Statistics

Saturday

James Delingpole

Juggling statistics

From our UK edition

I love statistics. Possibly my favourite is the one from Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist: the total number of birds killed in the Exxon Valdez disaster was the same as are killed each day in the US flying into plate-glass windows or the same as are killed in Britain every two days by cats. It’s good because you can use it in so many different ways: to annoy cat lovers; to amaze friends at dinner parties; and above all to bait those tortured souls for whom Exxon Valdez has become the ne plus ultra of the kind of Man Made Eco Armageddon that must never, at all costs, be allowed to happen again. Obviously, we’d all rather those little tweetie birdies didn’t die, but that’s not the point.

The Spectator

Barometer | 11 December 2010

From our UK edition

Model towns Celebration, the town in Florida founded by Disney in the 1990s, has suffered its first murder and a suicide. Model towns have had mixed fortunes. —New Lanark, near Glasgow, was built by industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen as a model for utopian socialism. It narrowly escaped demolition in the 1960s and is now a World Heritage Site. —Chandigargh, India, was instituted by Nehru after partition as the modern face of India. It now has the highest per capita income of any Indian city, but it also has rising crime, recording 19 murders in 2007. —Brasilia, built in the isolated centre of Brazil between 1957 and 1960, survived criticism to remain the country’s capital.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

A new Brownie Buster

From our UK edition

Michael Scholar: hero. The newish head of the UK statistics authority is finally coming to the aid of the statistics nerds who have been protesting that Gordon Brown makes things up. Normally, the ONS do not censure Mr Brown when he misrepresents their data: that's not their job. But as head of the Statistics Authority, Sir Michael has - wonderfully, inspirationally - written an open letter to the Prime Minister telling him not to lie. Well, not quite in so few words, but this is the plain implication. What is significant is that Sir Michael is using his job to protect  the integrity of statistics in Britain. One of my favourite ever facts is that "65 percent of the UK population do not believe statistics".