Tuesday, June 13, 2006


Violent crime on rise in big U.S. cities: AP - FBI statistics Monday confirmed what big cities like Philadelphia, Houston, Cleveland and Las Vegas have seen on the streets: Violent crime in the U.S. is on the rise, posting its biggest one-year increase since 1991. [...] effrey Sedgwick, director of the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, cautioned that it is not yet clear whether the FBI numbers reflect a real increase, or the ordinary year-to-year variations that statisticians call "static noise." (Via Yahoo! News - Top Stories.)

Statisticians don't call anything "static noise," at least not in informed company. A statistician might have used the term, which people are familiar with from bad phone systems and car radios, talking with a journalist who knows nothing about statistics. But a serious journalist would not imply that a folk term is a technical term with a specific meaning in statistics.

Bad statistical terminology is just one problem with this article. It falls for the usual neat single cause explanations for a complex problem. It highlights big relative changes in fairly low counts, which may be artifacts of small sample sizes. It does not seek serious scientific analyses of the numbers.


9:02:03 AM