Rss Feed
Tweeter button
Facebook button
Reddit button
Linkedin button
Delicious button
Digg button

Posts tagged as:

charts

Deceptive Charts #2

20 November 2009

Last month I wrote about the dangers of secondary axes, but even charts with a single axis can be deceiving. I have been reflecting on this after reading Jon Peltier’s critique of Microsoft’s “professional” charting tutorials earlier this week. One of the charts Peltier takes issue with is a column chart which has the value [...]

6 comments Read the full article →

Hot and Dry Days Ahead for Australia

13 November 2009

Earlier this month, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology released the October figure for the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI). It showed a precipitous plunge of almost 20 points down to -14.6. Just how significant a drop this is can be seen in the chart below, which shows the distribution of monthly changes in the SOI going [...]

11 comments Read the full article →

Petrol Price Update

21 October 2009

Oil prices have been heading up, but so has the Australian dollar. So, petrol prices in Sydney for October will have fallen since September.

3 comments Read the full article →

Is Australia taking its fair share of asylum-seekers?

16 October 2009

In Crikey this week, Bernard Keane made the point that Australia accepts a disproportionately small number of asylum-seekers given our population size. So, where exactly do we rank in the world in terms of generosity towards displaced persons? The United Nations Refugee Agency provides a wide range of statistics about refugees and asylum-seekers. The latest [...]

17 comments Read the full article →

Does Switzerland have the world’s best universities?

13 October 2009

Today @jgzebra drew my attention to the Times Higher Education league table of the top 200 univerities in the world. A quick glance at the list shows two US universities in the top three and six in the top 10. And indeed the United States dominates the results, claiming 54 spots out of the 200. [...]

4 comments Read the full article →

Fertility Declines Don’t Reverse with Development

24 September 2009

In this follow-up guest post on The Stubborn Mule, Mark Lauer takes a closer look at the relationship between national development and fertility rates.
STOP PRESS: Switzerland’s population would be decimated in just two generations if it weren’t for advances in their development.
At least, that’s what the modelling in a recent Nature paper projects.  The paper, [...]

5 comments Read the full article →

Crime Around The Corner

10 September 2009

Observant visitors to this blog may have noticed the recent appearance of a “wiki” button at the top of the page. This links to the recently established Stubborn Mule wiki, which I plan to use as a repository of information relevant in some way to the blog. Since so many of the posts here focus [...]

10 comments Read the full article →

Is There a Baby Bounce?

4 September 2009

In this first ever guest post on The Stubborn Mule, Mark Lauer takes a careful look at the relationship between national development and fertility rates.
Recently The Economist and the Washington Post reported a research paper in Nature on the relationship between development and fertility across a large number of countries.  The main conclusion of the [...]

8 comments Read the full article →

Where Have the Fish Come From?

11 August 2009

After reading my posts on the international arms trade, a friend thought I might be interested in some data on the international trade in fish. While I know almost as little about fish as about arms, I always welcome good data. The data in question is published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of [...]

27 comments Read the full article →

The Arms Trade

27 July 2009

Yesterday iconoclastic commentator on technology, politics and culture, Stilgherrian, shared an interesting discovery on twitter. He had come across the website of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and their Arms Transfer Database. SIPRI has been monitoring international arms trades since 1968 and in the process have assembled an extraordinary database with details of [...]

11 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries