I know I blogged about this ages ago, but it’s worth revisiting. After all the red
stave versus blue state shenanigans, it’s nice to fight over something that really
matters – soda versus pop.
(Thanks, Jimmy
Akin)
Thou shalt say “soda”, not “pop”. Thus saith the Funky One.
Here endeth the lesson.
The fella at Electoral Vote Predictor has read my mind and produced exactly
the kind of election results map I wanted. It gives a better indication of just
how deeply divided this country is than the simple red and blue maps.
Nobody seems to care about how much healing America needs. The Republicans are patting
each other’s backs and claiming
a mandate from the people and the liberals are turning
their noses up at the “unwashed masses” who elected Bush and/or fleeing
to Canada. Meanwhile, Christendom still can’t agree on what
takes moral priority in politics.
On a side note, the
election cost American tax payers way too much. There are so many programs
that could have benefited from that money. What a waste.
Who are the most popular screen scientists according to a
recent UK poll? Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant, Beaker. 🙂 The Muppets
rule! Spock came in second and my idol, the Doctor (from Doctor Who), came in third.
I find the Doctor’s rank a bit surprising given Doctor Who’s popularity in the UK.
Maybe he’ll go up in people’s esteem when the new show airs in 2005.
Statistics and I don't always get along well. I'm getting better at detecting fishy conclusions drawn from statistics, though. Take this article about abortion among Catholic women for instance.
Almost half of the clinic's 6000 patients last year identified their religion and of this group almost 40% said they were Catholic. A further 23% identified themselves as "Christian", while fewer than 5% said they were Protestant. Seven% were Muslim and 5% were Buddhist.
Nowhere does this article mention what percentage of women in the general population consider themselves Catholic. All it says is that 40% of those women who (1) have an abortion and (2) identify their religion, are Catholic. If Catholics outnumber Protestants in Australia, such a disparity is to be expected, all other things being equal.
Let's simplify the numbers a bit to clarify this. Suppose 100 women have an abortion. 40 are Catholic, 23 are generically Christian, 5 are Protestant, 7 are Muslim, 5 are Buddhist, and the remaining 20 are something else. Let's divide the 23 generic Christians equally between Catholics and Protestants, since we have no data to support a more lopsided grouping. That makes 52 Catholics and 16 Protestants. Let X denote the number of Catholic women in Australia and Y the number of Protestant women. The percentage of Catholic women who had an abortion is 100*52/X. The percentage of Protestant women who had an abortion is 100*16/Y. These percentages will be equal when X = 3.25 * Y. If the multiple is smaller than 3.25, the percentage goes up and vice versa. In other words, if Catholic women outnumber Protestant women by less than 3.25:1, Catholics women are "more likely" to have an abortion than Protestant women. Too bad the article doesn't give us a population breakdown. To make matters worse, only about 50% of those women having abortions identified their religion. The numbers given are essentially meaningless.
The Fallacy Files site has a good explanation of this kind of statistical goof.
Speaking of fallacies, this site is sort of a Cliffs Notes version of Fallacy Files.
Perhaps the impact of The Passion of the Christ was bigger than I was initially
led to believe. The Mighty Barrister seems to think the
survey results are biased.
“Despite marketing campaigns labeling the movie the ‘greatest evangelistic tool’ of our era, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of those who saw the film stated that they made a profession of faith or accepted Jesus Christ as their savior in reaction to the film’s content.”
Surprised? I was at first, but not once I did a little digging. It turns out that George Barna, “Founder and Directing Leader of the Barna Research Group, Ltd.,” is a born-again evangelical.
Barna’s religious preferences appear to have colored his conclusions, if not the survey’s methodology itself. Take, for example, the last sentence in the quote above. It is almost guaranteed that nearly all of the people who saw the movie were believers in Christ before they saw the movie. He tells us that 53% of the people who saw the movie were “born again Christians,” but he doesn’t tell us how many were Catholics. In fact, the only time he mentions Catholics at all is in a slightly disparaging remark, noting that “Protestants were more likely than Catholics to give The Passion an “excellent” rating (78% versus 68%, respectively),” – and this is mentioned right after he says that the groups most likely to disparage the movie were “atheists and agnostics, homosexuals and liberal Democrats.” We are in fine company.