In How to Make the World Add Up, Tim Harford draws on his experience as both an economist and presenter of the BBC’s radio show ‘More or Less’ to take us deep into the world of disinformation and obfuscation, bad research and misplaced motivation to find those priceless jewels of data and analysis that make communicating with numbers so rewarding. Through vivid storytelling he reveals how we can…
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I've just read an interesting article by M.G. Siegler entitled - "What you’re working on sucks, just give up now, they said." It can be summed up thus: Commentators said our startup wouldn't work. Our startup did, in fact, suceed. ∴ All commentators are wrong about whether startups will work. This exhibits one of my favourite logical fallacies - survivorship bias. If you only look at the win…
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Surrey County Council have sent every household in the county a booklet explaining how our council tax is being spent. Within it is a highly political comment from Kevin Hurley, the newly elected Police and Crime Commissioner. He presents a pie chart showing how the police force spend its money. Take a look at it and ask yourself this question: what percentage is spent on "Employees". …
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There are no words to adequately describe the horrific rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey. I remember, several years ago reading a short piece of speculative fiction which postulated that China would go to war over access to women. Generations of female infanticide would leave the country with a severe gender imbalance. Hoards of men would be unable to find a wife, would become violent, and …
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Wandering around the steets of London, I came across this excellent initiative from Camden Council on how to use QR codes on street furniture. If you see that a light - or anything else - is damaged, you can scan the QR code and report the issue. There's even a phone number and vanilla URL for those who aren't quite up to speed with new technology. There's only one slight issue - the QR code…
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I'm not a big fan of URL shortners - bit.ly, t.co, goo.gl, ow.ly, etc - I understand the need for them, but they seem to offer a fairly poor service in terms of privacy and usefulness. Take this recent example from Vodafone. Aside from the obvious downsides (user doesn't know where the link will take them, if it's compatible, link looks like gobbledegook, etc) there is a rather more…
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As we enter another NaBloPoMo - where I try to write a blog post each day in Novemeber - I thought I'd take a look back at how this blog has developed. On Friday, October 30, 2009, I switched on WordPress statistics so I could get a better idea of what was popular on my site. My average traffic back then was 80 visits per day. Not bad for a backwater blog. Since then, my writing has been…
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One of the great things about publicly blogging for the last 5 years, is that I can remind myself of what I was doing this time last year. Or several years ago. The Terence Eden of October 2009 was a busy chap! 22 blog posts! What a guy :-) One post which caught my eye recently, was asking "What are the browser statistics for 10 Downing Street?" Here was their answer UK Prime…
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No, I'm not talking about Masabi's innovative technology, but of this rather odd bit of advertising found on the back of a train ticket. There's no specific call to action - but there's not much space to play with. Let's give it a scan... sigh A non-mobile site. With an Adobe Flash plugin in the top right which won't work on any iPhones. Why on Earth do marketing companies insist on pointing…
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At the start of 2012, I revealed how many scans TfL's QR campaign was getting. A lot of comments on Twitter & Google+ dismissed these results as a success. A typical response was: 70 scans a day? In a city of millions? Rubbish! This fails to address something that advertisers are conspicuously loathe to reveal - the true "response rate" of any advert is hard to calculate. How many phone…
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There was a lot of interest in my recent post about TfL's QR statistics. Today, I present to you three very different QR codes and their statistics. These are all taken from the Metro newspaper on Tuesday January 10th. Wowcher First up is "Wowcher", a big quarter page advert on page 28. Wowcher's statistics show a consistently good performance with QR codes. Between 30 - 80 scans per day,…
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Last year, I suggested that TfL should use QR codes to point to their excellent mobile countdown service. Looks like someone was listening! I spotted this poster at a tube station. Nestled in the corner is a QR code pointing at the mobile bus countdown service! This is a close-to-perfect use of QR. Points to a mobile site. Easy to scan code. Good call to action. As I…
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