Compare Stuff News » Topical

Obligatory UK election charts

Bob — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 10:43:51 +0000

It’s a shame compare-stuff doesn’t let you compare three things, but never mind. Here we go with “Labour Party” vs. “Conservative Party” compared over recent years:

And here’s “Labour Party” vs “Liberal Democrats”:

And to complete the circle “Conservative Party” vs “Liberal Democrats”:

And finally, some personal qualities compared between the two contenders for Gordon Brown’s job:

The meteoric rise of mephedrone

Bob — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:09:51 +0000

Let’s start by comparing some old-school drugs, cannabis and cocaine, and their relative occurrence on web pages containing the numbers 2004 to 2010. In other words, let’s see how their web-popularity has changed in recent years:

They are almost identical. Let’s try another two, MDMA and heroin:

Again they are very similar, but with a slight tailing off for MDMA (harder to make in the UK since 2008).

Now let’s try mephedrone and cocaine. The difference is massive.

Meanwhile, it is almost completely absent from the medical literature.

Head to head: EU-based airlines

Bob — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:35:27 +0000

With Ryanair in the news “blaming high passenger taxes and rising charges” for its cutbacks at London Stansted, you might be thinking “Hang on a minute, but Ryanair are the masters of hidden taxes and charges!”. Well let’s see who is most moaned about on the web in this respect:

Surprisingly, BMI Baby tops the charts for “hidden charges”, with Ryanair and EasyJet coming in a close second and third. The results for “stranded” aren’t as you might expect. It seems that Lufthansa had a well reported strike which left thousands stranded. I doubt the unions are very strong at Ryanair… I guess you want to try the phrase “I was stranded”, that should reflect customer opinion better.

Now let’s try “unreliable” vs “reliable”:

Lufthansa seem to be most often reported as reliable on the web, with Air France most unreliable. KLM are second highest in reliability and unreliability. That’s quite impressive.

Now how about not getting your bags at the carousel?

Alitalia seem to be best at losing your bags!

Even dead people have lawyers

Bob — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:06:00 +0000

However, none of the following graphs will make any accusations of misconduct or mental instability whatsoever.

To mark the passing of the King of Pop, I have introduced a new category for the X-axis: “famous dead people”. By this I mean famous people who died a bit too soon.

Recently deceased Michael Jackson won’t be remembered for his musical talents, at least in comparison to Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley.

Surprisingly, the People’s Princess didn’t score highly for pretty or dumb, instead the honours go to Buddy and Michael:

Finally, let’s get even more topical and bring Wimbledon into the frame (I guess that should be ‘court’). Let’s compare Mr Jackson and Andy Murray’s personal characteristics:

You’ll need to click on the image to get vaguely legible X-axis labels:

So what do we get (on 26 June 2009)? MJ is polite but not courageous and Murray is confident but not very reliable.

Punch Bob Crow

Bob — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:56:52 +0000

Well I’ll add a token graph but most of you probably want to punch Bob Crow for ruining your day (if you live or work in London, UK).

The graph below sums him up perfectly. Bob Crow is a hostile, pessimistic ~@^&er. Click on the plot to get a (slightly more) legible version!

More flu graphs

Bob — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:28:02 +0000

Well this swine flu really caught us by surprise didn’t it? After months of worry about avian flu a while back, now it’s really happening, but coming from the other side of the planet.

Here’s a plot of “swine flu” and “avian flu” vs. recent months:

And for a longer perspective:

Google Flu Trends

Bob — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:50:53 +0000

Well here’s a nice bit of search engine trend news: search engine query traffic detects outbreaks, and there’s accompanying paper in Nature. Can we compete with that? Not really, but here’s a plot anyway:

This shows a peak for January which agrees with the Google and CDC data. However, this compare-stuff query is on all pages in all countries. We could narrow it down a bit to “flu” and “cough” along with “New York” on a web page:

and you get similar results.

At this point it’s worth pointing out that Technorati’s charts are looking good these days, although they take a long time to generate. Here’s one for flu vs. cough. Blogs are probably better than the web as a whole for this kind of analysis, but there won’t be a blog version of Compare Stuff coming any time soon, sorry!

If you’re into all this kind of stuff, check out the legacy PubMed version of Compare Stuff – where you can plot the relative amount of influenza research in different countries for example.

The slow rise of the e-book.

Bob — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:51:36 +0000

In the week that Amazon announce their new Kindle 2 ebook reader, let’s look to see how ebooks are doing vs. their more established paper counterparts:

ebook vs. paperback

ebook vs. hardback

No surprises there really.

Pollution is prime cause of torture…

Bob — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 11:29:37 +0000

Not really, it’s just a catchy headline to point out the problem with correlation being confused with causation. Here’s a plot I just made with the current sporting event (better not name it in case I get sued) in mind:

There’s a strong correlation between smog and human rights abuses, but we can’t say that one is causing the other!

Cripes, Boris is ahead!

Bob — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:18:07 +0000

Forget the US elections, things are hotting up in London’s mayoral race. Any PR is good PR for Boris Johnson it seems. His web visibility is rising faster than Ken Livingstone’s…

We can add “mayor” to the search terms if we like, the picture is the same.

It’s interesting to drill down into their personal qualities (please click – font too small to show inline with this article). There are big differences between the candidates compared to Hillary and Barack and they seem to make sense to me – Ken more thoughtful and hostile, Boris more polite, loyal, honest, generous and intelligent. Well they nearly all make sense.

And finally, their ties (in webspace) to different aspects of society are very different:

Livingstone is ahead on pollution and recreation, but Johnson leads on pretty much everything else. I personally am very scared of what the polls are saying. I know Ken has probably been in too long now, but come on, could Boris Johnson seriously do this job???