Thursday, June 15, 2006

Dangerous Sports - meaningless stats

Today LiveScience.com (see link in title) reported that Basketball rated as the most dangerous sport during 2005 with 512,213 people put the ER and wrestling coming in at number 15 with 33,724.

These stats are completely meaningless if you are trying to work out which sport is safer than the other as they don't take into account hours played per person per sport.

As an example, if there were a total of 33,724 hours of wrestling done during 2005 then the injury rate would be 1 per hour. If there were 512,213,000 hours of basketball played then the injury rate would be 1 per 1,000 hours. Doesn't wrestling look a bit more dangerous now with my hypothetical hours?

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