Saturday Low Statistics
Saturday mornings are also a little slow for me, so this morning, as I looked at my statistics, I thought I saw a pattern. I counted back every seven days, and, sure enough, every week my statistics take a small dive on Saturday.
I am guessing that the quality of what I publish doesn’t vary that much, but that the majority of my readers come from places where they have a Saturday – Sunday weekend. Saturdays are always busy days for getting things done – getting the new garden in, getting shopping done, bringing in the groceries for the week, if you are a working Mom, going hiking or boating or some activity you can’t do during the work and school week . . .
Last night we visited friends who had just accomplished a major project in their garden here – transferring palm trees. It took a crane and a whole team of people to dig the huge holes, dig the trees out of one spot and transfer them to another. What an undertaking!
It was one of those lovely evenings in Kuwait – our friends were relaxed and enjoying the glow of having accomplished a major task, the evening was soft and sweet, and the fire glowed with eucalyptus wood. I came home smelling so good, and knowing it was one of those evenings I will long remember. Kuwait in February – the sweetest time of year.
Tomorrow is Kuwait’s National Day, and the day after that, Kuwait Liberation Day (from Saddam’s troops), so the Kuwaitis are enjoying a four day weekend at this sweet time of the year. Some have taken holidays in connection with the five day weekend (somehow Saturday became a weekend day, too, because it is sandwiched between the Thursday-Friday weekend and the Sunday-Monday holiday) and made it a full nine or ten day holiday.
Happy Holidays to all our Kuwaiti friends.
Surveys and Statistics
We have a unique expression “to eat crow.” It means when you make a flat statement that you believe to be true but you later find out it isn’t, you are obligated to say those words were untrue, and you have to say them to the people you first said them to. Or at least that is how it works in my family. You “eat” your words, they don’t taste good, you “eat crow.”
So today I am eating some crow. Remember when I talked about Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics and I told you about a survey I had filled out about building management and maintenance? I was so cynical; I thought the survey was really going to be a marketing took, a pat-myself-on-the-back kind of thing. I was wrong.
Recently, a management team came to interview my husband and me, and as they are building more complexes like ours, they wanted our input – what was working and what wasn’t. They asked honest, open ended questions. And they weren’t just looking for the good things, they genuinely wanted to know the weak spots and criticisms.
Seeking critical input, as I see it, is a great strength. I don’t do it a lot. Just putting myself out here in the blog is risky enough for me. I’m not about to ask you all how I’m doing; I figure you have plenty of opportunity to tell me in the comment sections. If I DIDN’T get readers, I might wonder, but I think that since I am out there, you can take me or leave me, and I also figure some of you probably won’t like what you’re reading and go elsewhere. My initial reaction to criticism in denial. As the pain lessens, I can begin to evaluate more objectively and perhaps (insh’allah) learn from the criticism.
In the commercial world, customers going elsewhere is not a good thing. The building operators don’t have the luxury I have; if their customers go elsewhere, their investment goes bust. There are a lot of apartments and residential units going up in Kuwait – I admire this management team for intelligently seeking out what they are doing right, what they can do better, and what is hands down annoying. They asked about maintenance, security, internet connections, suggestions. Very open ended, very uncontrolled.
As they listened, they were writing things down. We had comments in multiple areas, and they listened, wrote, asked further questions. I’m impressed. This building isn’t bad, and I bet the next one is even better.
The Mysteries of Blogging
Every blogger will tell you – you can’t anticipate what your audience will love. There are pieces I labor over – mostly the travel pieces – and I get some comments, and the hits are steady over time, but nothing spectacular.
And then I will just jot off something in a hurry, and it will get hit after hit. When WordPress first came out with it’s snap-to feature, I wrote just a short blurb, and it gets several hits a day, even almost a month later.
But yesterday, all of a sudden, I started getting hits on Unexpected Pleasures a very abbreviated book report I wrote back in January on a book about belly dancing. If it were just one or two or three or four, I would have just thought it were a fluke, but it was 17, then 26, and finally 31 – in one day!
Most of the hits were coming from one referrer, and when I tried to check the referrer, it had some posts that were not public, so if she has mentioned my review, it is not visible to me. I wrote to Little Diamond who had reviewed the book, and she said she, too, had received a huge number of hits yesterday on that one obscure review.
It is a total mystery. No comments, just people peeking in. I don’t know what they are looking for. I don’t know why that one entry interests them. It is a blogging mystery.
BBC: Dog Owners Lead Healthier Lives
(See Statistics: “Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics” below for perspective. Ask “who did the study? What was the purpose of the study? Who profits?”)
This article is from today’s BBC News online. You can read the whole report here.
Dogs can provide companionship
If you want to live a healthier life get a dog, research suggests.
