>To an alarming degree, selfie deaths seem to plague India. Here, 19 individuals — 40% of all selfie-related fatalities — met their demise. This can’t solely be attributed to India’s large population (China, by contrast, has only one reported death).
Two comments based on that quote alone:
1) These numbers are ridiculously low. You can find 50 people dying worldwide every year from X-related fatalities where X is just about anything.
2) They acknowledge a crucial fact in their second sentence, that they aren't bothering to correct for population or selfie-frequency in any of the demographics they compare (across countries in this case). Of what use are the numbers, then? May as well compare non-price-level-adjusted prices of goods across countries.
They seem to have done the research by Google news stories, presumably with English-language queries. Much of the media in India is English language, but little in China.
Shorter: GIGO. That chart had no business in the article.
Right. And they seemed to make a big deal about male vs female selfie deaths, but I don't think there is enough data here for statistical significance.
This is an economics website--- shouldn't we be looking at the rate of selfie deaths?
Over 1 million selfies are taken a day[0], so your death rate of dying while taking a selfie is 28deaths (in 2015) / 360million (seflies taken in 2015). Each selfie has a 1 in 12,857,142 chance of causing you death.
I'm pretty meh about it. These are people chasing glory and fame. Taking extreme selfies is probably safer than going to war or becoming a kingpin.
> Each selfie has a 1 in 12,857,142 chance of causing you death
That's assuming every selfie has an equally likely chance of causing death, which I think we can all agree is not the case.
But yeah, it's extremely difficult for me to muster any compassion for people that befall the horrible consequences of their own stupid decisions. To paraphrase the late, great Bill Hicks: "They were assholes. I'm glad they're dead."
> Polls have shown that 30% of all photographs taken by 18 to 24 year-olds are selfies — so the average age here (21) doesn’t come as much of a surprise: it makes sense that the demographic taking the most selfies also perishes the most in the process.
That's sloppy writing. 18-24–year-olds might be taking the most selfies, but that statistics doesn't support that.
> "In march of 2014, a young man posed for a selfie atop a boxcar. Diverted, he was unaware of the 35,000-volt livewire just beside him."
These articles always quote high Voltage numbers as being dangerous. It is not the Volts that are particularly dangerous, but the amps. A static shock you get from a carpet or doorknob etc can be as much as 25,000 Volts and you barely notice it. A 100 Volt shock with 50 amps behind it can kill you very easily.
The higher the voltage the higher the current through the body. Now the exact resistance of a person varies enormously, in particular if we take into account things like rubber boots or if the person managed to ground herself. But as long as the system can deliver it, the current through the body will be 250 times higher when the voltage is 25000 V than when it is 100 V.
Now a very low current through the heart might kill you, so with a little bit of bad luck or stupidity you'll die from a 100 V source. Like you are replacing a lightbulb in an old fixture with one wet hand resting the other one on the kitchen sink.
25000 V will almost certainly kill you. The moisture outside you rubber boots probably has low enough resistance to let a deadly current through your body.
The exception is of course the static shocks. Here you are saved by the extremely low total charge.
To summarize, yes it is the current that kills you, but it is the voltage that matters.
Not to mention the fact that, for example, high frequency AC is pretty harmless at any voltage because (waves hands) the current travels over the surface of the body... Or something.
While your story is true, I think it's fair to say that "X,000+ electrical transmission cable" has a 1:1 correlation with "electric cable strong enough to kill you".
> In general, India has a very high drowning fatality rate.
> Each year, 86,000 people drown in the country, roughly 20%
> of all drowning deaths worldwide.
Isn't India roughly 20% of world population anyway, making this number entirely consistent & unremarkable?
Exactly. And all the article itself is example of marvelous statistics: it's not really useful to know how many people died while taking a selfie or how many selfie-deaths were caused by running in front of a train. Implication is that it's about "selfie-taking trend is dangerous", but it's not. Much more interesting would be to compare how many death, caused by extremal activities were accompanied by taking a selfie — it's quite possible, that people die of running in front of a train as much as they did before, they just take selfies while doing it now.
The difference is that now we have proof, but there is no way of knowing if the 'selfie' (I hate that word) was the cause or not. It's a bit like blaming 911 for the death of people dying while calling that number.
Author writes a whole article extrapolating uninformed claims from a single wikipedia article. No sources listed likely because it would be too obvious that no real research was done.
No, not every death is natural selection. In fact, most of them aren't since the majority of deaths worldwide are either age related or age related illnesses.
Natural selection is random processes that weed out certain traits (biological, physical, social) before those have been passed on to the next generation. This typically means before the entity has had time to reproduce. If you have deaths after reproduction then the traits can still be passed down genetically. Though the longer post birth maturation period can still have an effect.
The deaths reported in the original article were all removing stupid people from the world; thanks to their actions the average level of the stupidity of humans has decreased slightly.
Their deaths should act as a warning to try and reduce further stupidity in the world; though some humans are especially bad at learning from other's mistakes.
Unless the person became infertile, why would death by old age not be considered part of natural selection? The people who die of old are are unable to have more children, because they are dead. They are also unable to further contribute to the fitness of their descendants.
A person's reproduction isn't just whether they did or not, but how much they did.
when people use language like "thanks to" when talking about evolution, I think it attaches too much of a value thing, such that people sort of smuggle in the idea that a thing that happens is good, by hiding it in the description saying that it happens.
Natural selection is, in its respectable form, about what is, not about what ought.
That's not to say one can't say related things about what ought, but I think one should be sure to clearly express when one is doing one versus when one is doing the other.
> In fact, most of them aren't since the majority of deaths worldwide are either age related or age related illnesses.
Have you ever heard of the grandmother hypothesis? Just because an organism is done directly reproducing its genes doesn't mean that it can't help its descendants successfully reproduce their genes.
Please do some reading on a topic before pontificating on it.
I would guess that they're basically the same as the first category: people falling off of things. Just that they fall into water (and either can't swim or maybe hit their head on the way down).
Two comments based on that quote alone:
1) These numbers are ridiculously low. You can find 50 people dying worldwide every year from X-related fatalities where X is just about anything.
2) They acknowledge a crucial fact in their second sentence, that they aren't bothering to correct for population or selfie-frequency in any of the demographics they compare (across countries in this case). Of what use are the numbers, then? May as well compare non-price-level-adjusted prices of goods across countries.