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December 02, 2005
Expect the unexpected
Everyone thinks
Google (
www.google.com) is the no. 1 site on the Web, but the surprise, surprise of Web rankings is that
Yahoo! (
www.yahoo.com) is. Yahoo! has really lifted its game, and it offers a lot of good destinations, not least its comparison shopping sites which take the legwork out of consuming.
MSN (
www.msn.com) is no. 2, and Google a mere third.
Alexa (
www.alexa.com) has rankings. What else is in the top ten?
eBay (
www.ebay.com) is for starters.
Amazon (
www.amazon.com) is only 11.
Blogger (
www.blogger.com) is no. 30, but
mySpace (
www.myspace.com) is 14, way ahead of
CNN (
cnn.com) and the
BBC (
news.bbc.co.uk). People obviously value personal news and contacts over hard news. See Alexa's long, long list of who's where at
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none.
Posted by belinda at
09:02 AM
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December 01, 2005
Crowded house
Another day, another statistic. The
Australian Bureau of Statistics (
http://www.abs.gov.au/) has published
projections of Australia's population as a whole by age and sex from 2004 up to 2101, and projections for states, territories and capital cities up till 2051. The publication,
Population Projections, Australia, can be found
here. For future reference, it is ABS catalogue number 3222.0.
Posted by belinda at
09:21 AM
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November 01, 2005
Across the Tasman
Statisphere is
New Zealand's official statistics portal. See it at
http://www.statisphere.govt.nz/ for all your Kiwi counts.
Posted by belinda at
11:57 AM
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May 03, 2005
Some good news
Just out is
The State of World's Population 2004 (
http://www.unfpa.org/swp/swpmain.htm). It includes both long term and current trends affecting the world's population. According to the summary, ten years after the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, "
the quality and reach of family planning programmes have improved, safe motherhood and HIV prevention efforts are being scaled up, and governments embrace the ICPD Programme of Action as an essential blueprint for realizing development goals."
Posted by belinda at
04:27 PM
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April 19, 2005
Real lives
While we worry about what computer game addiction and childhood obesity are doing to Australian kids, many, many children around the world are struggling simply to stay alive. The three big threats to millions of children are poverty, armed conflict and HIV/AIDS. Same as last year, and then there was the tsunami.
The State of the World's Children 2005 (
http://www.unicef.org/publications/index_24432.html) has the lowdown on the problems and what is being done to deal with them. Answer: not enough.
Around 10. 6 million kids died last year before reaching their fifth birthday. The report has a statistical tool, photographs and real life stories, not all of them grim.
Posted by belinda at
04:00 PM
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April 05, 2005
Numbers game
Colombia has the most murders per capita, with Russia no. 5. Australia isn't in the top 25 - hey, sometimes it's good to be last. We're 19th in the richest list, with the US at no. 2. We're no. 3 in most educated, and the US is a mere 14th - weak stuff. Bangladesh is the most corrupt and South Africa the most trigger happy. Plan your travel accordingly. These stats and more on hundreds of topics are at
NationMaster http://www.nationmaster.com/. Sources for the figures include the CIA World Factbook, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Resources Institute, UNESCO, UNICEF and the OECD. It's comprehensive, graphic and regularly updated. Good stuff.
Posted by belinda at
02:47 PM
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December 24, 2004
Big numbers
It's 254 pages long -- probably to accommodate big numbers such as
8.97 billion -- the number of humans expected to be around in 2300. The UN's new
World Population to 2300 report (
www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf) provides population projections to 2300 for the world, its nations, and its major areas. According to the report: "
Three African regions -- Eastern Africa, Middle Africa, and Western Africa -- will grow unusually fast. " The document has lots of tables, figures and projections.
Posted by belinda at
09:44 AM
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October 27, 2004
Bottom line
The
World Bank's World Development Report 2005 is just out at
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDR2005/Resources/complete_report.pdf. It's all about making money this year since its subtitle is
A better investment climate for everyone. Why the focus on investment? According to the Report,
the investment climate is central to growth and poverty reduction, and it urges governments around the world to
tackle costs, risks, and barriers to competition. The Report draws on surveys of more than 30,000 firms in 53 developing countries, but also includes country case studies sponsored by the World Bank itself.
Posted by belinda at
12:55 PM
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June 01, 2004
How low can they go?
With
East Timor joining the group, there are
now 50 countries officially termed "least developed" by the United Nations. Countries qualify for the tag if they have "
very low per capita incomes, weak human resources and high economic vulnerability to shocks". Only 7 of the world's least developed countries - Angola, Bhutan, Chad, Eritrea, Mozambique, Rwanda and Sudan - achieved the 7% growth target set under the Programme of Action for LDCs for the Decade 2001-2010. Rising debt burdens, plummeting commodity prices, civil conflicts and HIV/AIDS have all taken their toll on such countries. Things may only get worse, unless international trade can work to pull these countries out of poverty. The data comes from the
2004 Least Developed Countries Report published by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
The full report is available online for download, chapter by chapter. Reports back to 1996 are available for comparison.
Posted by belinda at
10:36 AM
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May 28, 2004
The problems with polling
According to a new
Research Note by the Federal
Parliamentary Library,
opinion polls have become '
staples of contemporary political reporting'. Yet, often, too few details are published, which means people get the wrong impression of results. For example, '
The margin of error (or sampling error) is an oft-overlooked part of polling that can have significant effects on the utility of results, especially those that are within a few percentage points of one another.' Why is this so? And why do polls fail to predict election results accurately? For a range of reasons - see the full
Note,
Interpreting opinion polls: some essential details, for the lowdown. It's at
www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rn/2003-04/04rn52.pdf.
