Partially Attended

an irregularly updated blog by Ian Mulvany

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Mon Nov 21, 2011

219 Words

Back in 2010 I was pointed at zanran, a search engine that looks for data in graphs.

I’ve been playing around with some sample searches, and decided to try drowning deaths swimming pool. Incidentally all of the results that came back were figures for young children. I guess this is because that is the group where there is the most concern, and so there is more published data about this group.

There are some interesting broad figures that come out from the data:

Figures come in on average at about 2 per 100,000 population, or 0.00002%

This is about the same chance as drowning in natural water, but at 66% more likely than drowning in a bathtub

of drownings: (natural water 25%) (swimming pool 24%) (bathtub 15%)

Cars are about 4–5 times more dangerous than swimming pools. Guns are about 10 times less dangerous.

If you are a boy in Australia, you are more than twice as likely to drown in a swimming pool than if you are a girl. I guess that this is a combination of boys being encouraged to be more reckless and girls being supervised more.

Over a year on and the site is still up. It looks like it’s still in beta, has more data than a year ago, and is registered in London.

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