While sitting in the car waiting to give my sister a ride back from a volleyball game, I came up with a new road trip game. There was nothing interesting on the radio stations I usually listen to, so I switched to AM and started scanning. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t anything interesting on. I heard a [...]
To continue on my latest post… GMAC Insurance released their 2010 National Drivers Test results. The findings are interesting: If taken today, 18.4 percent of drivers on the road – amounting to roughly 38 million licensed Americans – would not pass a written drivers test exam. The national average score was 76.2 percent; a score [...]
This is surprising, according to the latest ‘Allstate America’s Best Drivers Report,’ Fort Wayne ranks eleventh for longest time between accidents among drivers in the two hundred largest cities in the country. Even more surprising, 11th is down from 6th last year. I never would have guessed, but apparently drivers in Fort Wayne are involved [...]
If you’ve paid attention to national political news at any point in the last 18 years, I’m sure you’ve heard variations on the saying ‘safe and legal, but rare,’ when discussing abortion. Beyond the fact that a procedure where fewer than half of the patients survive can never be considered ‘safe,’ how is ‘rare’ defined? [...]
It’s amazing how often a little data can overthrow conventional wisdom. Today’s example is term limits. I had long thought that most elected offices should have strict term limits to solve the problem of the same politicians staying in office as a career, loosing touch with their constituents. Thinking about it a bit more a [...]
I enjoyed watching the Whistler/Vancouver Olympics. As anyone who knows me would guess, I was excited to watch the Nordic events, since the Olympics are the only time they are on broadcast TV in the USA. This was a good year for Team USA, with the first Nordic Combined medals. And it’s fun to watch [...]
This week I read a USA Today story (from the first screen of Tuesday’s homepage) that made a couple common mistakes. The newspaper’s mistake is basing a story on a press release from an advocacy group, instead of doing an independant story based on the study itself. As frequently happens, the press release commits a [...]
I’ve run across the interesting Zipfian distribution several times recently. Zipf’s law states that for many things, particularly words, the frequency is inversely proportional to the rank of the frequency. So, for example, the most common word is used twice as often as the second most common word, which is used twice as often as [...]
I had a flash of inspiration this morning. A story about the All-Star game came on the radio and got me thinking. I’ve always been annoyed when people, often athletes, say “I gave it one-hundred and ten percent,” or something along those lines. Now, there are plenty of times when percentages over 100 make sense, [...]
One of today’s headlines is “Hoosier obesity rate flat at 27.4%.” The article cites a RWJF/Trust for America’s Health report, which included this map and an interesting interactive map. The original data are from the CDC National Center for Health Statistics. Sources: The Journal Gazette: Hoosier obesity rate flat at 27.4% Trust for America’s Health: [...]