Posted by belinda at
10:16 AM
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April 20, 2004
Local info
ABS (
www.abs.gov.au/) has released the
National Regional Profile for anyone who wants local data on an area. This could be an area as small as a suburb in a city, or a town, or could be Australia as a whole or a state as a whole. The profile consists of a standard set of social and economic data for a place and covers one year only. So if you want to know how many people live in a place, how many are employed or out of a job, how many births occurred, this is the place for it.
Posted by belinda at
04:23 PM
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April 08, 2004
How are we doing?
The
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has just released a long statistical document of "
Indicators of Australia’s welfare" - which covers not government handouts, but
welfare in the broadest sense of healthy living, autonomy and participation, and social cohesion. The report finds that while Australian health is generally good, "
Certain population groups experience disadvantage across multiple areas. In particular, compared with other Australians, Indigenous Australians have much poorer health, higher rates of injury-related deaths, are less likely to own their own home and more likely to be homeless. Similar constellations of disadvantage are experienced by Australians of low socioeconomic status." Read the full report at
http://www.aihw.gov.au/publications/workingpapers/wwp42.pdf.
Posted by belinda at
03:59 PM
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March 01, 2004
Number cruncher
Anyone doing surveys should find the
Sample Size Calculator handy. You can use it to determine how many people you need to interview in order to get results that reflect your target population to the level of precision you need. You can also calculate the level of precision in any existing samples. You can opt for different confidence levels. It's at
http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm and terms such as
confidence interval and
confidence level are explained in plain English.
Posted by belinda at
12:46 PM
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December 05, 2003
New developments
the World Bank's latest
World Development Report 2004 is just out and well worth a look for
all kinds of statistics on how the poor are faring in the global economy. Not very well, it seems. The report says that poor people need greater access to education, water, sanitation, and electricity. These reports are not just dry accounts of statistics and figures, but are filled with human stories. See for yourself at
http://econ.worldbank.org/wdr/wdr2004/
Posted by belinda at
03:28 PM
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October 31, 2003
OECD figures
The
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (
http://www.oecd.org/) has recently released the 2003 edition of
OECD in Figures: Statistics on the Member Countries. It's at
http://www1.oecd.org/publications/e-book/0103061E.PDF. The figures will help you compare how OECD countries are faring against each other. The first section includes statistical tables on economic growth, employment and unemployment, trade, development aid, R&D, science and technology, education and others. The second section has graphs on health spending, road fatalities, life expectancy, and investment flows as well as GDP and carbon dioxide emissions.
Posted by belinda at
03:21 PM
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September 17, 2003
Unmediated numbers
If you are interested in American polling, try looking at the
Gallup Brain, a searchable database of more than 60 years of public opinion polling in the US. You can click on each decade. It includes answers to more than 125,000 questions, and responses from more than 3.5 million people interviewed for
Gallup Polls since 1935. It's at
http://brain.gallup.com/.
Posted by belinda at
03:54 PM
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July 02, 2003
Women in universities - equal or not?
"
How Far Have We Come? Gender Disparities in the Australian Higher Education System" is a new eBrief, compiled by the Federal
Parliamentary Library, that illustrates that
significant gender differences remain in higher education, despite recent gains in women's participation in universities. The full Brief is at
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/cib/2002-03/03cib31.pdf.
Posted by belinda at
01:12 PM
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June 25, 2003
One in five Aussies is high
According to
Clive Hamilton of the
Australia Institute (
http://www.tai.org.au/), one in five Australians use drugs to improve their mental well-being. Not just prescription drugs either - alcohol and illicit drugs are also regularly used as psychological props. Read the full report,
Comfortable, relaxed and drugged to the eye-balls, which he compiled from unpublished ABS (
http://www.abs.gov.au/) data, at
http://www.tai.org.au/Publications_Files/Papers&Sub_Files/drug%20use.pdf
Posted by belinda at
02:53 PM
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May 16, 2003
Comparing countries
Bill D. has alerted me to another useful site today called
NationMaster (
http://www.nationmaster.com/). The site uses data drawn from the
CIA World Factbook 2002 and you can use the data interactively to create comparisons on a range of criteria. The displays are not as attractive as those on the ill-fated
your-nation (
http://www.your-nation.com/) but your-nation is no longer being updated (their data is from 1998) so this will have to be the substitute. Anyone wanting the CIA World Factbook directly can see it at
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/.
Posted by belinda at
10:04 AM
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April 11, 2003
Report card
The
IMF has just released its
World Economic Outlook, April 2003, at
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2003/01/index.htm. It's had some coverage in the news so get the full story. For our region, there is a section entitled:
Asia-Pacific Region: Has Growth Become Less Reliant on Global Developments? . Maybe more importantly, the site also provides access to the
Global Financial Stability Report, released in March, at
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/gfsr/2003/01/index.htm.
Posted by journoz at
02:35 PM
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April 03, 2003
How would the US rate?
The
US State Department has released the
2002 Country Reports on human rights practices. See them at
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2002/. Areas covered include Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Eurasia, the Near East and North Africa, South Asia and Western Hemisphere. The US is not covered. However,
Human Rights Watch's
2003 World Report is at
http://www.hrw.org/wr2k3/.
Posted by journoz at
10:58 AM
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January 29, 2003
European analyses and facts
Europe is getting bigger and bigger all the time. Find out about 28 European countries, including countries such as Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan
and others at Transition Online's Knowledge Network at
http://knowledgenet.tol.cz/.
Posted by journoz at
08:49 AM
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