Various people asked what would happen if I excluded London and Northern Ireland from the BNP analysis. Here’s a table showing the R-squared for each factor, first for the whole data set and then excluding these two outliers. (After all, who needs statistical analysis to know those two are weird?) Factor R-Squared R-Squared Excluding NI,…
Read More Even More BNP Data…OK, so I’ve spent some time getting more data together on the correlates of BNP membership. I’ve created a table which contains the following metrics: population growth (%), change in population density (%), Gross Value Added(GVA) in 1991, 2006, change in GVA, % GVA growth, unemployment, long-term unemployment as a % of total unemployment, the…
Read More Yet More BNP Data Analysis: Does Not Compute!You will hear all kinds of people in authority say that immigration, or population growth, is causing people to turn into racists and vote BNP, either just because (the rightwing version) or because of “pressure” on public services (the Decent Left version).Therefore, they usually say, we need a stingier immigration policy. If you’re reading this,…
Read More The Swamping MythOh yes, gleeful leftie hacker tournament after the BNP did a 0.16 megarecord datafart. My effort contains absolutely no personally-identifying data; it’s made with this guy’s count by region and population data from National Statistics, to show the number of BNP activists per 100 citizens in each UK region. People kept asking for that kind…
Read More don’t compromise, visualiseAccording to the BBC, the Home Office really, really doesn’t get the basic truth that 0.01% of a really big number is quite a big number. The Torygraph reported that the Criminal Records Bureau had mistakenly told its customers between February 2007 and February 2008 that some 680 people had criminal records when in fact…
Read More A Truth Moment at the CRBAnthony Wells is arguing about what percentage of don’t knows in the polls for the Crewe & Nantwich byelection are actually Labour voters who feel embarrassed to say so – analogous to the “shy Tories” of the 1990s. I would think the number is considerable. During my candidacy in Egham Hythe, I knocked on and…
Read More Bashful BrownitesIt’s been said, I think by Alanbrooke, that strategy consists in the proper handling of reserves. Looking at the situation with this framework, what can we say about Iraq? It’s now been a year since the announcement of “The Surge”, the deployment of the US Army’s strategic reserve in Iraq. And what’s happened? First, it…
Read More Ou est la masse de manoeuvre?OK, so by chance we have some real data to put into the sums in this post. The head of MI5 has just announced that we should all be very scared, because he reckons there may be 2,000 people in Britain who pose a threat to national security because of their support for terrorism. So…
Read More Some data pointsIf you watched Britz this week you’ll have seen the MI5 chaps and chappesses poring over really complicated social-network diagrams of the jihadi menace. And this has indeed been a boom academic industry since 2001; after Valdis Krebs’s seminal paper in which he mapped the relationships of the September 11 plotters, there were all kinds…
Read More The Failings of Social Network AnalysisThis row over at Tim Lambert’s, also here, reminded me of something I’ve noticed around the blogosphere. There was this, too, and also this. They’re all arguments from meta-analysis of some sort, and they’re all wrong. They’re all wrong in the same way, too; the first, David Kane’s beef with the Lancet survey of mortality…
Read More Scienciness, again