statistics

Stilgherrian’s links for 23 August 2008 through 24 August 2008, with shaved parmesan:

• Medals per mil. Population by Country | Swivel: Sean Carmody continues his data mining on the Beijing Olympics that discover that the Bahamas is the highest medal winner per capita, followed by Jamaica, Slovenia, Australia and New Zealand.
• Ohio Voting Machines Contained Programming Error That Dropped Votes | washingtonpost.com: “A voting system used in 34 [US] states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.” Yet another argument against computer-based voting.

Here are the web links I’ve found for 07 May 2008, posted automatically.

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Here are the web links I’ve found over the last few days, posted a bit later than I’d intended. Cope.

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TechCrunch has some figures on Twitter usage. It seems my own Twitterings at 16+ a day makes me a “heavy” user.

March 2008
Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day

What’s most interesting is the rabid Twitter usage by active users — they send an average of 15 Twitter message per day.

My Twitter stats show that my usage is spread across my waking hours right across the week. Yes, Twitter has become a core communication tool — though I’ve said that before [1, 2]. Maybe you should follow me.

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

At some point we will have to stop blaming John Winston Howard for every problem we face. For the moment, though, it does seem that whenever we lift the lid on some important issue we find something smelly whose cause was inaction or ineptitude on JHo’s watch.

Yesterday it was how we’re stuck with the Super Hornets thanks to “a lack of sound, long-term… planning decisions by the former Government over the course of the last decade”. Today let’s look at Chairman Rudd’s theme of the week, housing affordability.

It’s now more expensive to live in Sydney than in New York.

[P]roperty prices have jumped 400 per cent since 1986, while income has increased by only 120 per cent.

The mysterious but awesomely-brained Possum Comitatus explains how he ran the numbers, leading to this graph.

It’s worth reading the full analysis, but his conclusion is blunt:

[R]eal house prices remained virtually frozen over the period from 1990 through to 2000. It wasn’t until Howard started stuffing around with halving the capital gains rate and things like the first home buyers grant that real house prices started to accelerate…

It also highlights in real terms just how much the NSW market has dropped over the last couple of years.

Possum’s going to look at our policy options in part 2, coming soon. However The Australian’s George Megalogenis has already started down that path — from the suitably cynical viewpoint of which options generate the most votes for whom.

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Summer’s over, so time to burrow indoors and catch up on reading, yeah? Here’s a few things to kick off your weekend.

• Learning to Lie, a fascinating article covering not only how lying is a sign of an intelligent child, but how we learn that no-one likes a tattle-tale and teen rebellion. Hat-tip to Bruce Schneier.
• A selection of 27 images from Life’s coffee-table book 100 Photographs that Changed the World.
• 6 Influential Datasets That Changed the Way We Think. Hat-tip to O’Reilly Radar.
• Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, an amazing series of photographic images by Chris Jordan which illustrate the excesses of human consumption.

While poking around the stats as part of my scrag-fight with Laurel Papworth, I found these figures for how many Australian businesses are using broadband.

% of internet-connected businesses with broadband

2003-04	41.5 %
2004-05	62.7 %
2005-06	82.5 %

Mind you…

Broadband… is defined by the ABS as an ‘always on’ Internet connection with an access speed equal to or greater than 256kbps.

Nothing to be proud of.

Statistics on how businesses use the Internet demonstrate how the Web 2.0 digerati are rocketing so far ahead of reality into their self-obsessed digital fantasy-land that they might as well be on Mars.

ABS figures show that fewer than a third of Australian businesses have a “web presence”.
This week the redoubtable Laurel Papworth complained about that:

Well, that sucks… Not much hope for Web 2.0 if 70% of us can’t get our heads around Web 1.0, is there?

Stephen Collins, who I’ve read for a while and chatted with recently, agrees.

I am disappointed. It indicates just how far behind the 8-ball most business in Australia is…

Laurel associates this lack of penetration with the widespread lack of understanding of the power of the Web, and specifically Web 2.0 technologies, amongst Australian business. I’d have to say I agree.

Really? Disappointed? I see steady growth in those “web presence” figures. I’ll show you in a moment. First, though, I need to tell you why I reckon you’re wrong.

“Disappointment” shows a misunderstanding of what constitutes “business”, even in the 21st Century. And there’s still a lot of work to help businesses lay the digital foundations before we start building so many crystal castles.

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Yeah I just said that it’s the wrong sort of day for numerical analysis. However I stumbled across these numbers and had to draw a graph immediately.

The world’s population reached 1 billion people in 1804. The second billion was added by 1927. And so it goes. In 1999 we hit 6 billion, and current estimates are that we’ll hit 7 billion in 2013.

You all know the drill from here…

A small proportion (us Australians, Americans, Europeans, Japanese and some others) chew up the vast majority of the world’s resources and are dumping our shit everywhere. We know we need to stop. But those other billions reckon they’ve had the rough end of the pineapple for too long and now it’s their turn.

And we’re surprised when they get stroppy about it.

Yes, there was a 7.1% drop in the ASX All Ordinaries yesterday, the 4th biggest one-day fall in our history. But before you throw yourself out of the window, let’s put that in context.

That’s a graph of the All Ordinaries for the last 20 years, thanks to Robert Merkel in Lavartus Prodeo. See that little wiggle at the far right-hand side? That’s yesterday. Short-term thinking is perilous.

70% of the email processed by my business’ mail server is spam, at least according to this morning’s stats.

8990 messages Scanned by MailScanner
253.5 Total MB
6341 Spam messages detected by MailScanner
1117 Messages forwarded unscanned by MailScanner
8 Viruses found by MailScanner
18 Banned attachments found by MailScanner
401 Content Problems found by MailScanner
6361 Messages delivered by MailScanner

That’s pretty much the same as last year. And the vast majority of inbound email connections are rejected for being from known spam sources before they even get a chance to be processed by MailScanner!