Giving Liverpudlians back their good name, or a thousand years ago....
Way back lost in the mists of time, I blogged this:
"Joan 'I used to run CND you know' Ruddock has been chewing over the fly-tipping league table, and "The results, covering 354 English authorities, show an increase in incidents over the past year, however, nearly half of all cases reported came from Liverpool City Council".
This year's thrill a minute fly-tipping results are in (oh be still my beating heart), and they note "Flytip incidents appeared 50 per cent higher last year due to a reporting anomaly by Liverpool City Council. This has now been corrected".
C'mon Joan, don sackcloth and ashes and apologise to the good people of Merseyside, Canossa style.
A preliminary root around in the data does not show any particular stand outs by town or authority, but note this as a textbook example of how to lie with statistics:
(Apologies for lack of clarity - it is a scan of a PDF print)
A chart with a non-abbreviated scale looks like this:
They could not have wanted to convey the impression of a drop of around two-thirds rather than 1.2%, could they?
As a footnote, the Pravda Central link is this - http://defraweb/environment/localenv/flytipping/flycapture-data.htm
Which does not work. Defra.gov.uk does however. Defraweb.com, which is where Firefox takes you if you trim the directory tree, is owned by an Italian site registry. Really professional, Defra.
"Joan 'I used to run CND you know' Ruddock has been chewing over the fly-tipping league table, and "The results, covering 354 English authorities, show an increase in incidents over the past year, however, nearly half of all cases reported came from Liverpool City Council".
This year's thrill a minute fly-tipping results are in (oh be still my beating heart), and they note "Flytip incidents appeared 50 per cent higher last year due to a reporting anomaly by Liverpool City Council. This has now been corrected".
C'mon Joan, don sackcloth and ashes and apologise to the good people of Merseyside, Canossa style.
A preliminary root around in the data does not show any particular stand outs by town or authority, but note this as a textbook example of how to lie with statistics:
(Apologies for lack of clarity - it is a scan of a PDF print)
A chart with a non-abbreviated scale looks like this:
They could not have wanted to convey the impression of a drop of around two-thirds rather than 1.2%, could they?
As a footnote, the Pravda Central link is this - http://defraweb/environment/localenv/flytipping/flycapture-data.htm
Which does not work. Defra.gov.uk does however. Defraweb.com, which is where Firefox takes you if you trim the directory tree, is owned by an Italian site registry. Really professional, Defra.
Labels: fun with statistics, Liverpool
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on Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 9:37 am.
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