From a strictly mathematical viewpoint it goes like this:

What Makes 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wondered about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give more than 100%. How about achieving 103%? What makes up 100% in life?

Here's a little mathematical formula that might help you understand these questions:

If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

Then:

H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and

K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But,

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

And,

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

AND, look how far ass kissing will take you.

A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118%

So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that While Hard work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you there,…… it's the Bullshit and Ass kissing that will put you over the top.

QED

Not to make light of a tragic disaster, but this headline from IOL is one of those they write books about - Passenger plane crashes with all aboard

And then, in the RSS feed linking to the article Mother 'can't remember killing' her babies, IOL makes yet another mathematical breakthrough:

A German woman has admitted to killing seven of her nine children shorty after their birth, but says that she can't recall killing the other three.

That one is quite old, but I thought I'd report it in light of the recent IOL mess-up.  Technically, it doesn't fit with the blog subject, but since it started here, it will continue here.

On the one hand, South Africa is trying to prevent the emigration of doctors and other medical personnel, and on the other, one IOL headline suggests that we would be better off if the youth went.

Youth must go and make SA a better place

Or maybe it has another meaning.

'Thousands of children raped in SA every day' - IOL

I am not sure I trust IOL's stats, considering that they have elsewhere given us statistics on the religious/racial demographics of 282% of our population.  But I am sure that rape is unfortunately a big problem in South Africa.

This article quotes a psychologist as saying, "Ninety-nine point nine percent of their life is about survival."  I am sure that is another statistic that is made up, although, unlike the 282% of our population, it's unlikely that they intended it to be a real statistic.  More likely it was intended as hyperbole.

" ... the best therapy option for a child rape survivor in an impoverished community is to take them out of their environment where their basic needs of food, safety, and shelter are met."

If this had been seen by an editor, the ambiguity there would have been removed.

But the police can be as bad as IOL in the cases of rape.

When I was doing my community service year as a doctor in the Limpopo province, the police arrived with a rape victim and a rape kit for taking the relevant samples.

When I opened the rape kit to begin taking samples, there were already specimens in the box.  The tubes for blood contained blood, the gloves had clearly been used, and so forth.  I noticed that the handwriting was that of a colleague of mine, and the name on the specimens and box was that of a rape victim seen by him about 3 weeks before - I remembered the name because two of us were with him in casualty at the time.

So the police had taken the used rape kit, and put it back on the shelf for reuse later - not sending it away for the proper forensic analysis.

I am sure that happens quite often.

When I sent them back to the police station to collect an unused rape kit, they came back with a kit used to collect blood and semen from a male.  I wanted to collect blood, semen, and a variety of other specimens from a female, and so I had to improvise with the kit I had - who knows what I would have ended up with if I'd sent them back a second time.

From looking around on the web, it looks like IOL's blunder with the statistics (which, as I write, have not been corrected) is a case of copying errors out of other articles without thinking about what gets written or published.  Who copied whom, and what the original source of the errors is, I haven't a clue.

My two initial posts on this mess-up are here and here.

Most of SA accepts euthanasia, study finds - IOL

From News24.com and the Daily Dispatch, we see equally silly statements, while some [see red text] at Health.iafrica are at least correct.  [IOL is now partially corrected as I write this, due to my initial message to them - see green text.  I quote the original here.]

How on earth does this sort of drivel get past their editors???

I don't know who got their information where, but someone needs a maths lesson.

These are the notes I left via their contact pages.  00:34, 4 Sept 2005.

In the article on euthanasia at http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_1761536,00.html, there are some horrendous errors in the statistics. I would suggest a complete revision of the paragraphs with statistics about races/religions of respondents. I don't know how this got through the editorial process!
Stephen

In the article on euthanasia at http://www.dispatch.co.za/2005/09/01/Leader/lp1.html, there are some horrendous errors in the statistics. I would suggest a complete revision of the paragraphs with statistics about races/religions of respondents. I don't know how this got through the editorial process!
Stephen
[ failed: bad config on their site, resent to links found here with all 3 urls below, and 2 of the addresses on this page failed delivery ]

In the article on euthanasia at http://www.dispatch.co.za/2005/09/01/Leader/lp1.html and at http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_1761536,00.html and at http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=79&art_id=qw1125317886470B261, there are some horrendous errors in the statistics. I would suggest a complete revision of the paragraphs with statistics about races/religions of respondents. I don't know how this got through the editorial process!
Stephen

In the article on euthanasia at http://health.iafrica.com/healthnews/477298.htm, there are some horrendous errors in the statistics. I would suggest a complete revision of the paragraphs with statistics about races/religions of respondents. I don't know how this got through the editorial process!
Stephen

For further info, see the original post on the survey in question, as well as the followup post 7.5 hours after this one.

Three and a half hours later, after me sending them an e-mail via their website, IOL changed one of the paragraphs.

What originally read:

Almost 60 percent of people holding this view were black, 35 percent white, 56 percent Indian and 47 percent coloured.

now reads:

Almost 60 percent of black people hold this view, 35 percent of white people, 56 percent of Indians and 47 percent of coloured people.

I acknowledge that this was the only paragraph I explained how to correct in the message I sent.  But I thought that they would at least think about the entire article, or perhaps read it.  Maybe someone else will help them along with the rest.  I might just give them something utterly ridiculous to say, since they seem to use suggestions verbatim.

Most of SA accepts euthanasia, study finds

According to the article, the same study has found that 282% of our population has either a religion, or none.

And according to the article, the same study has found that 198% of our population are of one race or another.

The first question posed to respondents was whether a patient's family should be allowed to turn off life support systems if the individual had been declared brain-dead.

Seventy percent of those who agreed were Christians, 89 percent Muslims or Hindus, 65 percent Ancestral or other, while 58 percent of the respondents had no religion.

Huh???  70% + 89% + 65% + 58% = 282% ... what about the rest of the population?  The other 327% are not represented here.

Half of those questioned agreed people should never be allowed to take their own life, even if they were terminally ill and in considerable pain.

Almost 60 percent of people holding this view were black, 35 percent white, 56 percent Indian and 47 percent coloured.

That's 198% of our population that belongs to a certain race.

Of those who agreed, 37 percent was Black, 60 percent was white, Indians constituted 50 percent of those who agreed and 49 percent was Coloured.

Eish!!!  37+60+50+49 = 196% - so what happened to the other 2% ??  The last racial listing was 198%!  And what on earth happened to grammar?  Or was it one person who agreed, of which 37% was black, 60% was white, etc?

I guess that our census and various other surveys done show similar results.

This is what you call lies, damn lies, and statistics.  One wonders whether it is the study that is totally unreliable, or if it is the journalism.

Followup post 3.5 hours later.

Followup post 11 hours later.