Her disappearance had been linked to a string of missing person cases involving US scientists, which have fuelled internet conspiracy theories.
At least 10 scientists connected to sensitive US nuclear and aerospace research are thought to have disappeared or died under mysterious circumstances in recent years, prompting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to launch a probe in April.
How many nuclear and aerospace people does the US have?
From which we can then try to see whether 10 is higher or lower than the suicide/murder rate we’d expect in the general population. At which point we can try to decide whether this in fact a general problewm or not? Obviously, each death is a specific problem, but….
In these cases it might be best to start by being suspicious.
Missing persons and mysterious deaths are different categories to suicides and murders.
There is a Radio 4 programme called ‘More Or Less’ that talks about numbers in news stories – statistics, poll results, etc. They stress that the first question you should always ask is, “Is that a big number?”
They once did a program about rapes in Sweden, rather than saying “let work out percentage of Swedes called Mohammad and percentage of rapists called Mohammad to see if Islam does cause rape,” they just said, “Sweden doesn’t have lots of rape it is just a counting artificat”, which seemed weird to me.
Reminds me of a half-dozen deaths of people working for GEC-Marconi in the 1980s.
Lots of conspiracy guff being spun at the time, but actually it looked like a combination of coincidence (several suicides at the same time) and geekiness (trust an engineer to over-complicate killing himself…)
Having had business contact with GEC around that time I can understand the suicides. Glad I never took them up on their job offer out of Uni.
Mat Briggs (“Statistician to the Stars!”) did a piece on this a few weeks back:
wmbriggs.com/post/60549
BTW: The answer to questions like “What are the chances of all these scientists dying or going missing?” is (given that they all actually did die or go missing) is 100%. But it’s the wrong question.
Everybody knows Nessie ate ’em. She loves wee bit of American as a starter.
Still not quite the right question. The suicide/murder/accidental death rate should be compared with the rates for the population of comparable scientists and engineers, not the population as a whole. After all, there may be factors which pre-dispose people in those professions to s/m/ad. That’s the problem with many of these statistics-based questions – it’s very easy to lose a significant parameter by comparing the wrong populations.
llater,
llamas
Why is the FBI getting into the aerospace business by launching a probe? Just more space junk as far as I can see.
Well, how many times, irl, does it turn out that there is a bizarre conspiracy of some sort?
Quite a lot. Now do pay attention, 007.
Do you remember how the Yanks found rented apartments full of mobile phone SIMs, thousands of them plugged into machines that could be used to bring down metropolitan communications networks? The suggestion was China.
Other Chinese agents have been arrested running illegal biolabs in the US. Why? Do we think the Chinese want to secretly improve Western health?
You don’t think they’d kill their scientists? From those two incidents alone, we can gather that China is already in an undeclared war with the United States.
As Russia is with the UK…
I suppose a lot depends on who they are, or were.
If a dozen of the very top people running the Manhattan Project had either died mysteriously or disappeared I reckon it would have been mad not to suspect Squarehead infiltrators. But If it was minor players out of thousands, less so.
I do think it’s entirely possible that the Chinese or the Russians or the Iranians (to name but three) might like to have a pop – after all, in the latter case, Trump has been bumping off their nuclear scientists with gay abandon.
The Yanks haven’t had to do it mysteriously, but if they had it might look a bit like this.
In short, who the fuck knows.
[citation needed]
There are double-ought zero conspiracy theories. All we have is the observation that certain people are missing/dead. Theories might make it interesting.