Great White Shark Attack Paddle vs Pedal Numbers

[FISH11]

Same here. It was super hard to make any bait. So I trolled a rapala, not much fun trying to avoid the lobster trap buoys and the floating cut up kelp. No hits and finally found some spanish late and went deeper to try some more. Just lost 3 in a row to the knucklehead dogs. trolled and drifted for a couple more hours and nothing. After finding the bait late I did see some bait jumping so I threw a surface iron, but nothing. Was on the water from 8am to 5:30 with no luck. Still had fun drinking beer and enjoying the sights on a very calm day.

[blitzburgh]

Good stuff Paul!

[pbb]

As someone with a stats background (Ph.D. in Sociology with a quantitative focus, M.A. in Demography), I would agree that there is nothing here that suggests any conclusive "statistically significant" differences by propulsion method.

The OP is correct that you would really need to know how many people are out there in these types of kayaks at risk of getting attacked to do the analysis correctly.

In fact, you would ideally need to know not only what kind of kayaks are out there in consumers' hands, but how much they use them. In other words, if you had 1000 people with Hobie mirage kayaks and 1000 people with paddle kayaks, and the mirage drive kayakers spend twice as much time on the water as people with paddle kayaks, you would expect them to experience twice as the number of shark attacks even if the rate of shark attacks was exactly the same.

[PAL]

Originally Posted by pbb

As someone with a stats background (Ph.D. in Sociology with a quantitative focus, M.A. in Demography), I would agree that there is nothing here that suggests any conclusive "statistically significant" differences by propulsion method.

The OP is correct that you would really need to know how many people are out there in these types of kayaks at risk of getting attacked to do the analysis correctly.

In fact, you would ideally need to know not only what kind of kayaks are out there in consumers' hands, but how much they use them. In other words, if you had 1000 people with Hobie mirage kayaks and 1000 people with paddle kayaks, and the mirage drive kayakers spend twice as much time on the water as people with paddle kayaks, you would expect them to experience twice as the number of shark attacks even if the rate of shark attacks was exactly the same.

Great stuff! I'd like to quote you in an update to the original story. Please PM your name, and add any other statistical observations you'd care to share. Maybe something about the relatively small sample size?

[GregAndrew]

Originally Posted by PAL

Great stuff! I'd like to quote you in an update to the original story. Please PM your name, and add any other statistical observations you'd care to share. Maybe something about the relatively small sample size?

I said essentially the same thing as a comment on the page the article appears on. It is the total number of hours spent in the "Zone" by the different types of kayaks divided by the number of attacks on each. That will give you the attacks per, probably, hundreds of thousands of hours in the "Zone".

Sample size is not a term that applies here. What you have is a small number of occurrences. Sample size is the number of data points that you survey in order to make a prediction about a population. Like the number of Hobie owners you question in order to find out if they have been attacked by a shark.

[PAL]

Originally Posted by GregAndrew

I said essentially the same thing as a comment on the page the article appears on. It is the total number of hours spent in the "Zone" by the different types of kayaks divided by the number of attacks on each. That will give you the attacks per, probably, hundreds of thousands of hours in the "Zone".

Sample size is not a term that applies here. What you have is a small number of occurrences. Sample size is the number of data points that you survey in order to make a prediction about a population. Like the number of Hobie owners you question in order to find out if they have been attacked by a shark.

I hear you, but who has the time (or the data) for that?

That is likely why the risk of suffering a shark attack is typically expressed in terms of the overall population. For instance, you have a better chance of getting killed by a falling coconut than you do a shark... blah, blah, blah. That's no help other than in simplistically illustrating the low overall occurrence of death by shark.

Someone who never dips a toe in the ocean has no chance of succumbing, not even if they are Austin Powers (just maybe if the sharks have fricken laser beams).

Life is one big judgement call.

[GregAndrew]

Originally Posted by PAL

I hear you, but who has the time (or the data) for that?

That is likely why the risk of suffering a shark attack is typically expressed in terms of the overall population. For instance, you have a better chance of getting killed by a falling coconut than you do a shark... blah, blah, blah. That's no help other than in simplistically illustrating the low overall occurrence of death by shark.

Someone who never dips a toe in the ocean has no chance of succumbing, not even if they are Austin Powers (just maybe if the sharks have fricken laser beams).

Life is one big judgement call.

Sharks don't have laser beams? Sorry, my pet peeve is people using data as statistics, especially politicians and environmentalists.

[GregAndrew]

More than the color of the kayak, I would like to know the visibility of the water at the surface in each instance. If it is generally less than say 15' (at the speeds they are probably traveling) then you might infer that the sharks are attacking a silhouette more than anything else. That could also cloud the data if the sharks can't tell until last second that a Hobie has fins. However, if the sharks are seen before the attack or the water is generally very clear, then all bets are off on that.