Google's loss my gain?

I don't check my blog stats too often because I write for myself, not others, but recently I'd noticed a huge increase in the hits on my blog. The last year or two they had dropped from 200-300 a day to 15-20. Oh well, I thought, blogging is just not a thing these days. Now they are back up around 200-250. Do you suppose the lawsuit that went against having Google be the default search engine had anything to do with it?
"In a ruling aimed at restoring competition in the search engine market, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta refrained from ordering Google to sell off Chrome, the world's most popular browser, but ordered the tech company to end exclusive deals that make Google the default search engine on phones and other devices." (Sept. 2, NPR)

Dog bite month, not just a week

Dog Bite week used to be in April, but now it gets a whole month. June. The 2025 National Dog Bite Awareness Campaign by the United States Postal Service (USPS) takes place throughout the month of June 2025. The theme for the 2025 campaign is "Secure Your Dog, Keep Deliveries on Track". When I was the Vet Med librarian at Ohio State I kept a huge file on this topic--injuries and hospitalizations and deaths. My motto: All Dogs Will Bite. And it's primarily a male problem. Male dogs owned by young men biting young boys.

"About 4.5 million persons sustain animal bites in the US per year, about 750,000 of which require medical attention. Bites are a combination of laceration, crush, avulsion, and puncture injuries and can cause abscess, cellulitis, and lymphangitis.[17] Most dog bite injuries are soft tissue injuries, fractures, sprains, strains, or crush; less than 1% are skull fractures and damage to intrathoracic, abdominal, pelvic, or intracranial cavities. Dog bites account for 60% to 90%, and cat bites 5% to 20% of bites receiving care. Results from a retrospective study of dog and cat bites in California found dog bites highest in boys younger than 10 and cats highest in women older than 80, mainly occurring in residences and during the summer.[18]" StatPearls, Animal bites, 2025 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430852/

What is the Average American?

We hear a lot about "the average American" but what exactly is that?

According to the Washington Post, the average American is a woman. 

50.8% of Americans are women.

is white and not Hispanic. 60.7%

is 52 years old.

has a bachelor’s degree.

works in health or education.

earns $889.62 per week (figures are from 2018).

lives in a city.

is politically independent but tends to vote Democrat.

has a 26.1 minute commute.

is married and living with spouse.

is an evangelical Baptist.

disapproves of Trump’s performance….(in 2018) but believes that he has strengthened the economy.

There are a few other points listed, but read the linked article and make up your own mind.

Footnotes

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/13/this-is-what-the-average-american-looks-like-in-2018/

Rereading old blogs on health, Lakeside, family memories

As my memory becomes less sharp, it's nice to find markers and reminders, many of which I don't even recognize, in my blog posts. The stats at blogger tell me I've written about 19,000 posts since 2003, and approx. 2,900,000 readers or bots have either stopped by, glanced at or read them. That's a lot more action than I ever got writing articles when I was working, and I don't have to hassle with an editor to get them published. Today I was looking up articles on exercise, homocysteine levels, Covid, chocolate, Lakeside (not all in one post) and found I'd written on all and since I try to include links, I also had places to look. 

Rank, rate, percent and number

When reading statistics, watch the terms. Rank, rate, number, percent. For instance, Alaska RANKS 4th in the nation for black homicides. Wow. The RATE of homicide for blacks in Alaska is 29.22 per 100,000 (the national homicide rate is 4.62; 2.67 for white Americans). Must be a very violent place, that Alaska! In most states many fewer women are lost to this violence (about 12%), but in Alaska it's over 37 PERCENT. However, in NUMBERS only eight blacks were killed, 5 men and 3 women. 100% were killed by someone they knew, and 50% of those deaths were because of an argument. (2015 statistics from Violence Policy Center, April 2018, p. 3, state rankings)

I checked 4 sources--each had different figures for black male homicides. But I did see one in VPC that reported of the 7,014 black homicides, 121 were killed by law enforcement--of those where a relationship between victim and assailant could be determined, 75% were killed by someone they knew. Which is more likely to be breathlessly reported for days on the news, followed by a trial and protests?

