This post represents something of a milestone for the Stubborn Mule. A few months ago I passed the one year anniversary of the Mule (the first post was published on 18 May 2008). Now I have reached the 100th post. To celebrate, and in recognition of the fact that older blog posts tend to disappear […]
A few months ago, a new site arrived on the increasingly crowded web 2.0 scene. Posterous offers a medium that fits somewhere between a blog and a microblog (the canonical example of the microblog being, of course, the juggernaut that is Twitter). Maybe it should be called a “miniblog”. Posterous is not the only site […]
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 […]
Many of the posts on the Stubborn Mule use the R statistical package for analysis and charts. I have started making my R code available on github. For people not familiar with the git version control system, I will also make some files (code, data, etc) available here. Leave a comment below or drop me […]
Last week, Politico published an analysis of Barack Obama’s language. The words he used most often were “America”, “Health” and “Economy” (Politico included “American” in the count along with “America”). This prompts the obvious question: what are the favourite words of our own Kevin Rudd? Fortunately, the prime minster’s website publishes transcripts of all Kevin’s […]
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 […]
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 […]
Following on from my post on Visualizing the Hottest 100, I noticed that the UK’s Guardian newspaper has published a list of 1000 songs to hear before you die*. The list was assembled from nominations posted by readers. Even before looking at the list, I suspected that the demographic profile of the Guardian’s readers may […]
A few weeks ago, I had a preliminary look at Australian property prices. That post focused on rental yields and argued that the fact that property prices have consisently outpaced inflation over the last 10-15 years can be associated with a steady decline in rental yields which has been matched by a decline in real […]
Today radio station Triple J finished broadcasting their Hottest 100 tracks of all time, the first all-time vote since 1998. For those outside Australia and not familiar with the tradition of the Hottest 100, it began back in 1989 and results are determined by listener votes. After two more years the format changed and votes […]