JOURNALISTS and politicians will never understand statistics. To
prove it,
the Royal Statistical Society recently printed a few choice gaffes from
the past
year.
鈥淭his [the Chiswick flyover] is a busy motorway carrying 109 000 vehicles in
a typical 24-hour period and 4000 an hour during peak periods鈥� (Evening
Standard, 8 January 1996).
鈥淢ost women drive warily鈥攖hough research shows that women have more
accidents per mile (21.44 compared with 16.92 for men)鈥� (Daily Mirror,
9 February 1996).
Advertisement
鈥淨uite simply, not enough schools perform like the best. In most British
schools, results hover around the national average鈥� (Labour Party education
proposals, The Observer, 10 October 1995).
鈥淪ince 1979 we have recruited an extra 16 000 policemen, 500 in the
last year
alone鈥� (John Major, party conference speech, The Times, 13 October
1995).
THE BRITISH government is encouraging businesses to move to a
new country
where labour is cheap.
Sounds unpatriotic? Not at all. This is happening in Canada, where radio
advertisements are encouraging companies to relocate to a country with an
鈥渆ducated workforce鈥� and 鈥渓ow operating costs鈥�.
What country could that be? Why, Britain, of course.
AH, THOSE good old days of space exploration, when there was
money to splash
around on anything the developers fancied, and rockets had not yet got into the
habit of blowing up in mid-air . . .
NASA, in a fit of nostalgia for the glorious past, has taken to naming new
projects after the pioneers of yesteryear. The latest example is 鈥淐lipper
Graham,鈥� the former DC-XA experimental rocket, a single-stage rocket
designed to
reach orbit, then land on its tail when it returns to Earth.
The name honours the recently deceased Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham
who, in the words of NASA administrator Dan Goldin, 鈥渃hampioned the promise of
fully reusable single-stage-to-orbit vehicles at a time when the majority
of the
space community were sceptics. We鈥檙e doing this in commemoration of his vision
in opening the space frontier.鈥�
What NASA doesn鈥檛 mention is another programme Graham championed, a proposal
called 鈥淗igh Frontier鈥� that in the early 1980s suggested spending billions
on an
orbiting anti-missile defence system. It was the conceptual ancestor of the
ill-fated Star Wars programme, which really did spend billions鈥攐n paper
studies of an antimissile defence system.
READERS have been telling us of ways to get a name and address from a
telephone number that are easier than ploughing through the paper directories
for the whole of London, a method we reported on here on 8 June. Some of the
shortcut scams are dishonest, and probably illegal, so we are not going to pass
them on. Suffice it to say they can all be foiled by people refusing to
give out
names and addresses when asked to do so, no matter how legitimate the request
appears.
The cellphone company Orange has plugged another loophole that many
people do
not even know exists. Orange noted that some service companies are now overly
proud of their computer billing systems. When customers call in with a
query and
give a phone number, the office clerk just loves to prove how efficient their
system is by keying it in and telling the caller their name, address and
postcode. It shouldn鈥檛 happen, says Orange, but humans make errors.
So subscribers to the Orange cellphone service can now pick a password. This
is entered into the billing computer alongside the name and address
information.
Callers are only told who they are if they first give their password. And
it has
to be something more imaginative than `Lemon鈥�.
THOM Geier writes to tell us about the fond memories evoked by
our report on
the bingo game inspired by Al Gore鈥檚 commencement address in Boston (29 June).
At Yale, back in the late 1980s, Geier and his friends would occasionally
play a
game called 鈥渟ection bingo鈥� during the weekly discussion sections of
lecture classes.
Players would concoct their own bingo boards, filling squares with buzzword
phrases they thought might be raised by their pretentious peers: 鈥渟emiotics,鈥�
鈥渟ubaltern,鈥� and 鈥渄econstruct鈥� were all popular squares. The real fun came when
the winning player completed a row of academic buzzword phrases. The
winner then
had to raise his or her hand and be the next to speak in class. The challenge:
to offer a comment using all five of the phrases in the winning row.
Happily, Geier reports, the professor was usually none the wiser.
ACCORDING to the sides of their vans, Dyno-Rod, the
drain-clearers, appear to
have invented a 鈥渓iquid laser鈥�. This sounds like an exciting breakthrough, with
potential applications ranging from communications networks through the
drainage
system to shooting down nuclear missiles with raw sewage. Nevertheless,
Feedback
will be sorry if this development heralds the end of the noble
sludge-gulper.
HERE is another story about computer howlers that is currently
circulating on
the Net and popping up on numerous humour sites.
Caller: 鈥淗ello, is this Tech Support?鈥�
Tech Rep: 鈥淵es, it is. How may I help you?鈥�
Caller: 鈥淭he cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty
period. How do I go about getting that fixed?鈥�
Tech Rep: 鈥淚鈥檓 sorry, but did you say a cup holder?鈥�
Caller: 鈥淵es, it鈥檚 attached to the front of my computer.鈥�
Tech Rep: 鈥淧lease excuse me if I seem stumped, it鈥檚 because I am. Did you
receive this as part of a promotional at a trade show? How did you get this cup
holder? Does it have any trademark on it?鈥�
Caller: 鈥淚t came with my computer, I don鈥檛 know anything about a
promotional.
It just has `4X鈥� on it.鈥�
At this point the Tech Rep suddenly understood. The caller had been
using the
load drawer of the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder, and snapped it off.
SEVERAL readers with an in-depth knowledge of men鈥檚 urinals have
written in
protesting about our report on the toilets at Amsterdam鈥檚 Schiphol Airport (29
June). We said that the urinals there have an image of a bluebottle printed on
the inside of the urinal bowl.
It wasn鈥檛 a bluebottle, readers are insisting. It was a bee.
Apparently, the manufacturers of Victorian public conveniences had a
rollicking sense of humour. They routinely printed the image of a bee in the
urinals they made, and the Dutch must have emulated them at the airport.
Why a bee? Because of the Latin name: Apis. Ho, ho, ho . . .