NO. HATE CRIMES ARE NOT INCREASING—down in the last decade

NO. Hate crimes are not on the increase, and shame on the MSM for repeating that lie. "Our data sets keep expanding. We have higher numbers of incidents, but we also have more and more police agencies participating in the voluntary reporting system. In 2016, there were 271 more incidents deemed hate crimes than in 2015, with 257 more law enforcement agencies reporting. As I pointed out when those data came out, "the number of hate crime classifications was higher in 2016 than in any of the four preceding years" but "lower than in 2011 and significantly down from 2006-08." There were also fewer victims in 2016: 7,615, down from 9,652 in 2006." You won't get that from CNN.

https://reason.com/blog/2019/02/22/hate-crimes-and-human-trafficking?

USAFacts—a new way to gather government statistics

This non-profit has been launched by Steve Ballmer and wife Connie.  Although most non-profits established by wealthy capitalists claim to be non-partisan and unbiased, we’ll have to see about that.  When Ballmer gives interviews we’ll see the clues. But since I frequently use government statistics myself in making my points about medical costs, education, immigration, sex/gender, religion, animals, housing, etc., I welcome any source which can make sense of it all, particularly the blending of federal, state and local.  Federal dollars, for instance, are only 3% of total spending on education.

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/full-interview-steve-ballmer-discusses-usafacts-new-10-k-government/

“USAFacts is a new data-driven portrait of the American population, our government’s finances, and government’s impact on society. We are a non-partisan, not-for-profit civic initiative and have no political agenda or commercial motive. We provide this information as a free public service and are committed to maintaining and expanding it in the future.

We rely exclusively on publicly available government data sources. We don’t make judgments or prescribe specific policies. Whether government money is spent wisely or not, whether our quality of life is improving or getting worse – that’s for you to decide. We hope to spur serious, reasoned, and informed debate on the purpose and functions of government. Such debate is vital to our democracy. We hope that USAFacts will make a modest contribution toward building consensus and finding solutions.”

https://usafacts.org/

  

The plan is to divide all government statistics by the four items in the Preamble’s mission statement.

“Revenue And Spending

Government revenue and expenditures are based on data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Each is published annually, although due to collection times, state and local government data are not as current as federal data. Thus, when combining federal, state, and local revenues and expenditures, the most recent year shown is 2014, the most recent year for which all three sets of data are available. We show government spending through two different lenses:

Spending by segment: We recategorized several programs and functions to align them with four constitutional missions based on the preamble to the constitution:

• Establish Justice and Ensure Domestic Tranquility
• Provide for the Common Defense
• Promote the General Welfare
• Secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and Our Posterity

This approach is modeled after what businesses do for their own management accountability and shareholder reporting. Public companies present their businesses in segments – a logical framework for discussing the areas in which the they operate. We do the same for government. In using this constitutional framework, we have made judgements in how we group programs. . .

Spending by function: We also show spending by functional categories such as compensation for current and past employees, capital expenditures, transfer payments to individuals, interest on the debt, and payments for goods and services. “

My on-line statistics course through Coursera

In the statistics course I'm taking (online) I'm definitely way beyond the normal distribution and beyond the 3rd standard deviation in age.  The instructor kept assuring us we didn't need math, but since he talks about percentages and decimals and uses funny little Greek symbols, and my last math class was 1955, I sort of smile when he says that. There's some very, very basic math that I probably learned in 4th grade that I no longer remember.  When I don't understand I look it up on Google and add the word Khan (online academy for children). But I did get 100% on the Week 3 quiz--after the 2nd try. 

Now I'm in week 4, and not even sure what to Google!

California crime statistics

Each state compiles crime statistics and sends them on to the appropriate federal agency which then sorts and recompiles them into different category. This is the address of the California Homicide Report for 2015, Kamala D. Harris, Attorney General.

https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/cjsc/publications/homicide/hm15/hm15.pdf

The first thing you notice in this report (and the older ones which I looked at) is that there is a wealth of information on victims; almost nothing on the offenders. Since most violent crimes are committed by younger males within their own ethnic/racial group, we can only guess at the offender, but it's close.

