Monday, April 12, 2010

Is this real?


An article written this April depicts a graph trying to relate a country's voters to their fiscal policies. Their findings are that the less people in that country exercise, the less positive their financial outlook. How can they even begin to correlate these two things? It looks like a legitimate article, but I just thought I'd see what your opinions were on the subject...

Click here to see the actual article.
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3 comments:

  1. Noah OesterleApril 13, 2010 at 9:28 AM

    This is a unique way of trying to analyze this information. I don't feel like the author made that compelling of an argument. I look at this graph and see four former Eastern bloc countries at the very bottom and the traditionally stable Scandinavian countries at the top. It appears the correlation is more regional than anything else. Maybe there is a lower quality of life of those lower countries and those people are forced to work long hours at old fashioned type jobs, and this answered they never exercise, simply because they do not have time. It is a fun article though...not so convincing though in my opinion.

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  2. KelseyApril 13, 2010 at 10:02 AM

    I think that as we discussed in class you can manipulate data to say things that you want it to. It's an interesting message that they are trying to send but didn't really affect me (a reader) very much so I'm not sure it did a good job convincing people.

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  3. Ashlee SteudleApril 13, 2010 at 10:44 AM

    While I agree that this was an interesting article, I hardly think that the stats are incredibly reputable. This is a correlational model at the most and only suggests that the two factors are linked not any sort of directionality. Additional factors such as gender, ethnicity, public health, hours spent shopping, or even amount of sleep could also should this positive relationship. The graph would be much more reputable if the r squared value was listed.

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