How to Deceive with Statistics: Distortions Due to Diminutive Denominators (THE HAPPY INDEX)

American Thinker ^ | 01/10/2018 | Thomas P. Sheahen

[SeekAndFind]

We all learned in elementary school that "you can't divide by zero." But what happens when you divide by a number very close to zero, a small fraction? The quotient shoots way up to a very large value.

Pick any number. If you divide 27 by 1, you get 27. If you divide 27 by 0.1, you get 270. Divide 27 by 0.001, and you get 27,000. And so on. Any such division exercise blows up to a huge result as the denominator gets closer and closer to zero. 

There are several indices being cited these days that get people's attention because of the big numbers displayed. But the reality is that those particular big numbers come entirely from having very small denominators when calculating a ratio. Three prominent examples of this mathematical artifact are the feedback effect in global warming models, the "Global Warming Potential," and the "Happy Planet Index." Each of these is afflicted by the enormous distortion that results when a denominator is small.           

 The Happy Planet Index

The "Happy Planet Index" is the easiest to explain. It is used to compare different countries and is formed by the combination of 

(a x b x c) / d. 

In this equation,

a = well-being – "how satisfied the residents of each country feel with life overall" (based on a Gallup poll)

b = life expectancy

c = inequalities of outcomes ("the inequalities between people within a country in terms of how long they live, and how happy they feel, based on the distribution in each country's life expectancy and well-being data") 

d =  ecological footprint ("the average impact that each resident of a country places on the environment, based on data prepared by the Global Footprint Network")

[SeekAndFind]

How do the assorted countries come out? Using this index, Costa Rica with a score of 44.7 is number 1; Mexico with a score of 40.7 is number 2; Bangladesh with a score of 38.4 is number 8; Venezuela with a score of 33.6 is 29; and the USA with a score of 20.7 is number 108 – out of 140 countries considered.

[Zuben Elgenubi]

Costa Rica with a score of 44.7 is number 1

I've been there quite a lot over the years. Top score if one lives in a gated community. Outside that protection, not so much. Federales are pretty tough outside the city. Lovely plants, almost alien in appearance and some of the best fruit on the planet.

[ClearCase_guy]

Using subjective numbers and bad math as a political weapon.

Certainly there is no science here.

[House Atreides]

Wow, based on the happiness index (US being red and Mexico being green), people should be fleeing the US toward Mexico in search of happiness.

[Mr. K]

Mark Twain said there are 3 types of lies:
1) Lies
2) Damnable Lies
3) Statistics

But now there is a new category:
4) Liberal Talking Points.

[Tenacious 1]

I love that article. It lays out the model math tricks and details the junk in junk out BS that is the AGW models and predictions.

They don’t just meddle with the actually input data (temperatures and such). They tinker with the math so that formulas will exaggerate the interpreted data. And “interpreted” is a key word there.

This proves there is very little science actually involved in the AWG fanaticism.

[Mr. K]

Can you eat the fruit and drink the water?

[Zuben Elgenubi]

Never had a problem with either.

[spintreebob]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/3621509/posts

See
1 Dead, 800 Injured as 3.5 Million Catholics Follow Blackened Jesus Statue With ‘Miraculous Powers’

for a current example.

[Ozark Tom]

There is more to statistics than trying to stuff all data into a Gaussian distribution. The key is Skewness and Kurtosis. Climate models tend to neglect these finer points.

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/kurtosis-mpemba-temperature-and-history/

https://brownmath.com/stat/shape.htm

[abclily]

Lying with statistics.

In one of my college courses (many years ago) a professor gave the example of a race between a Russian car and a U.S. car. The U.S. car won. Russian news said, “Russian car came in second. U.S. car came in next to last.”

[Mr. Jeeves]

The originator of that example deserves a job at CNN. :)

[Yosemitest]

That's not all that's corrupted with FRACTIONS.

STEALING ELECTIONS WITH COMPUTERS and Technology Cybercrimes, watch Bloomberg's Digital Defense November 3, 2016 (19:40).

To better understand "THE MASTER KEY" to stealing elections with computers, watch:

Fraction Magic - Detailed Vote Rigging Demonstration ( 24:40 )
Bev Harris
Published on Oct 31, 2016

I'LL NEVER TRUST ANOTHER COMPUTER COUNTED ELECTION AGAIN !

Election Fraud Against Moore Confirmed, Shills BTFO ( 24:29 )

Things have changed!

Bennie Smith, a Memphis computer programmer, discovered HOW this is done through a

" ... a GEMS tabulator—for Global Election Management System—which is a personal computer installed with Diebold software that sits in a windowless room in the county’s election headquarters.
The tabulator is the brains of the system.
It monitors the voting machines, sorts out which machines have delivered data and which haven’t, and tallies the results.
As voting machines check in and their votes are included in the official count, each machine’s status turns green on the GEMS master panel.
A red light means the upload has failed.

At the end of Memphis’s election night in October 2015, there was no indication from the technician running Shelby County’s GEMS tabulator that any voting machine hadn’t checked in or that any votes had gone missing, according to election commission e-mails obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek.
Yet as county technicians followed up on the evidence from Smith’s poll-tape photo, they discovered more votes that never made it into the election night count, all from precincts with large concentrations of black voters. ... "

Diebold Election Systems changed its name in 2006 to Premier Election Solutions.
Bloomberg's article titled How to Protect Against Election Day Hacking gives more proof of this by Memphis computer programmer Bennie Smith.

"... The method Smith used to catch the problem should be a playbook for any candidate, party or concerned citizen worried about the accurate tallying of their votes:
Smith snapped some pictures of printed voting tallies (known as poll tapes) at a high-turnout polling location and then compared the results there to the electronic tabulations.
This is a very good, if labor-intensive, way to check to ensure that votes are being counted correctly.

Smith has created a proof-of-concept program called Fraction Magic, showing how corrupt officials could tamper with GEMS to manipulate election outcomes.