Tonight was Crawley Labour’s constituency meeting and, unsurprisingly, the mood was good. I enjoyed congratulating Peter Smith, Colin Moffatt and Chris Mullins on winning their seats and others for holding onto theirs. There was also a new leader of the Labour group to congratulate.
Entries Tagged as 'Statistics'
Mindboggling aviation statistics
May 12th, 2011 · No Comments · Technology
For some reason I was looking at the Wikipedia page for the B-24 Liberator WWII heavy bomber, saw the numbers that were built and it got me thinking. It sounded like a lot (18,482 built in 6 years) so I started looking around at the numbers built of other aircraft for comparison and came up [...]
Tags: Aviation·Statistics
Number-crunching the leadership ballot
September 29th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Politics
I was pleased to see the data behind the leadership ballot released, and also a little surprised. But mostly pleased. The data is available as a Google Doc here and you can download it all to your own computer to pull it about in Excel. ((or Open Office of course))
Tags: Elections·Labour Party·Statistics
Is it 18 months already?
August 2nd, 2010 · No Comments · Music, Technology
Spotify still feels like a new toy, but it appears I have been using it for about least a year and a half now.  Soon after I started on Spotify I started scrobbling to last.fm and I have just reached the milestone of having listened to 20,000 tracks since then. Looking at the statistics on [...]
Tags: Spotify·Statistics
Lessons for the left
February 6th, 2010 · 23 Comments · Politics
I found this article on the BBC website to be in equal measures interesting and depressing. It is called Why do people vote against their best interests? and is about the US healthcare issue, but really has lessons for the left over here too.
Tags: Labour Party·Statistics·USA
Sick statistics
January 25th, 2010 · 2 Comments · Life
Should there be some sort of exam where journalists have to display even a rudimentary grasp of statistics before they are allowed to go around journalling all over the place?  I have just been reading this piece from the Telegraph about people taking sick days.
Tags: Books·Newspapers·Statistics
Superstition
July 27th, 2008 · No Comments · Life
Last week somebody in Horsham bought a lottery ticket at Waitrose in Piries Place and won £2.3 million. This week, if the papers are to be believed, business has been booming for the Waitrose lottery machine as people have been flocking to buy a ticket from the ‘lucky shop’. Which part of “random” is it [...]
Tags: Horsham·Statistics
Alternative medicine success story?
February 20th, 2008 · 8 Comments · Technology
According to this story: (which refers to this earlier story) There is growing evidence that acupuncture can greatly increase a woman’s chance of becoming pregnant I am more than a bit sceptical about claims for medical treatment based on theories like “the body’s major organs use energy pathways to communicate and that malaise occurs whenever [...]
Tags: Medicine/Health·Statistics·WTF
Lies, damned lies, and statistics
January 6th, 2008 · 2 Comments · Life
Only I couple of weeks ago I was pouring scorn on a set of meaningless statistics, and now there is another set which is not as bad but which says the opposite.
Tags: Crawley·Horsham·Statistics
Meaningless statistics
December 23rd, 2007 · 2 Comments · Life, Work
There was an eye-catching headline on the Argus website about how ‘Salaries in affluent Brighton are £3000 below average‘. It also says that salaries in Crawley have dropped £6,000 in the year. And its all rubbish.
Tags: Brighton·Crawley·Horsham·Statistics
