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".

Please use this poll to record your guess - answers at the end of this blog.

Pie charts have a long and noble history. They were popularised by Florence Nightingale and were hugely effective in helping politicians understand the causes of death among soldiers during the Crimean War.

As we understand more about the human brain and how we perceive shapes, it is becoming clear that pie charts are ineffective for representing complex information.

2D pie charts can still serve a useful purpose in limited circumstances. The real problem is with 3D pie charts. As far as I can tell, these abominations were popularised by Microsoft's Excel charting software.

3D charts distort the view of the data in such a way that it becomes increasingly hard to understand the information being presented. A picture being worth 1000 words, allow me to demonstrate:

So, just how bad is Surrey Police's Pie Chart? In an extremely scientific study of asking half a dozen people, they all guessed between 75% and 85%. That's quite a wide range considering it's a multi-million pound difference.

On the opposite page to the pie chart is this summary of spending.

In slightly more readable format, it is:

A few interesting things to note here.

Firstly, how do we calculate the percentages? The total spend isn't mentioned in the report (£216.90). If we use that, "Employees" accounts for 81.9% of spending.

If we take into account the gross expenditure (£207.70) the figure jumps to 87.5%.

Secondly, if we do assume that we're using the unreported total spend - there is at least 2% missing. Some of which can be explained by rounding - but I wonder what the rest of the money is spent on.

Given the above, I don't think the provided pie chart allows Surrey residents to see an accurate view of how their hard earned money is being spent.

Hopefully, this side-by-side - of the above data - will show you how 3D pie charts distort data and end up misleading their audience.

With this overlay, we can see the distortion much more clearly. The smaller sections of the chart look disproportionately larger. It's time to announce a zero tolerance crackdown on dodgy data representation.

Once I went to university, I stopped going to the library. Even university libraries are pretty poor for computer science books - and the ability to buy cheap paperbacks online obliterated my need to visit them. It wasn't until Surrey libraries started offering digital borrowing that I even thought about my local library. Nowadays, I'm found there once a week teaching computer programming to kids.

The popular children’s-author Terry Deary says that libraries are obsolete and, in these times of austerity, we shouldn't feel bad about them closing down.

Naturally, this has outraged both traditional and progressive authors.

Neil Gaiman

@neilhimself

Selfish & stupid, shortsighted & sad. Mostly selfish. Terry Deary gets avaricious & anti-library: bit.ly/15de7Ve

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Even regular people seem to think that libraries ought to be preserved.

Neil Gaiman

@neilhimself

Selfish & stupid, shortsighted & sad. Mostly selfish. Terry Deary gets avaricious & anti-library: bit.ly/15de7Ve

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Metty

@_Metonymy_

Replying to @neilhimself@neilhimself what?!? Our library is like the center of our community! Tons of events happen there, and it is always packed

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(I've picked those two statuses more-or-less at random, there are thousands of people who tweeted Neil about this.)

What it comes down to is asking "what is a library for?"

When I've expressed the opinion that high-street shopping needs to die off, someone always says to me "But old folk like going out shopping - it's their only chance to interact and chat with people."

The is a skeuomorph solution. We're keeping alive a vestigial part of society when really, we ought to be re-engineering it. We wouldn't say "electric car engines should be designed in such a way that they should be started by hand cranks and towed by horses," would we?

The solution for pensioners' social lives isn't necessarily coupled with a retail experience - we should have decent care, community centres, and services which meet people's needs.

It's exactly the same with libraries.

Last month, I wrote about the proper use of the library. It's no longer solely about borrowing books or looking up back issues of periodicals. It's about the Internet, a community meeting space, a learning environment. Being the rampant egotist that I am, I'll quote myself:

The proper use of a library is a space where people can feel safe and enjoy free access to culture.

Let me spell it out simply. Lending books is not what a library is for any more.

We need to decouple the idea of book loans from that of a library. All those people who say that their library is used for events, for poetry readings, for toodlers, for accessing the web, and for teaching kids to code - they're not talking about a building for book lending, they're talking about a community centre.

For readers and authors who are worried about people not discovering new books, or being unable to take a chance on a new author or genre, the ability for a random small town library to carry a specific book is vastly inferior to an author giving away free copies on their website.

Amazon is full of authors allowing their books to be downloaded for free (or at extremely low cost) in the hope that the reader will be sufficiently interested to buy the next book in the series.

Rethinking The Library

What would happen if we shut down all the libraries and gave everyone in the UK a Kindle?

(Aside from massive protests!)

Here's some back of the envelope calculation...

Unison have produced an excellent pamphlet about library provisions in the UK. In it, they estimate that the total expenditure on UK libraries in 2006 was £1,063,120,000.

A billion quid plus change. I assume that covers buying books, staffing, buildings, etc. The Public Lending Right in the UK means that authors get paid when their book is borrowed from the library (6.2p per borrow, to a maximum of £6,600). According to the PLR, the total cost of this was £7.6 million in 2006. That's roughly 122,580,000 library borrows per year - a little over two per person.

I'm unsure if the £1 billion figure includes the PLR's £7.6 million - but let's say it does to err on the side of caution.

A basic eReader's cost ranges from £60 for a Kobo, to £70 for a Kindle, to £80 for a Nook. Let's assume that technology gets cheaper, that eReaders are treated like books for VAT purposes (0% rather than 20%), and economies of scale means that prices drop.

It's not a stretch of the imagination to say that next year a basic e-ink ereader could cost no more than £30. Indeed - the Txtr beagle eReader costs a mere £8. Yes, eight.

The billion pound yearly library budget costs roughly £20 per person per year.

So, dissolve all the libraries. Give everyone in the UK a voucher good for £30 off a qualifying eReader (you can buy the cheap as chips version or pay extra to get the Kindle HD Super Max Plus if you want).

With the remainder of the money, continue the Public Lending Scheme but tie it to a national digital library.

You can either borrow a book - in which case the state will pay the author. You can download a public domain books - for free. Authors can sell their books for whatever price they choose - or give them away.

Who loses? Every person - not just children - gets fast access to infinite knowledge, authors get exposure and get paid, vast sums of public money are saved, and we can use the remainder of the money to digitize our archives.

The physical buildings which house books can be converted into community centres, meeting places, Internet hubs - without the need to store books and insist on silence.

Rip, Mix, Burn

I don't mean we should literally set fire to libraries - nor their book collections.

Apple launched its iMac and integrated CD writer with the slogan "Rip, Mix, Burn".

The idea is simple. Rip the music out of your CDs or vynil and convert them to digital information, mix them up to create new things, burn the new tracks into the world.

And that's exactly what is needed with libraries. Rip the analogue books to digital formats, remix the services so they're more useful to people, burn the new way of experiencing culture into society.