I’ve always wanted to make my own pulp magazine cover…..

I’m trying to learn how to use Twitter now, so I’m still learning this whole hashtag thing.  However, I know enough to know I love #middleearthpublichealth

I’ve written before about the dangers of comparing international data, but a recent stat floating around reminded me that it’s not just public health data that’s tough to compare.

There’s a stat going around about the rapid increase in Swedish sexual assault.  The article shows this graph:

Which purports to show a 500% increase in sexual assault…with a particular rise between 2004 and 2005 (I don’t speak Swedish, so if this graph is actually about something else, my apologies).

Anyway, I vaguely remembered around the Julian Assange case that there was some assertion that the Swedes had a particularly broad definition of rape, so I went digging to see if I could find anything about what was going on.

I found this report from the BBC, which included this tidbit:

“But the major explanation is partly that people go to the police more often, but also the fact that in 2005 there has been reform in the sex crime legislation, which made the legal definition of rape much wider than before.”

Apparently the Swedes also count sexual assault by individual act, even if the incidents were by the same perpetrator (ie if she was assaulted twice in one night, that’s two rapes….in the US we count people reporting they’ve been raped as one per person), though it’s unclear when that counting convention started.  There has also been a major push to attempt to increase reporting rates and increase police knowledge around the subject.

According to this Amnesty International report, there likely has been a real rise, though likely not as dramatically as the chart above would suggest.  Apparently the number of cases being brought to trial has risen, but the conviction level has stayed fairly steady.

Off topic, but the BBC article above also points out that Australia and Canada have the highest kidnapping rates in the world, in large part because they count custody dispute issues (where one parent takes the child during non custodial time) as kidnapping incidents.  Interesting stuff.

What is unique about the number 854,917,632?

A couple of weeks ago I was watching something – can’t remember what – and I heard someone casually mention that someone who had been poisoned was likely killed by a woman.  It’s a trope I’ve heard before (both Sherlock Holmes and Ned Stark both assert this), but for some reason I’d never questioned it.  Anyway, I put it on my mental list of “things to google” before promptly forgetting about it until I saw this Wired magazine post.

The Assistant Village Idiot has up a short and sweet post on proof:

Whenever I come across the word proves in a news story or a comment section, I usually think “Here’s someone who didn’t take enough math courses.”

I feel the same way when some says “that’s statistics 101”.

Example: I was reading a story recently on a particular type of forensic testing that was coming under some question (I was a lab tech in a former life, these things interest me).  Anyway, the study author was quoted as saying that 15% of the samples they were able to test showed some contamination, with the caveat that only one third of the samples in storage were still testable and thus the percentage could be subject to change.

When I was reading the comments section, one of the commenters got quite irate that this was being presented as only a 15% potential error rate.  Since only a third of samples were tested, he claimed we should actually multiply by 3 to get the real error rate….45%.  That’s Statistics 101! 

Sadly this is a blog with lots of angry and under educated commenters*, so the next 3 follow up comments were all along the lines of “nice catch”.

Math, it’s how you know when people are lying to you (but only if you do it correctly).

*This is another “not going to link to it for fear of track-back vitriol” blog citation.  But if you’re curious, it’s a blog tackling the issue of false criminal accusations.  While it’s a real and important issue, it does attract a good number of irrational people who hate the world and leave comments expressing their feelings quite….disturbingly.  The guys who run it seem pretty fair though, and I like reading the forensics aren’t perfect stuff, CSI be damned.

For those of you who are more recent readers, you likely don’t know that in a former life I attempted to start a wrestling blog.  

I was flipping through the Volokh Conspiracy yesterday when I stumbled upon an article that revisited an incident involving their contributor Jim Lindgren.  

Just wanted to let you all know that I just released quite few comments from the spam folder.  Not entirely sure what happened, but I was getting notification for comments that were subsequently not appearing on the blog, including some from regular readers (karrde in particular seemed to have a few routed that way).

Anyway, I found them all in the spam folder, and made sure they got posted.

This also explains why there are a few right answers for yesterday’s brain teaser…..Eric’s answer was one of the ones that got caught up in the filter, and thus wasn’t there when Geek Vader got it right, even though it’s time stamped several hours before.

I’ll be more vigilant about this in the future.