Naked Statistics!

Image source: A Little Stats.

Now that the post title has got your interest - read on...! 

I was recently reading in The Economist a review of a book by Charles Wheelan, called "Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread From the Data". It's quite an old book now (published in 2013), but I've just bought it from Amazon. The piece that made up my mind for me to buy the book was when the reviewer (not named) wrote: 

The reader learns why insurance for low-cost items is worthless and why playing the lottery is a quick way to become poor. More seriously, the book explains the basic statistical approaches used in a 2011 study showing a link between a child’s brain size and autism. And it teems with interesting statistical facts, such as that there may have been an extra 1,000 deaths in the three months after September 11th 2001 because more people chose to drive rather than fly.

The last point is an interesting one and a quick visit to Wikipedia for data on road deaths in the US reveals (using Excel) interesting trends. While roads deaths have fluctuated enormously since 1970, you can see that there is in fact an increase from 42,196 deaths in 2001, to 43,005 deaths in 2002 - an increase of 809 deaths. The trend had been increasing over the previous three years anyway, but there is evidence that road deaths did increase after the 9/11 attacks.  The chart below is really easy to create in Excel (the slowest bit was adding the red label), and I find it is fun to be able to quickly visualise data like this. While road deaths were not caused by the 9/11 attacks (most people of the 43,005 who died in 2002 would have died anyway), it is an interesting thought that in addition to the 2,996 who did die as a direct result of the 9/11 attacks, perhaps the figure should be 3,805 (2,996 + 809)?

Data Source: Wikipedia.