Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 January 6

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January 6

distribution of world population by age

I have this specific question: "What percent of the world's population is 10 years old and older?"

I'd like to see a bell-curve type distribution graph of world population (with associated spreadsheet or table) that I could use to answer my question and other related questions,such as, "what percent of the world population is over 60?" or "what percent is in their child-bearing years?" etc.

I did find (on wikipedia) that 31.1% of the population of India is 0-14 years old, which is related, but not on target. Actually, this highlights the general problem that demographic information tends to be clumped into countries or regions, not shown as planetwide or world statistics. Maybe this makes sense because governments generate census data, but with all the partial statistics begin thrown around, and with the emphasis on population growth and the impact of humans on global warming, etc., you would think that world population numbers would be carefully compiled and analyzed.

Thanks for any help you can give me. 108.68.102.24 (talk) 00:14, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

I think that this is roughly what you want (but not a graph) World Population Info.

Not sure exactly how accurate it is, but it should be close. APL (talk) 01:49, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

lifespans of everyday objects

Where can I get statistics on the average "life span" of various objects, goods or products from when they are bought to when they are discarded? How are these stats collected?

I am thinking of the fact that once in a while, I hear statistics like the fact that the average car lasts X amount of years on the road in the United States, or the average laptop has a life of Y years, or that an item of clothing such as a shoe has an average life of Z years from when it is purchased to when it is finally discarded.

I am curious about these things and I would like to know where to get these stats? I'm assuming it would be surveys based on consumers and self-reported, since you can only really ask when someone buys and replaces/discards their item. How reliable are these stats?

I would like to know if there are organizations that collect stats like this methodologically for many products impartially (for instance, many kinds of appliances, electronics, furniture, clothing, shoes, etc.), or if it is more narrow in scope and possibly biased (for instance, one company does a survey of its customers only to show that its product lasts longer than its competitor).

I'd ideally like to get a general feel of the life of everyday objects in human life, sampled as accurately as possible.

Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.226.108.89 (talk) 23:01, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Defining the lifespan might be problematic. Some products do completely fail after a certain period of time, but more often they don't completely fail, but just don't work as well as they once did. A TV may get a bit darker, for example. Or the product may just be out-of-date, either technically or fashion-wise. StuRat (talk) 23:10, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

If you Google appliance lifetime you get sites like [1] which says it is based on the "23rd annual portrait of the U.S. appliance industry," [2] and [3]. These lifetimes would be based on surveys. But A little maintenance or good luck can easily achieve multiples of the "maximum" times listed in various sites, since I have a 40 year old deep freeze, a 56 year old rotary telephone, a 60 year old table radio, and a 43 year old blender which all work fine without replacing parts. Contrariwise, modern telephones and clock radios tend to have a 10 year lifetime before they fail. Light bulbs have well defined lifetimes based on use. Planned obsolescence takes out celphones and computers, since however well they work, they cannot adapt to changing standards. I have several computers in the attic dating back to the early 1990's which perform to original standards but cannot run current operating systems. Edison (talk) 02:51, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

I don't think that qualifies as planned obsolescence, since, no matter what they did, such old PCs would be 1000x slower than current ones, and thus unable to compete. StuRat (talk) 17:15, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

I disagree. Just because your PC is 1000 times faster you don't type 1000 times faster, nor do modern word processors save anywhere near 99.9% of your time. Often it is the other way around and you're lucky if you save anything with all the getting used to the new program "features."

I have a 266 MHz rig with Windows 98 and Microsoft Word 97, and it's still great. Gigahertz machines are mostly for games today, and occasionally for some other demanding task like CAD. 217.88.168.11 (talk) 06:15, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

I have 3 old Windows 98 PCs myself, and I run 2 of them daily. They work fine, so long as I stick to tasks I could do in 1998, like viewing text-only websites (the Weather Underground Braille page is a good one). And I agree that new software should have more options to support older PCs. However, none of this means that when the PC was originally manufactured, they sabotaged it in some way to make it become obsolete. This obsolescence is merely a result of technological improvements. If they put in components designed to burn out in 3 years, then that would be planned obsolescence. StuRat (talk) 15:56, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Many old PC's can be turned into useful computers again by installing Linux on them instead of Windows. I agree that an old computer can still do perfectly useful word processing, emailing and such. However, it's going to get increasingly difficult for it to do other tasks such as surfing the web or interfacing to things like cameras and memory sticks just because the world has moved on. Another consideration is that you can buy a very serviceable MODERN PC for around $30 these days (eg Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone) if you have a display, keyboard and mouse to connect to it. At that point, the space and energy that an antique PC consumes really does mean that it's worth dumping it for something newer. SteveBaker (talk) 17:36, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Good arguments SteveBaker. If the machine is pre-USB, it is probably obsolete and useless by now. Mine is USB1.0 and hooked up to the LAN (10Mbps coaxial - I don't need more), it contains a floppy drive, and an ISA flat-bed scanner interface card. In a sense, a newer PC would be useless.

Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone: I don't know. Do they come with FDD controller, and what kind of cards do they take? 217.88.172.8 (talk) 10:20, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

They don't "take cards" at all. The idea of having add-on cards is going the way of the dodo. Most modern PC's don't need any add-on cards at all - except perhaps an extra graphics card if you need to play high-quality 3D games. You don't have a scanner interface card because scanners are a part of printers - and they use WiFi or USB interfaces so no serial or parallel ports are needed (or available). Sound cards aren't needed because the motherboard has reasonable sound support. Joystick cards aren't needed because joysticks are USB devices. Floppy drives are beyond obsolete - the last floppy disk rolled off the production line in 2010, the last PC with a floppy drive in it shipped in 2008. Transfer their contents to Internet cloud storage before your computer fails and makes them forever inaccessible - and then junk them. The Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone are only slightly larger than a credit card. Both use a $5 16Gbyte memory card for storage - no floppies, no hard drive, nothing. All peripherals are connected via USB - including mouse and keyboard - if you need a CD/DVD drive or hard-drive, then those are USB devices also. You get an HDMI video connector for your monitor and WiFi or a cat5 patch-cord for the Internet. That's really all you need for basic computing. No add-on cards! You can't run Windows on either of those two computers - but unless your needs are highly specialist, Linux software works great, is free and pretty comparable to Microsoft stuff. SteveBaker (talk) 05:53, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Now I have to disagree, too. IP 217.88 has a point with add-on cards; even if a "PC" is available at $30, that doesn't mean that a scanner is that cheap, too, or that a scanner built today would last as long as one built in 1995. On top of that, I have a 5.25 inch floppy drive which is still good, and last time I checked, all my disks were good, too. The disks are from the early 1990's, and the drive is even older. OTOH, 3.5 inch disks are like Russian Roulette of mass storage. That and you'd rather brag about your hard disk than about your 3.5 inch floppy.

Most energy-savers seem to forget the energy needed to produce a new PC, too. Printing via wifi is a privacy disaster waiting to happen, and HDMI is overpriced junk compared to DVI-D.

BTW, we need a measure of obsolescence – if the Raspberry Pi can't even install Windows, how can we claim that it's not as obsolete as the PC that actually can, but still runs on 98 because XP would slow it down to a crawl? - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 09:46, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

You've got a radio that's been going for 60 years without needing any valves changed? Hmm. See cathode poisoning and Theseus' boat. More relevantly, at what point does "routine maintenance" become "repair", and has an item that needs to be repaired reached the end of its lifespan? Tevildo (talk) 23:15, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

The "Ship of Theseus" argument applies strongly here. When I first came to the US 20 years ago, I bought a brand new Windows 3.1 PC - and at no point since have I bought a new one to replace it. However, it's almost certain that every single part of that PC has been upgraded many times since then. So at what point do we say that I scrapped my old PC when not one single part of it is still tucked under my desk? (I used to claim that the power cord had not been updated - but a year or two ago it got sucked up into a vacuum cleaner and severely mangled - so I'm fairly sure there isn't *any* of the original machine left now). That's mostly true for things like PC's - but it can be true of things like heavily-restored classic cars. I know of at least one where the only original part left is the metal plate with the VIN number on it! SteveBaker (talk) 17:36, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia has an article "Ship of Theseus".

—Wavelength (talk) 18:24, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

For some classes of object, it's possible to estimate the lifespan by knowing how many new ones are sold. Clearly this doesn't work in expanding markets (like cellphones) - but it should work fairly well for things like washing machines - where each family has just one of them (to a reasonable degree of approximation). If there are X million households out there and washing machine manufacturers sell Y million washing machines per year into a particular market - then their average lifespan for people in that market is going to be fairly close to X/Y. That's not going to be an exact number - but for most purposes it's good enough. SteveBaker (talk) 20:34, 7 January 2014 (UTC)