Statistics

Saturday

The Spectator

Barometer | 11 December 2010

Model towns Celebration, the town in Florida founded by Disney in the 1990s, has suffered its first murder and a suicide. Model towns have had mixed fortunes. —New Lanark, near Glasgow, was built by industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen as a model for utopian socialism. It narrowly escaped demolition in the 1960s and is now a World Heritage Site. —Chandigargh, India, was instituted by Nehru after partition as the modern face of India. It now has the highest per capita income of any Indian city, but it also has rising crime, recording 19 murders in 2007. —Brasilia, built in the isolated centre of Brazil between 1957 and 1960, survived

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

A new Brownie Buster

Michael Scholar: hero. The newish head of the UK statistics authority is finally coming to the aid of the statistics nerds who have been protesting that Gordon Brown makes things up. Normally, the ONS do not censure Mr Brown when he misrepresents their data: that’s not their job. But as head of the Statistics Authority, Sir Michael has – wonderfully, inspirationally – written an open letter to the Prime Minister telling him not to lie. Well, not quite in so few words, but this is the plain implication. What is significant is that Sir Michael is using his job to protect  the integrity of statistics in Britain. One of my