

Mining The Data Behind Toy Safety - thingsilearned
http://chartio.com/blog/2014/01/mining-the-data-behind-toy-safety

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kevinpet
Strikes me as pretty meaningless because while they compare, for example, the
number of recalls of toy animals vs. musical instruments, there's no scale
showing how many different types of each product are sold. It's entirely
possible that musical instruments were recalled at 10x the rate of animals,
which seems to be the useful question.

It seems that as the tools have gotten strong, the focus has been on creating
prettier graphs, not making sure the units are chosen to be most meaningful.

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shawn-furyan
This was my reaction as well. The article calls out high selling manufacturers
directly, implying that they are the worst offenders, but without sales data
you can't determine recall rate (something like recalled toys per 1000 sold),
which is what consumers need to act upon this data.

It strikes me that the largest manufacturers with the most mature design and
fabrication processes at least have all the tools to outperform smaller
manufacturers in this regard, and so the article may well be nudging readers
to manufacturers with higher recall rates.

I mean, one of the principal challenges of empirical data analysis is putting
together data from disparate sources in order to come to actionable analysis.
One doesn't just publish the data that's easy to come by and then call it a
day. And the poor analysis presented in this article is a good illustration of
why.

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Zancarius
> I mean, one of the principal challenges of empirical data analysis is
> putting together data from disparate sources in order to come to actionable
> analysis. One doesn't just publish the data that's easy to come by and then
> call it a day.

I thought it was curious how the most dangerous "toy" is the bicycle. I
suppose that's not surprising, but other charts indicate that the greatest
hazard to children is choking. I'd wager it's difficult to choke on a bicycle
save for disassembling it and ravenously ingesting the smaller parts.

Given the CPSC's recent history (think Buckyballs), I also wonder if the
relative number of product recalls has increased due to changes in regulation,
changes specific to the CPSC itself (organizational, leadership, mission,
etc), or increased pressure from consumer/physician groups.

Products containing lead appear to be responsible for a sizable portion of the
recalls, but I'm not completely sure I agree with the implicit suggestion that
modern toys are somehow more dangerous based on recalls alone. The US is a
litigocracy (and increasingly so) after all.

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lectrick
This data is completely meaningless without it being as a percent of total
sales.

Otherwise it's essentially the same as a popularity chart.

I cannot fathom how this simple understanding was missed.

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tobyjsullivan
"Fisher Price is the most high-risk manufacturer in terms of recalls"

High-risk implies that for every toy released, there is a high probability
that it will be recalled. The post fails to provide any data indicating this
is true for Fisher Price. It is most likely that Fisher Price and Mattel
simply sell a significantly wider array of toys.

For all we know, based on this data, Fisher Price could just as possibly be
the lowest-risk manufacturer.

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thingsilearned
Link directly to data dashboard:
[https://chartio.com/project/14404/dash/18166/public/](https://chartio.com/project/14404/dash/18166/public/)

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bonemachine
Perhaps a better title would be "Everything Wrong With Our Insatiable Big Data
Fetish In 4 Easy Charts".

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ye
You should probably work on the embeddable charts, instead of taking a
screenshot, saving-optimizing, uploading, CDN'ing, linking to the image.

