Slashdot Mirror

10 000 in France http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3181941.st m

Germany and Spain only counted heat deaths as those directly attributable to heat, rather than as a statistical excess (i.e. in the hundreds). The general figure of 20 000 now widely accepted for Europe summer 2003 must be taken as one of the highest meteorological morbidities of the last 50 years.

Office of National Staistics says that population has grown 0.4% per year since mid-2001. So the record industry is above the curve.

My subjective response to the music industry is that the output in the previous year has improved greatly, such that I'm far more likely to buy a few CD's.

The privatised rail networks carries far more passengers, more safely than the nationalised one did. Oh, you thought it has a poor safety record did you? Maybe thats becuase unlike the "morons" you get your statistics from reliable tabloid headlines, rather than second rate sources like the ONS. Go on, have a look at the number of passenger kilometers now and pre-privatisation (up drastically) and the number of deaths per km (down).

The infrastucture is inadequate becuase people travel more, it is impossibly expensive to build more, and the economically sensible course (raise prices to deter people from travelling and put the money into new infrastucture) is politically impossible.

I do not disagree about undue business infulence on governments (and not just in the US and UK either) - and most governments are now mercantalist rather than free market in their policies. However state control is not the solution in this case unless the state is prepared to either raise fares or pour in a LOT of money to improve the infrastucture.

Funny that. In 'Communist' France, the GDP/hour is higher than that in the US [International Comparisons of Productivity, US 122.5, France 125.2]. France is the number 1 tourist destination in the world, rare for a 'Communist' country.

From the web site: "WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage."

The BNC gives British English usage, not English usage. It does not reflect U.S. English usage. Britain has only 59 million people. The United States has 294 million people. Britain has a small percentage of the total number of English speakers.

This is just an ad agency attempting to advertise to prospective clients. The agency is trying to impress people who aren't very knowledgeable about advertising. A knowledgeable person would be very negative about the agency's misuse of facts.

--
24 wars since WW2: Creating fear so rich people can profit.

In the UK it's about 15% average for public transport but varies strongly by region; a further 10 or 11% walk to work. Source: National Statistics office

The unemployment rate in the UK is 4.8%, in the US it's 5.6% ( US, UK). Curse our third world-esque level of unemployment!

And white people just don't blend in everywhere. During the Cold War black intelligence agents sometimes felt that their career growth was stunted because the best assignments were in the USSR and black people just didn't fit in there. We need to go to war against Canada or England so we can make better use of our human capital.

Also you should remember that the city of London is over twice as big as New York, yes not everything American is the biggest. In the year 2002 there was a total of 587 murders in NY city while in 2000 there was only 517 in the whole of England and Wales. Also I would imagine that there are more polce officers killed in an average year in New York than has been killed in the last ten years in the UK, excluding NI for obvious reasons. What does this show us? That having a load of criminals, civilians and police running around with guns does not make for a safer society.

I for one would rather be mugged than murdered.

The reason that no-one has remarked on the minority status of men is not, as you suppose, that only you have noticed this sinister development. It is because everyone has known it for years and years and years. Women make up a majority of the population in most countries. Over the last three decades, the population of the UK has fluctuated very little from a 48.7:51.3 male-to-female ratio. This is entirely due to women's greater life expectancy. In fact, the population under the age of 65 has a majority of males (52.4%). Although I don't have the age-based numbers to hand, the USA and Canada both have largely female populations (about 50.9% in the USA, 50.5% in Canada). I think you'll find similar numbers elsewhere.

Actually - It's Gernmany, France, and the US (out of the G7) within a couple percent (nowhere near 10%), with the UK about 20% behind.

Or at least, so the British government says.

Yes, guns do cause more crime. The rest of the world learnt (sic) to read a bar chart years ago.. do they teach them in your schools yet?

As referred above, try the Swiss on for size.

Unlike the rest of Europe, they still have very low crime rates.

I'll let you make the rest of the comparsion.

Or, try the Brits. Look at their crime rates from long ago up to the last decade. Notice what has happened since 1997.

From Webmaster@fatcities.com

Thanks for the plug. I wouln't have known you existed but for our stats report that shows links to this post about the Fatcities Portal.

Obesity is just not a problem in the U.S, it's also 'de rigueur' in the UK. I ask myself how could that be, last I visited good ole England, I lost 12 pounds just from refraining to eat English fare, which, if you didn't know, does not have the reputation of being top of the list to most seasoned travelers.

You should, perhaps, take a look at statistics for your little island regarding various factors, like, oh, your own obesity ratings, your very high unemployment rate, deficit on trade in goods and services, and last but not least, the general health of your nation, one in 10 people say their health is not good.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk

Please, no thanks necessary for giving you fodder for thought. Seeing as 6 out of 10 people are fat, according to government stats, I'll bet there are quite many of you posters out there, who will mosy over to Fatcities and 'join the crowd'.