The companionship offered by many pets is thought to be good for you, but the benefits of owning a dog outstrip those of cat owners, the study says.
A psychologist from Queen’s University, Belfast, said dog owners tended to have lower blood pressure and cholesterol.
Writing in the British Journal of Health Psychology, she says that regular ‘walkies’ may partly explain the difference.
Dr Deborah Wells reviewed dozens of earlier research papers which looked at the health benefits of pet ownership.
In some cases, the social support offered by an animal is greater than the support than another human could offer
Dr June McNicholas
Health psychologist
She confirmed that pet owners tended in general to be healthier than the average member of the population.
However, her research suggested that dog ownership produced more positive influence than cat ownership.
As well as lower blood pressure and cholesterol, she said dog-owners suffered fewer minor ailments and serious medical problems.
There was also the suggestion that dogs could aid recovery from serious illnesses such as heart attacks, and act as ‘early warning’ to detect an approaching epileptic seizure.
Stress-busting
Dr Wells said the precise reason for the benefits was not totally clear.
“It is possible that dogs can directly promote our well-being by buffering us from stress, one of the major risk factors associated with ill-health.
read the rest here.
My comment: I hate a study that says dog owners are healthier than cat owners, but they say that the regular walking might be a factor. Have to admit, that is true. I have a leash for my cat. When I tried to put the body harness on him, some primitive switch deep inside switched on, and the Qatteri Cat went bat-crazy, clawing, biting, twisting, hissing . . . never tried it again.
We tried walking a cat once – we’ve been told it can be done. Our experience we called “taking the cat for a drag.” I’ve never met a cat who would happily take to a leash.
And I never met a dog who wouldn’t go for a walk with great enthusiasm. They wiggle with uncontrollable delight when they see the leash, wiggle so hard you can barely get the leash attached. They bolt out the door, sniff the air, and prance as you race to keep up.
You see life differently when you walk a dog. It’s all “go! go! go!” and then all of a sudden it’s “Hey! What’s this? Some dog peed here! Woooof!” You really do see the world in a blade of grass, when you are a dog, or a hedge, or a pile of cat poop. (“No! No! You can’t eat that!! No!”) Their love of life is infectious, and probably even the stop and go kind of walking you do with a dog is better than no walking at all.
“Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics”
This week I got a survey from our real estate management firm, asking us how they are doing. As I filled it out, I had to smile. I have structured several surveys myself through the years. It is an art.
The first thing you need to know when you are putting a survey together is what you want the survey results to say. I’m a cynic. You can get a survey to show pretty much what you want it to show by choosing your questions carefully, limiting the ways a survey-taker can respond . . .thus the title. If you have an agenda, you can get the results you want.
Here is what our survey did not ask:
Do we communicate with you regularly and accurately? (Sometimes)
Do you understand what we are trying to communicate? (Sometimes we are laughing too hard to get it the first time)
Could our surveys use some work on grammar and spelling? (Oh YES)
When you submit a work request, do we respond and solve the problem in a timely manner? (Absolutely)
Given that the management, guards and maintenance team are all really nice people, are there ways in which we could improve our performance? (Yep)
If we could improve our performance in ONE way, what would you suggest? (Train the maintenance people well, supervise them closely, use checklists, and hold yourselves accountable for shortcomings.)
Hint: If you really want to structure an honest survey, have opened ended questions.
Before you ever take a survey, look through it and ask yourself “what end are they trying to achieve with this survey?” Many times, it is not the survey that matters at all (like online surveys) but getting your address and/or phone number so they can sell you something.
So I wanted to make sure I used the opening quote accurately, and Googled “damn lies and statistics.” Great results. Got the quote accurately, and got a fascinating article from BBC called How To Understand Statistics. Here is how the article opens:
The world is littered with statistics, and the average person is bombarded with five statistics a day.
1. Statistics can be misleading and sometimes deliberately distorting. There are three kinds of commonly recognised untruths:
Lies, damn lies and statistics.
– Mark Twain
This quote from Mark Twain is accurate; statistics are often used to lie to the public because most people do not understand how statistics work. The aim of this entry is to acquaint the reader with the basics of statistical analysis and to help them determine when someone is trying to pull a fast one.
Think about how stupid the average person is; now realise half of them are dumber than that.
– George Carlin
There are many books which teach statistics, but they are mostly big and heavy mathematical books, which cost a lot of money, and which may require a degree in the subject to understand anyway. For many years there has been a need for a
-
Statistics for Dummies
book and in fact there is one, written by Deborah Rumsey. On the Internet information on how to understand statistics can be found, but the sites mostly cater for medical students who need to examine experimental drug studies, although a great online starting place is RobertNiles.com, which explains how to examine statistics for errors and how to create your own statistics correctly. . . . .
read more here.
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