Archive for mortality

less bats, higher mortality

Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , on September 18, 2024 by xi'an

“…farmers compensated for bat decline by increasing their insecticide use by 31.1%. The compensatory increase in insecticide use by farmers adversely affected health—human infant mortality increased by 7.9% in the counties that experienced bat die-offs.” Eyal G. Frank

A Science article by Eyal Frank got a lot of press last week for linking US bat population plummeting (up to 70%) due to the “white nose syndrom” (an invasive fungus) impacting bats since 2006 (through premature awakening from hibernation) and therefore agriculture, to a huge (8%) rise in infant mortality in the impacted regions, resulting from a jump in the use of insecticides… (The statistical model behind the predicted mortality is a linear model for all dependent outcomes, insecticide use, crop yield, and infant mortality. With plenty of precautions to separate infected counties from non-infected ones and to eliminate exogenous causes.)

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another round of mostly useless road death statistics [and a terrible graph]

Posted in Books, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 16, 2023 by xi'an

Another terrible report on (French) road accidents and deaths Le Monde pointed to. The entire analysis does not consider once the number of people on the roads or the death per kilometer ratio. Which makes the absolute figures as those represented in this ugly graph hard to comment. For instance, the number of persons cycling to work has increased more than the number of bike deaths. (And, contrary to a urban myth, cycling in Paris should not be considered as a extreme sport: only one  [too many] cyclist died there in 2022.) I also find surprising the (a)symmetry in the age distributions of (overall) road deaths,


since the percentages of evolution between 2019 and 2022 almost exactly compensate for one to the next across the age groups. Any significance in these figures? The statistics that makes the most sense in the report is the comparison of counties where the 90km/h speed limit was reinstated and those where it stayed at 80km/h: an increase of 1% versus a decrease of 2%… As signaled by Le Monde car doors are bike killers: when getting off a car, use your right hand to open the driver’s door (except in Australia, Britain, Japan and 72 other left-hand driving countries!!).

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another surmortality graph

Posted in Books, R, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , on April 27, 2020 by xi'an

Another graph showing the recent peak in daily deaths throughout France as recorded by INSEE and plotted by Baptiste Coulmont from Paris 8 Sociology Department. And further discussed by Arthur Charpentier on Freakonometrics. With a few days off due to reporting, this brings an objective perspective on the impact of the epidemics (and of the quarantine) compared with the other years since 2001, without requiring tests or even surveys. (The huge peak in August 2003 was an heat wave that decimated elderly citizens throughout France.)

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