Kim Kardashian's tweet named stat of the year

The Royal Statistical Society has announced their inaugural International Statistic of the Year to be from a table tweeted by Kim Kardashian.

The statistic represented the annual number of Americans killed, on average (69), by lawnmowers, compared to the number killed annually by "Islamic jihadist immigrants" (2).

The society praised Kardashian's tweet, sourced from a Huffington Post article by Richard Todd:

Todd and Kardashian’s use of these figures shows how everyone can deploy statistical evidence to inform debate and highlight misunderstandings of risk in people’s lives.

Judging panel member Liberty Vittert said:

Everyone on the panel was particularly taken by this statistic and its insight into risk - a key concept in both statistics and everyday life. When you consider that this figure was put into the public domain by Kim Kardashian, it becomes even more powerful because it shows anyone, statistician or not, can use statistics to illustrate an important point and illuminate the bigger picture.

The winner of the UK Statistic of the Year was the percentage of land that is densely built upon:

0.1 per cent.

This was revealed in A Land Cover Atlas of the United Kingdomby professor Alasdair Rae of the University of Sheffield.

The same research found that only 5.4 per cent of the UK land area had been built upon, or is urban fabric. 9.4 per cent consisted of peat bogs.

HT BBC

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