Tuesday 4 July 2017

Junk Statistics 6


JUNK
150 people die every year from falling coconuts.

Web stats show that our attention span is now down to 5 seconds.

40% of food is wasted before sale. (Source? asks James Wong.)

A dog’s sense of smell is 1000 times more powerful than ours – a bear’s, 2000 times. Therefore ours is useless.

FROM IPSOS MORI
Britons think 45% of the population are atheists. It's 25%.
We think 25% are immigrants. It's 13%.
We think 43% of young people aged 25-34 live with their parents. It's 14%.
We think our average age is 51. It's 40.
We think 27% of us are under 14. It's 17%.
We think 30% live in rural areas. It's 18%.

Letters to the New Statesman, July 2015:
...you highlight a claim that the average number of sexual partners in a lifetime is 12 for men but only 8 for women. If the average is the arithmetic mean then, if we assume each partnership has one man and one woman, and the number of men and women is roughly equal, this discrepancy is hard to explain. Numbers of reported partners are, however, likely to be different from reality. (Andy Couldwell)

What I find so surprising about these statistics isn’t their absurd impossibility: it is that they are so wholeheartedly believed, defended and repeated. I put this statistic to a number of men and women, who invariably said: “Obviously. Everyone knows men are more immoral than women.” Men concur with a certain amount of pride, whereas women agree with condemnation, while both assert its truth... (John Darlington)

Many women make false rape allegations. (Times Aug 2016 Hardly any, says Leila Segal of Voice of Freedom)

In the olden days nobody lived beyond 40? It's explained here.

TRUE
Women earn less than men, spend more on caring for others, and are more likely to face poverty in retirement. (AP)

On average, women earn 24% less than men in the same job; Over 52 yrs, that is £298,064 less.

UK Female directors taking home £20,000 less than male counterparts. Up from £13,000 last year! (Architects Journal Feb 2016)

In 2015, a middle-earning woman who worked full-time was paid about 9.4% less each hour than men in the same position. (fullfact.org)

12% of QCs are women.

Queen's birthday honours list: knights outnumber dames five to one. (2014)

Books by women don’t get reviewed as often as those by men. (New York Times. And books by men, about men, win more prizes.)

Intimate partner violence tends to be high where gender inequality is high. (mg.co.za)

More women than men attempt suicide, say "official statistics". (Times)

In retail, women earn 68 cents for every dollar earned by men. (Demos)

Women make up 46% of Philosophy undergraduates in the UK, and yet are only 24% of Philosophy staff, and only 19% of Professors.

A floral painting by the late US artist Georgia O'Keeffe has sold for $44.4m (£28.8m) at auction, setting a record for an artwork by a female artist... The art auction record is $142.4m (£90.8m) for a Francis Bacon piece.

51% think that “common law marriage” exists. (British Social Attitudes Survey, 2008. It doesn't.)

IKEA is the world's 3rd-largest user of wood and sells 2 billion Swedish meatballs a year.

Solar power in the UK increased 50% in the first six months of 2016. (Springwatch)

13% of UK power is wind-generated.

A study by the Cook Ross Consultancy in the US in 2008, revealed that while less than 15% of American men are over 6ft tall (1.8m), almost 60% of corporate CEOs are over 6ft tall. Furthermore, less than 4% of American men, yet 36% of corporate CEOs are over 6ft2in tall.

One-third of US couples met on the internet last year. (2016)

Just over 55% refugees arriving in Europe currently are women and children. (UNHCR)

UK alcohol consumption rose 40% in the 70s.

In 2010 in the US, a child was injured by a bouncy castle every 46 minutes.

In 100 top grossing films of 2012, only 10.8% of speaking characters were Black, 4.2% Hispanic, 5% Asian, and 3.6% other.

Weekly attendance at Church of England services has fallen below 1 million.

New figures released by the Church show that just 1.4% of England's population attend Sunday services with the Church of England. 980,000 people attend church each week, based on figures from a survey carried out in October 2014, and there has been a 12% decrease in church attendance in the past ten years; equivalent to an average decline of little over 1% a year. 
(secularism.org.uk)

Roughly 11 adults an hour are raped in England & Wales. (James O’Brien)

A woman or child is raped every 20 seconds in South Africa. (Sky News)


Privately educated people dominate the top echelons of the honours system as much as they did 60 years ago... The figure – 46% – has hardly changed since 1955, when it was 50 per cent, yet only 6.5% of the population goes to private school. (Times)

In Europe, 18% of women live alone, 36% of Londoners live alone. Women from Nordic EU states and Germany are most likely to live alone. Marriage in Europe has dropped from 3.4 million in 1964 to 2.1 million in 2011. Divorce rates have risen by 150 percent in the period. 16% of women in Riga are divorced. 

In the United States, shorter women and men of average height have the most reproductive success.

Finding a potential spouse with a steady job is a high priority for 78% of women. (Pew Research) 


The 59-year-old is somewhat unusual — just 13 percent of men his age had never married by 2012. (vox.com)

Married people experience lower levels of cancer, heart disease, depression and stress. 


Crime in England & Wales down 31% since 2010-11 according to Crime Survey (and fullfact.org)

41,000 Brits are living in Thailand.

Rough sleeping up 16% in London, 25% of Welsh families in poverty, 686,000 sanctions in 2014. (@imajsaclaimant)

My most popular blog post concerns euphemisms for heavy drinking.

More here, and links to the rest.

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