Best Regards,
Harry
webmaster
Fatcities.com
http:// www.fatcities.com

England reports 390,000

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=297

"Lies, damned lies and statistics" applies, of course (I haven't bothered to check or enumerate the differences in metrics between the two sets of statistics), but draw your own conclusions.

--

I have no idea why anyone would ever need a TB drive at home...but if it comes down to betting, I'll bet with history, and bet they will.

Easy. Digital video.

1TB = 500 hours of MPEG2 video.
1TB = 100 hours of HiDef video.
Avg TV viewing in UK approx 3hr/day/per-person = 90 hrs/month

Even with improved CODECs (H.264/MPEG4(part 10)) will improve the compressions by a factor of 2 to 3 for the same quality. It's deminishing returns after that for newer CODECs -- so far it usually been cheaper just to add a bigger disk.

Dish Networks demo'ed a dual tuner HiDef integrated PVR at CES which has 250GB of disk and that's targeted for this year...

I can see myself watching all my TV through a PVR and keeping favorite film/series on tap on a big disk.

--- Rahul.

In case anyone is interested in how this works outside of the US...

In the UK the administrative regions don't map to postcodes (which is fairly insane). However, as you can't post census forms to 'John Q. Public, Borough of Wandsworth', the census bureau take care of producing a mapping every ten years.

This product is the 1991 copy, quite cheap at only £740 for corporate use (compared to other map data)

This one is from the most recent census and is the only mapping that covers the new boundaries in Scotland. A bit steep at £8000-odd. I say steep, because for roughly the same price, the Ordnance Survey will sell you (at the top whack corporate rate) the source data this is based on, complete with geometries for every postcode and every region. Doh!

If you just need something to narrow down someones administrative area from their postcode (to a handful at most), on the very very very cheap...Download this map of the regions and this map of the postcodes, overlay them in photoshop, and figure out the mapping for yourself.

In case anyone is interested in how this works outside of the US...

In the UK the administrative regions don't map to postcodes (which is fairly insane). However, as you can't post census forms to 'John Q. Public, Borough of Wandsworth', the census bureau take care of producing a mapping every ten years.

This product is the 1991 copy, quite cheap at only £740 for corporate use (compared to other map data)

This one is from the most recent census and is the only mapping that covers the new boundaries in Scotland. A bit steep at £8000-odd. I say steep, because for roughly the same price, the Ordnance Survey will sell you (at the top whack corporate rate) the source data this is based on, complete with geometries for every postcode and every region. Doh!

If you just need something to narrow down someones administrative area from their postcode (to a handful at most), on the very very very cheap...Download this map of the regions and this map of the postcodes, overlay them in photoshop, and figure out the mapping for yourself.

First a disclaimer: I worked on the designing some of the processing for this year's UK census, so I might actually know what I'm talking about :-)

The full census form (complete with name) *will* be released to the public - in 100 years time. The full census returns form an important historical record. And ask anyone who's ever tried to research their family tree if the names were helpful...

Furthermore there was a follow-up survey in some areas, used to estimate the number of people missed by the census. This is important because many of those who tend to missed (especially the elderly) have major consequences for government spending. Obviously 'name' is an important field in identifying which people were found by both the census and the survey.

The aggregate census data (how many people of type X in each area) will be used now, for such things as allocating local goverment money, and planning for major public spending. This does not include your name, or any data which might enable you to be identified. There are people who's full time job is to ensure that the released tables cannot be used to identify individuals.

Two different uses, one immediate and one in 100 years time, with the data being released in different ways at different times.

Why do they want to know where you work? Mostly for the historical record in 100 years time, but also because getting an estimate of how far people are travelling to work is important in town planning.

The religion question isn't especially important - except in Northern Ireland where it is of major importance for anti-discrimination laws.

More details at the census web site here.

At the referenced PDF, page 92 (PDF page 18), there is a duplication: codes 325 and 332. (See what I mean?)

It demonstrates with great clarity, (provided one is able to pull back from their damned tunnel vision first of all), just how bloody Christ-centric most of the world is. ?By this, I mean, everybody wants to put everybody else in one of those three stupid little boxes; Atheist, Agnostic, or None; people, I find, tend to stutter like the brain damaged when you tell them that their little score card is a conceited piece of shit.

Actually, if you check out the official list, there are almost 400 religions listed, including "Free thinkers", "Ancestor worshippers", "Own belief system" and pretty much everything else.

Yan

* No photons were harmed during the transmission of this message

Ok - so someone's really decided there needs to be separate categories for "Atheist" and "None".

Looking at the census list of religions it would seem just about every permutation of praise gets a mention...

So where is Time Cube? It's a perfectly valid religious choice?

I thought four corner truth was ineffable. Could it be that Census is just another Evil Word Institution trying to suppress Gene Ray's beautious vision...

Let's all pull together and make time cube number 900 on the list come the next census

what happened in my case is that the internet gave me a fifteen second attention span. i mean at least tv made me sit there now i cant even focus on tv for that long. because here im only a single click away from another interesting distracting bit of information, halfway through an article.