Rankings

http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-statistics-schools/rankings

Death

I don't know if it's just me or there have been a lot of natural disasters in the last couple months, earthquakes in Chile, Haiti, China, the volcano in Iceland, etc. Any such event makes global headlines even when the death toll is just a few people ("just" directed at "few", not "people").

When these events happen, I'm often cynical about the hype. On the one hand, I agree that death is just about the most profound event available for the media to examine. On the other hand, I like to keep things in numerical perspective.

Assuming that there are 6 billion people in the world, and assuming each person lives 70 years on average, each person then lives about 26,000 days. On average, then, it seems that about 6 billion/26,000 = 230,000 people would be dying around the world every day. However, with rapid population growth, death rates have not caught up to birth rates, so the number of people dying every day is a bit lower than that. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that currently about 150,000 people die every day (and more than twice that number are born every day!).

Freakwenter Award for Elaborate Vagueness

In response to an interpretive question, a student writes

Scientists designed the experiment in this way due to the constraints of reality and the negligible significance of the exact relative quantities of certain parameters.