Stats Birds Thought Paper

Allison Brown STATS 2000 Dr. Bird 21 February 2020 Thought Paper 2: “Birds: Dead and Deadly” 1. How the article might relate back to topics in our previous readings? This reading was strongly related to Chapter F of Joel Best’s “Stat-Spotting: A Field Guide to Identifying Dubious Data”. This portion of the text is titled “Measurements: How did they count?”. This section of the text discusses how a count is taken in the “real world” after a definition of what is going to be counted is fabricated. According to Best, “ … the people who wish to produce statistics must actually do the counting. To do so, they must devise procedures or methods that will allow them to measure whatever they wish to count. The choices they make raise another fundamental question: How did they go about counting” (Stat-Spotting: Best 49). In the case of the study conducted in “Birds - Dead and Deadly: Why numeracy needs to address social construction” also by Joel Best how the counts were conducted were small measurements and inaccurately chosen. To gather the information for this statistic, the number that “National Public Radio in 2005 put the annual number of fatal bird strikes at one billion” (Birds: Best 4). This number in a form like this even reminds me of Chapter D, which discussed “big round numbers”. For this statistic, only two houses were had data observed from their bird interactions; one house in Southern Illinois and one in a suburb of New York. In Illinois, “ … an older couple who loves birds, and who built a custom home with lots of windows, surrounded by trees, bushes, bird feeders, and so on. Their house was a bird magnet … observed 33 fatal bird strikes at their home in a year” (Birds: Best 5). Because this data was half collected, the statisticians who coined one billion a year created their statistic off of heavily skewed data, that had implications at the national level in terms of “bird safety”. 2. What you thought about the information - was any of this surprising or shocking? Explain your answer fully. I found the process of how the statistics were gathered to be very surprising, I guess as a frequent consumer of statistics in the media I used to make the ignorant assumption that the counts/statistics were always correct and conducted by experts. Not only this reading, but this course so far has shown me how incorrect that line of thought was. This is why understanding statistics and being numerically literate is important, sure how many birds die a year from hitting windows may not be a life or death situation, but when statistics are related to health or serious issues the numbers matter. 3. Discuss the dangers or importance of knowing HOW and WHAT was counted. As I began to speak of previously, statistics are everywhere in our day to day lives. As a consumer of the media and statistics it is important that we understand how they are made and who makes them; for that plays a large role in what the numbers will show and make you feel as a consumer who statistical producers are trying to convince you to buy a product or believe something to be true. Sources: Best, Joel. Stat-Spotting A Field Guide to Identifying Dubious Data. University of California Press, 2014 Best, Joel. “Birds-Dead and Deadly: Why Numeracy Needs to Address Social Construction.” Numeracy, vol. 1, no. 1, 2008, doi:10.5038/1936-4660.1.1.6