Since joining FraudWasteAbuse I’ve had several good article ideas, each of which was eventually tossed out for lack of data. (Sorry for the lame coffee article - it was all I had left!)
For example: a few months ago I read two unrelated articles - one that tallied the number of terrorism related deaths in the USA over the last ten years, the other that tallied the number of deaths caused by deer-vehicle crashes in the same time span. While reading the deer article I made a surprising connection: For nine of the last ten years, deer have killed more people on American soil than terrorists (2001 being the exception). For April 17th, I planed on writing an article about fear, death, and taxes based on this data.
Alas, I could not find the data needed to support the article and thus it was nixed. It was not due to a lack of effort.
And that made me wonder: Why is good data so hard to find? With the 2008 elections coming up and all the talk about universal health-care, the war on terror, illegal farm subsidies, and CO2 emissions; isn’t data - which provides us the ability to measure impact and effectiveness - of dire importance?
Without good data analysis to prove or disprove the merits of a particular policy, aren’t we destined to argue endlessly without truly comprehending the significance of our actions as a nation? Isn’t it likely that, without meaningful data, bad policies will continue and good policies will be eliminated simply because the policy fit or didn’t fit into some political ideal that can be proven wrong, but hasn’t been? Isn’t data the key to accountability?
So where is the data politicians keep spouting off about? I want it. Show it to me. I do not want ridiculously misleading statistics, true as they may be. I want raw data that I can analyze myself should I choose to do so. I want to see people like Hans Rosling analyzing the data and debunking myths caused by ignorance. I want to know the facts behind the facts, not perspectives on data designed to manipulate my opinion. Where is it?
Tiger got to hunt,
bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder,
“Why, why, why?”Tiger got to sleep,
bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.-Kurt Vonnegut
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
Thanks, Paul! Some good info. When I searched NationMaster, it just gave 404 Not Found messages though :-\
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
Total killed by dear-vehicle crashes is less than terrorism over the last 10 years.
You should come to Kuwait and see how hard it is to find any kind of data! nice post
Hi All,
I was just browsing related articles on Reddit and came across this article: Peanuts Kill More Americans Than Terrorists.
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.
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!
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.