25% of Hong Kong cellphone owners are under 13?
Hold on a sec. We were all set to write up something clever about how a survey done by a Hong Kong newspaper found that more than a quarter of all cellphones there are owned by kids younger than 13 and that freakier still, 5.1% of phones belong to children under six years old, but then we took another look at the numbers. The news item is a little unclear (which is part of the problem), but it sounds like what's really going on is that more than 67% of households surveyed reported having at least one family member under 18 with their own cellphone, and that a quarter of those are under 13, while 5.1% of that number are under the age of six (it doesn't help that according to UN population data, only 16.3% of the population of Hong Kong is aged 0 to 14—even if 100% of them had a cellphone they'd have a hard time making up 25% of cellphone owners in a place where 86% of the population has at least one handset). Just because 25% of these households surveyed had kids with cellphones doesn't mean that 25% of cellphone owners are kids—or even that 25% of kids have cellphones.
[Via textually.org]
