Aries Criminals

In: Culture Humor

4 Jan 2012

An analysis of people arrested in Southwestern Ontario in 2011 by astrological sign. Anyone have a larger dataset?

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7 Responses to Aries Criminals

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Jack

January 4th, 2012 at 6:30 pm

Regardless of dataset size, it’s misleading without also providing the breakdown the overall population. Even better would be to just present the values on this chart as percentages (accused/total).

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Ryan

January 4th, 2012 at 7:10 pm

Jack is right. Without knowing if there are just more Aries in the population this is meaningless. It would be cool though if there were less Aries in the population and this still held up. Very funny.

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Nick

January 5th, 2012 at 4:50 am

Even if it was already normalized to the fraction of the general population that is in each star sign (which I doubt it is), it still is not a strongly statistically significant result. Assuming simple poissonian errors for the counts in each bar, the 1 standard deviation error bar for Aries is 203+-14… for Libra, is only 1 standard deviation away at best.

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Gene Hayward

January 5th, 2012 at 9:25 am

As an Aries and one that grew up in northern New Hampshire (Coos county, which for the longest time had the highest suicide rate in the country) I may have some small idea—but I dont want to suggest correlation is causation…Aries were born in the spring. The transition of winter into spring is a depressing time in the northern climates (I think most northerners will agree to that)…Depending on a persons social/income status, depressing weather/climate mixed in with a birthday COULD produce, on the margin, negative behavior in SOME people—just enough to distort the arrest figure doesnt say what level of crime–could be just mischief). Would be interesting to correlate the arrest date with birthdate…Just a suggestion. Whatha’ think?? Thanks!

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Jim Land

January 5th, 2012 at 4:02 pm

I think the data show a completely expected scatter. All data are within 2 standard deviations of the mean. Aries is not a significant outlier. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

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Matthew B

January 5th, 2012 at 5:26 pm

While interesting, the real problem with this isn’t whether or not more Aries live in the area than is normal, but rather the assumption that everyone arrested is arrested for good cause and is actually a criminal. A better dataset would be “arrested and charged with a crime”, and an even better dataset would be “arrested, charged with a crime, and convicted of said crime”. Being arrested doesn’t make you a criminal. Being convicted of a crime makes you a criminal.

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lem

January 8th, 2012 at 9:20 pm

I wouldn’t be surprised if Aries (or any sign) had a significantly higher proportion of the population. If you assume conception rates are higher at certain times of the year (for aries it would be late june to early july) then it would lead to a higher birth rate nine months ahead.

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