In California for 2015

28.3% of the victims are black, who are 5.7% of the population for a rate of 23.5.

43.1% of the victims are Hispanic who are 39% of the population for a rate of 5.3.

21.2% of the victims are white, who are 38.5% of the population for a rate of 2.6.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/09/27/violent-crime-rises-in-california-u-s-but-is-still-low-compared-to-past/

http://www.ppic.org/publication/crime-trends-in-california/

If you live with a librarian. . .

Lunchtime conversation may include, “I was looking at the UN statistics on homicide yesterday and noticed some very odd things.” Then the spousal eyes glaze over—sandwich in hand he heads for his man cave.

Of course, the compilers warn that not all countries keep stats the same way, nor are all current. But you can’t miss the obvious—the homicide rates for North America-- Canada (1.6 per 100,000) and the United States (4.8)--are far lower than Central and South America. Brazil 21 per 100,000, Columbia 31.4, Dominican Republic 25, Jamaica 40.9, El Salvador 69.2, Honduras 91.6. 

And then there is poor little French speaking Haiti (6.9)—apparently far safer than its island neighbor, Spanish speaking Dominican Republic, which is much more wealthy and developed.  And the African countries are almost as high—Cote d’Ivoire is 56.9 for instance, Lesotho 35.2, Malawi 36, except those African countries with Islamic rule have low homicide rates.  (Maybe covering up the women works since most homicides are committed by men.) The tables don’t specify guns or knives, clubs or poison. But countries with lower gun ownership than the U.S. do have higher homicide rates. 

Like every other bad social charting, our homicide rate soared with the war on poverty and then began dropping in the 90s, although it hasn’t returned to the 1950s level before the government encouraged men to leave their families and let them fend for themselves.

Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland's murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns

 http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html

There are plenty of statistics out there—but I’m sure Congress will just throw them at each other since this isn’t about life, safety or property, but about politics.

Blogger.com tracks my blog visits and page views, but I usually forget to look

Page views last month (October, 2012)   20,440

Highest day, October 26, Cue balls Joe Biden, 368

Because it didn’t have this feature when I started blogging in October, 2003, the total is off at 390,632.   Site Meter shows that at 515,840.

Blogger's stats

I've recently switched over to a new Blogger template, and although it takes some getting used to (I guess they have to have something for the younger employees to do), I am paying more attention to the stats feature. Today for the first time I looked at country of origin for my visitors (for December 2011).

USA -- 1,789
France -- 283
Russia -- 152
Switzerland
and Germany -- 101 each
U.K. -- 81
Taiwan -- 71
Canada -- 68
India -- 50
Turkey -- 19

Of course, my all time big winner is a HGTV story on Tony Chau moving to Las Vegas. 534 page views since Oct. 15, 2010. So many people want to get rich on the internet.

Over 6,000 hits and chocolate too

I've been blogging since October 2003--not sure how many posts--the count says 8,829 Posts (just for this blog), but I have deleted quite a few. I've maxed out labels at 5,000 and occasionally go in and delete some old ones used only once so I can add something more current.

Blogger dot com has a new (to me) stats feature, and today I looked at it and discovered that just three posts account for over 6,000 hits to my blog (which right now has about 410,000). These are the guys and dolls paper dolls (have no idea why this is so popular, but guy paper dolls must be fairly rare); the Morganthau quote post on the failures of FDR's Great Despression programs; and finally, the HGTV show on Tony, the Chinese-Vietnamese immigrant millionaire moving to Los Angeles. A very distant fourth, I'm happy to say, is the page that lists my poetry. And then there's the sock puppet or troll that likes to visit under various names and argue with me about my religion and values, the latest being at the one and only post I did on Glee, and I was quoting someone else's blog. Hate to scare away a "valuable" stat, but she needs to get a life.

