Posts from November 2013 (53)

From Stuff

The [product being advertised] survey, which involved 2034 participants, found that 11 per cent of drivers admitted to having sex while driving. Men were three times more likely to admit to participating in sexual activity than women .

Firstly, a little skepticism would be appropriate here.  Isn’t it just possible there’s something wrong with the survey? If you go and search for the press release, you find

This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.

which is not encouraging. Also, the breakdown by age in the press release says the proportion who have ‘participated in sexual activity’ while driving is even higher, 17%, among 18-44 year olds. And flirting with a driver in a different car is apparently less common than having it off with a passenger in the same car.

I suppose I could just have led a very sheltered life. But if these figures are accurate you’d expect the AA to have noticed and to have a slightly different list of the top ten driving distractions. And surely it would be hard to have missed the salacious headlines whenever one of these couples caused an accident, which 5% of them report having done.

I’m not sure if it’s encouraging or discouraging that this is a  Fairfax story, not something from the Daily Mail.

From a UK real estate ‘insight’ paper, via Twitter, the age distribution of London immigration and emigration

As a technical quibble, this is the sort of graph that shouldn’t be in JPEG format. It should be in PNG or GIF — you can easily the see artifacts produced by JPEG compression.

From Felix Salmon at Reuters

Let’s say that you saw various news reports about an event, and that different words were used to describe the weather: some said it was “cold”, others “brisk”, others “frosty”, others “wintry”, and so on. You wouldn’t raise an eyebrow: you’d see that they were all describing the same thing, in slightly different language, and you wouldn’t demand an explanation for the “discrepancy”. Well, numbers in news articles behave like words: they’re trying to describe the state of the world. That’s why the NYT has banned the use of “record” or “largest” unless inflation is taken into account. What matters is not the mathematical relationship between abstract numbers, but rather the state of the world that is being described.

Go and read the whole thing.