More Reason to Like the WSJ Online: The Numbers Guy

By Ian

I've been enjoying this series, and forgot to mention it to T&B readers.

The Numbers Guy, over at the Wall Street Journal.

Here's just a quote from the top page I think Kevin, given his recent focus on errors in data, might appreciate:

Jan. 28, 2005 Some 63,135 cellphones were abandoned in the backseats of London taxis over the last six months, according to a quirky survey that made headlines recently. The precision of that number should be your first clue something's amiss.

-- January 31, 2005 4:26 PM |

Comments

Kevin Brancato wrote:

Cool.

Strangely enough, this figure strikes me as perfectly normal.

For millenia the most popular method used to generate social data could be aptly described as "count everything you can find and add."

For you, the data collector, this method always generates remarkable "precision", but ignores what you could not find, what you counted incorrectly, what you forgot to add in, and, of course, what you stole.

-- January 31, 2005 4:40 PM ∞

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