dmiessler.com | grep understanding - Latest Comments in How I Grew Up Seeing the United States

Re: How I Grew Up Seeing the United States

jr — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 23:58:52 -0000

Ehhh...no. I have never once tried to force my religion on someone.

Re: How I Grew Up Seeing the United States

CarlM — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:50:29 -0000

Jonathan is right. It's a pretty well-known fact among those who study this stuff that 74 percent of statistics found on the internet are simply made up.

Re: How I Grew Up Seeing the United States

Jonathan S. — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:51:21 -0000

Cool site and all, but you have to wonder how accurate the data is. I mean, StateMaster uses Wikipedia as it's source on some of these results. Wikipedia? C'mon.

On one graph I saw that the "National Coalition Against the Death Penalty" was the source. So you can imagine which way the graph leaned.

Statistics can be manipulated any way you want to show almost outcome you desire. That's why it's even more imperative in this instant-access world to not just believe every little stat that is presented to you on the Internet.

Re: How I Grew Up Seeing the United States

MD — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:13:50 -0000

There's also NationMaster which is pretty cool as well, http://www.nationmaster.com