I gave up Facebook for Lent--call it a Facebook Fast. It's much easier than blogging and therefore a bigger time waster. My neighbor Jerry gave up chocolate for Lent. He had to go home to walk his dog today, so I had his lunch on our tour. Fabulous chocolate dessert--so rich I couldn't finish it. Thank you, Jerry. You can post on Facebook for me, since I ate your lunch.

My stats are down, but not this bad

The Daily Kos
Oct: 82,893,374
May: 25,293,380
Change: A decrease of 57,599,994, or 69%

Without Bush to hate, the lefty bloggers are struggling.

Bloggasm

Rolled over 255,000

Yesterday at some point my site meter logged 255,000 hits. It would be nice if that meant everyone read something, but they don't. Some of those are "pings" sort of like waving from an airplane instead of stopping by to chat. I think someone fell asleep, staying 14 hours 38 mins 8 secs. I mean, I'm fascinating, but no one would read this blog for close to 15 hours. Just like the economy and employment, my stats are down. Here's the October 2007 to October 2008 chart.



The low point June is understandable. I was out of the country or ill for almost two weeks and didn't blog. And then everyone else was on vacation in July and August and not checking in. In January, the high point, I was still doing Thursday Thirteen and the Poetry sites fairly regularly. Those are sort of participation blogs, where bloggers visit each other and leave comments, but after awhile I just had nothing to say to 13 favorite movies, or game shows, or 13 favorite photos of my babies. And the time I wrote 13 things about illegal immigration, well, I got some really unhappy readers who said they didn't want to read anything political--ever. Then came the run up to the election, and even my close friends and relatives were voting for Obama, so they sure dropped me. Now I'm digging through government and non-profit acronyms that are costing us millions, so that bores people too.

One thing I've noticed about statistics is that if you leave a comment, even anonymously, the next reader is more likely to spend more time, or leave a comment. I do that myself. It's a bit more like a conversation. That's also how I find new blogs to read. I read a blogger I like, look at the comments, then track back to that person. It's really easy. Click on comment, when the window comes up, type something, then go down and poke that little button for anonymous (or leave your initials if you think I know you), then publish, or submit, or what ever they call it. Or you can create a blogger dot com account with any name you choose but not actually have a blog. You'd just be a niche in the wall of cyberspace that goes no where.

Misleading us on military deaths

Perhaps you've seen it. The e-mail that's circulating comparing the number of military deaths during the Clinton years compared to the Bush years. Pitch it. Someone in the process of forwarding, or just having an agenda of his own, has reworked the numbers. Lowered the Bush years numbers and increased the Clinton years numbers. Look at the Congressional Research Service link for the original document, American War and Military Operations Casualties:
Lists and Statistics. However, it is still surprising, and our media continue to mislead us. Table 4 and Table 5 gives the numbers of U.S. Active Duty Military Deaths, 1980-2006 (as of Nov 22, 2007, and these numbers are constantly revised based on new information if the cause of death was unclear).

The numbers are startling. Military deaths have been much higher during non-conflict, non-war years, like comparing 2001-2006 (Bush) with 1981-1986 (Reagan). Deaths were much, much higher in the 80s and the military was also larger. It's the cause of death--homicide, suicide, accidents, and illnesses that bumps up the deaths of yesterday's U.S. military, whether Carter, Reagan or Clinton were Presidents. I was shocked looking at these tables. Homicide was almost halved during the Reagan years, but is still much lower now. Remember all the suicide stories we've been treated to during the dinner hour? 269 in 1986 and 192 in 2006. In 1985, deaths from accidents were 1476, and in 2005 deaths from accidents were 644. Another table I looked at showed the amputation ratio per injury, and that was way down.

What this report shows is a military that's safer, healthier, better cared for, better trained and more highly motivated to defend their country and support their Commander in Chief. It also shows that our news sources, and both presidential campaigns, continue to paint this war with a brush dipped in careless abandon and wild hyperbole. Even so, read the real document, and ignore the stats in the e-mail.

HT to Murray who pointed me to this interesting document.

