August 2010

Junk Charts #4 – Puns are dangerous

31 August 2010

Design guru Edward Tufte famously lambasted pie charts in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and went on to say the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them While pie charts do have their defenders, the basis for the contempt in which pie charts are held by Tufte and others is […]

4 comments Read the full article →

More Informality

24 August 2010

Yesterday’s post on informal votes generated a lot of questions, both on and off the blog. One commenter was interested in understanding why there was so much variability in informal votes in New South Wales. It is a good question, and one I do not have an answer to. Presumably demographic differences across electorates (such […]

4 comments Read the full article →

Dress: Informal

23 August 2010

While Australia still waits to see which party will manage to scrape into power, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has announced an investigation into the unusually high rate of informal votes. Veteran ABC analyst Antony Green observed that the rate of informal votes was the highest since 1984. Some are attributing the rise to the […]

13 comments Read the full article →

Recognise this?

20 August 2010

Last night I was watching the Chaser’s Yes We Canberra (only a day late), and jumped out of my chair when I saw Craig Reucassel corner Tony Abbott to challenge him about his obsession with reducing Government debt. Have a look at this to see why! Here is the post referred to in the video. […]

11 comments Read the full article →

Infrastructure Bonds

17 August 2010

With Australia’s Federal election looming, the opposition has today proudly announced a new policy to fund infrastructure without actually increasing Government debt! What are we to make of this? It’s hard to determine the details from a media announcement, but based on the text posted by Peter Martin on his blog, it would seem that […]

15 comments Read the full article →

Broadband Poll

12 August 2010

As a follow up to our guest post on the numbers behind Labor’s broadband policy, here is a quick poll to see whose policy you prefer. Let us know what you think!

16 comments Read the full article →

Labor’s National Broadband Network – Less than $10/month

11 August 2010

Our regular guest contributor James Glover (aka @zebra) returns today with a look at the numbers behind the National Broadband Network. He asks: do you think it would be value for money?

43 comments Read the full article →