets/show/1000223
(search result on co2)
http://swivel.com/rest/search/datasets/co2?search_style=full

Sara Wood
http://swivel.com

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:59:59 +0000

Deer as also incredibly well distributed, leaving our leaders a wide variety of countries to take over. It will not be difficult to make a correlation between deer caused deaths on our own soil and the very real threat of Antlers of Mass Destruction.

By: paul isaac

paul isaac — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 19:10:24 +0000

You should read The Economist and also get their Pocket World In Figures. Especially the Pocket World has good statistics. My wife once met one of the Economist journalists, they are professional statistic gatherers, although even then they often struggle to get data you would expect to be widely available.

Another excellent place is www.nationmaster.com

Just think, if we all had good access to data, wouldn’t it be difficult for interested parties to manipulate us?

By: kubricklove

kubricklove — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 19:45:20 +0000

Take a look at the number of deaths attributed to cancer in the last 10 years as compared to terrorism, including 2001. Then take a look at federal funding of cancer research as compared to federal funding for the war on terror. We are a nation that needs to protect itself from itself. We’re going to do ourselves in long before statistics gets us. That is as long as cancer doesn’t kill us first.

By: JSwan

JSwan — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 19:49:42 +0000

Thanks, Paul! Some good info. When I searched NationMaster, it just gave 404 Not Found messages though :-\

By: desdemona

desdemona — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:07:00 +0000

Kill all the deer you can, the buggers have eaten all of my lovely deer resistant daffodils. Planted the sunfowers and what do you want to bet they will eat them too?

By: David Sterry

David Sterry — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:34:22 +0000

A lot of data that are reported in the news come from research groups that charge for their reports. Often, when you want to follow up on interesting statisitics, you run head straight into a shopping cart.

Since that data is a public good, it behooves the government to purchase such reports and distribute them to the citizenry. I love data and want to see more of it. I just don’t have $1k-10k to purchase one of these reports.

By: Sara Wood

Sara Wood — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:55:44 +0000

I did a very quick search on Swivel for some of the topics you mention above but think Akismet may have dropped my comment in the spam folder b/c I included the links. But have a look, lots of data on Co2, health insurance, farm subsidies, etc. Not sure if there is much deer and road traffic data, but there is road traffic injury data.

Ideas and suggestions welcome!

By: JSwan

JSwan — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 23:28:49 +0000

That is why we have started Swivel.

Hi Sara. Thank you for your kind comments.

A question about Swivel: If anyone can upload, how can one be sure the data is accurate?

Other than potential inaccuracy, Swivel sounds like a great idea. Google recently purchased Hans Rosling’s company, I believe for a similar purpose. I am interested to see what comes of that as well.

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 23:31:10 +0000

Total killed by dear-vehicle crashes is less than terrorism over the last 10 years.

By: Qaiss

Qaiss — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 09:06:31 +0000

You should come to Kuwait and see how hard it is to find any kind of data! nice post

By: JSwan

JSwan — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 15:41:34 +0000

Hi All,

I was just browsing related articles on Reddit and came across this article: Peanuts Kill More Americans Than Terrorists.

By: Janette

Janette — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:31:07 +0000

When my friend was researching mortality statistics for a similar article about what does and doesn’t put us in significant danger, he found that the World Health organization keeps very good records on causes of mortality by country. However, the information wasn’t displayed in a useful format. He’s taken their data and created a database that is searchable by country, gender, age group, and year, available at rationalfear.com.

There are some interesting patterns here. For example, a male in his 20s or 30s is more likely to die from suicide in a Protestant country, and homicide in a Catholic country.

By: iwanttofitin

iwanttofitin — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:08:06 +0000

I’ve been doing my part in dealing with the deer problem. Two of them have been taken out of this world with a few bullets and are now fertilizing this earth after having been consumed and expelled by me. Take that you people killers!

By: Isabel

Isabel — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:09:37 +0000

Check this site: http://www.deercrash.com/

With 1771 animal-crash related fatalities -thus, deers and all other animals- in the US in the period 1994-2004, I think American deers deserve an apology.

By the way, it takes two parties to have a crash: and aren’t we humans supposed to be the more intelligent species? Why do we keep on bumping into innocent animals, then?

—-

But more seriously: official statistitians go out of their way to make data available on the Internet and to explain how they came up with the data (metadata - methodologies). In the US: http://www.census.gov/, http://www.bls.gov, http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/

And yes, sometimes the methods are very complicated, but this does not mean that it is done on purpose. Life is complicated.