The problem with economic squeeze stories

There was another "economic squeeze" story in USAToday today. I think every reporter must be required to write at least one of these per year. I've been reading newspapers regularly for at least 40 years, and I don't ever remember NOT reading that the "American dream is out of reach," or that "the current generation will not be able to do as well as their parents." Even the USAToday story was unable to make its own statistics match up with its doom and gloom story. 65% of those interviewed expected much better, somewhat better or the same in 2008 compared to 62% expecting better in five years. Huh? But you can't get in print or testify before Congress by claiming everything is fine.

My parents were 40 in 1953; we were 40 in 1979; my kids in 2008. What's different in these three generations is the degree of "stuff," age of marriage and age of retirement. By stuff, I mean things my parents considered unnecessary or luxuries--air conditioning, a second car, a second or third bathroom, vacations, a larger home, hobbies like music or golf, and pass times like eating out. Even TV was considered unnecessary by my parents, well after most families had at least one. And cable came really late. I have six TVs. Even as a bride in 1960 I could see the difference between my in-laws and parents caused by their lifestyle, which for my in-laws included cigarettes and alcohol, an expense my parents didn't have. That was money that could go for something else. On the other hand, we spend about $2000 a year just eating out with friends, something my parents never did, and my in-laws only rarely. And most Americans eat out more than we do.

I married younger and accumulated more stuff than my parents; my children have more stuff and married later than me. Comparing generations is looking at apples and oranges, particularly retirement age. By choice, Dad worked well into his 80s. By choice, I retired at 60. Think if I'd had 25 more years to save, spend or invest. By choice, my parents went to college, unusual for their generation; we went to college, common for my generation; my children didn't, very unusual for their generation.

The biggest problem, as I see it, is use of the term "average family" and "working family" in statistics. How many unmarried women with children were in the workplace 35 years ago? How many today? And yet, a single mom without a college degree with 3 children is a family of four, as is a married man and woman, both college educated, with 2 children. Today we have a marriage gap. Government programs, college professors of women's studies and social work, church staff, political lobbyists and foundation think tanks depend on that gap for their livelihood.

Then let's track those children of the two parent families of the 1980s, not only do they have two college educated parents with an economic advantage, but they have the advantage of a father in the home, and as the women-to-work movement increased, many children even had dad as a primary care-giver, if not a 50% care-giver. (All promoted by the feminists, by the way.) Then as those children become adults, they are more likely to have support for education, assistance for home buying, a network with other families of similar values, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist or a PhD in Social Work to see what happens to home life and income in subsequent generations. Wake up Congress and Poverty Pimps. You are part of the problem as seen in this recent testimony! Notice the fuzzy use of the word "family" not once but seven times.

"As America has grown richer, inequality has increased. In 1979, the average income of the richest 5 percent of families was 11 times that of families in the bottom 20 percent. Today, the richest 5 percent of families enjoys an average income nearly 22 times that of families in the lowest quintile. Together, the top 5 percent of families receives more income than all of the families in the bottom 40 percent combined – 21 percent of total family income compared with 14 percent." Eileen Appelbaum, testimony before the Committee on Education and Labor

Where that strange environmental data come from

Thirteen hundred gallons of water to produce a quarter-pounder? That's based on an ag extension report given to a high school class 30 years ago, according to this interesting article in the Wall St. Journal Friday. Pardon the pun but it depends on whose ox you want to gore. Carl Bailik provides a number of alternative figures. He says at his blog:

A respected nonprofit focused on water education repeated the number in pamphlets and other material. A scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey saw the pamphlet and used the stat for a USGS water-facts Web site. And once the estimate became a USGS stat, it was amplified and repeated — on other government sites, on PBS.org, on a bottled-water trade group site, in university newspapers and in other publications. It even showed up in the office elevator of Numbers Guy reader Joe Penrose, who saw the stat on the Captivate Network screen as a “fun fact” and emailed me to suggest I look into it.

But whoever you believe, we can live without oil, but we can't live without water, and using up our water to grow crops to burn in our automobiles to satisfy environmentalists who go crazy at the thought of the internal combustion engine and melting glaciers is just silly.