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So who stepped out of line this time? I wish I could blame it on Rupert Murdoch but this time round it was the Sydney Morning Herald. In particular, one Edmund Tadros who signed onto a traineeship some handfull of years ago. I guess we have to offer some forgiveness to the young and inexperienced but then again, you would think Fairfax would be able to aford a few proofreaders. Doubly, so for the Sydney Morning Herald that likes to pretend they support a slightly more intelligent class of readers.
Lets get down to some maths... I know you are hanging to ;-)
the fact that 70 per cent of all liquor is consumed outside a licensed premises
OK, this gives us enough information to form a "null hypothesis". Suppose a (very large) drawer was filled with socks and we know that 70 percent of those socks are blue and 30 percent are red. If we randomly draw 100 socks out of the drawer, what would be the expected breakdown of blue/red in the sample?
Common sense dictates that we expect a 70 / 30 split.
Let's take a step further and say that our "null hypothesis" is that alcohol has no effect on crime whatsoever. The implication is that criminality and alcohol consumption are unrelated variables and thus by sampling criminals we would effectively have a random sample of the population (identical to the sock problem above).
Right... so the "null hypothesis" predicts that 70% of criminals would have taken their last drink outside licensed premises and 30% of criminals would have taken their last drink inside licensed premises and 30% of criminals.
Let's compare the predictions of the "null hypothesis" with the actual measured values:
They show 37 per cent of people involved in a crime were last drinking at home, compared with 35 per cent drinking in licensed premises. The remainder were drinking in a public place (12 per cent); at cafes, restaurants and special events (2 per cent); and not known (15 per cent).
Ignoring the roundoff error in these figures (i.e. the total is 101%), we have a situation where 35% were drinking inside licensed premises, 51% were drinking outside licensed premises and 15% could have been either (presumably they either refused to answer the question or never got asked the question or were shot dead or something).
There's no useful material for comparison in the "unknown" category (because we don't know anything about them) so factor that out and only pay attention to the measurements that we do actually know something about (not an unreasonable idea).
This results in: 59.3% outside licensed premises and 40.7% inside licensed premises (considering only the known cases).
This 59.3 / 40.7 split can be compared directly to the "null hypothesis" and sure enough we see a big 10.7% bias. That's enough to give a strong suggestion that the "null hypothesis" is wrong -- thus, alcohol consumption does have some relation to criminal behaviour. Here's the kicker, note which side the 10.7% is biased towards! Indeed, the number of criminals who drink inside licensed premises is 10.7% higher than the "null hypothesis" would predict.
First paragraph of the article:
DRINKING at home is more likely to lead to crime than drinking in licensed premises, confidential police figures show.
The stats quoted in the article prove categorically that the conclusion drawn by Edmund Tadros and the SMH is complete crap. Indeed, the exact opposite is the case.
Of course, there are lots of presumptions made in the figures anyhow, presuming that criminals would bother telling the truth about where they last had a drink and the obviously missing measure of how long ago it was when they were drinking and how drunk they were. With any social science you get an imprecise picture -- there's always scrappy unknown variables and factors beyond control; this isn't physics. It's just so annoying that simple statistical reasoning is so totally beyond the ken of our newspapers.
What's the point of even bothering to count these numbers when people are going to completely balls up the analysis? They put all of this effort into Freedom of Information just so they can make a mess of what they get back -- how useless is that?
*SIGH* What can you do?
Here's another tech-article about iTunes and the ongoing issue of the music industry. Piracy is (as everyone knows) the act of commandeering a ship by force of arms on the high seas. Copyright infringement is the act of copying an artistic work without permission of the creator of that work... well actually, the creator isn't as important as the copyright holder and usually they are not the same person (for a host of legal and financial reasons). On the whole, a good article except for a few points:
It provides music in a format that can be used across many digital devices at a reasonable price.
Many digital devices, but only the ones made by Apple.
Indeed this was one of the things that started the big barney in France because its a classic case of proprietary lock-in that is never good for consumers. Ultimately, consumers get the best value from public standards like OGG files and ordinary undongled CD-AUDIO media.
Best comment is this:
You don't have to go far to find somebody singing/rapping/drumming/guitarifying, there are plenty of s**t-hot musicians in this world that are not smiling for the cameras or even touring their state for modest gains. Buskers, live jazz, home recordings, this is all enjoyable music. Music is an act of expression that has been with us for centuries, and is not comparable to other entertainments of the 20th and 21st century. My point is, the supply of music far outweighs demand, even though demand is large. If all record companies folded tomorrow, music would still exist.
Which is why the best way to kill the overpriced, greedy record companies is to buy from their competition, the independent producers. For example, the excellent online store Magnatune or their sister-store CD Baby where you can search through heaps or artists (some good, some not so good, but that's a matter of taste and half the adventure). You can download samples for free (and without DRM) and you can either buy downloadable electronic formats or get physical CD-AUDIO media through the post.
Here's one of my recommended best-buys. Getting this quality music for such a low price (and you can try before you buy), just shows that the mainstream record companies are full of it when they say how hard things are in this digital age.
Then there's plenty of other bands that simply run their own website. They give gig details, keep their fans up to date and sell stuff direct. Kick out the useless middleman. With more and more people writing their own web pages about the things they like, it gets easy to find people who link to cool bands.
Here's another cool band, the backsliders, but they don't sell stuff online through their website (they use HMV store instead, more mainstream and look at the higher prices compared with CD-Baby, almost double the cost of Louis King, for pretty similar music). They do sell CDs at their live gigs, for a bit less than what HMV sells for (at least they used to do, maybe they are all "signed up" now and can't sell cheap CDs anymore). I'm guessing that when you buy CDs at live gigs you get more money going to the artists (dunno if this is really true).
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