One of those articles (from The Times, today) that you consume and file away, except one statistic caught my eye - can you guess which one ?
All I can say is it’s a bizzare world !!!
”There is good news: only 0.1 per cent of Britain has been densely built upon. There is bad news: real average UK pay remains 3 per cent lower than in 2008. And there is news that is good if you are scared of terrorists, but bad if you were blithely unconcerned about gardening: 35 times more Americans are killed by lawnmowers than by jihadists.
Together, these figures make up some of the Royal Statistical Society’s statistics of the year. The institute, which counts among its members some of Britain’s finest statisticians, has for the first time compiled a list of the most surprising, significant or unusual statistics of the past year.
Some of them, such as the figure on land use, come from published scientific research. That number was produced by Alasdair Rae, a professor at the University of Sheffield. It refers to land the surface of which is 80 per cent artificial. A further 5.3 per cent has been built upon in some way. However, 9.4 per cent is peat bogs and more than half is agricultural land.
David Spiegelhalter, chairman of the judging panel, said that they chose that statistic because of the insight it gave to current debates.
“The strength in this statistic is its surprise element. I think the figure is far smaller than most people will have expected. Whatever side of the argument you sit on, this statistic gives true insight into the landscape of the United Kingdom.”
Other numbers honoured included 7.7 billion — the number of phone lines, which for the first time exceeds the global population — and 403.3, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in parts per million.
Twenty-one, the number of teenage pregnancies per 1,000, was chosen because it is the lowest recorded level, and also because it highlights a disconnect between the reality and public beliefs, with surveys showing that people put the figure ten times higher.
Not all of the statistics came from official sources: 69, the number of annual US lawnmower fatalities, compared with two, the average number of Islamic terrorist-related deaths over the past decade, was sourced from a tweet by Kim Kardashian.
Liberty Vittert, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, said that the panel chose this in part because it was popularised by someone who was not a statistician.
“Everyone on the panel was particularly taken by this statistic and its insight into risk — a key concept in both statistics and everyday life,” she said.
“When you consider that this figure was put into the public domain by Kim Kardashian, it becomes even more powerful because it shows anyone, statistician or not, can use statistics to illustrate an important point and illuminate the bigger picture.”
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As always, I question the data. Why pick ten years? If they made it the past 20 years the stats would probably be very similar for mower vs terrorist deaths.
0.1% of Britain has been "densely" built upon... this is skewed to sound tiny. "Built upon" accounts for a far larger area. We can all see that the sprawl of our towns makes up much more than 0.1% of the land area. Society wouldn't cope with everyone living as densely as that 0.1%.