Let’s count our losses
CWHAT IF CAR THEFT NUMBERS WERE ENTERED ON A DAILY GRAPH ... IT’S AN EPIDEMIC
all me a nerd, but I’ve always been fascinated by devices that record things.
Back when cars had odometers that clicked over, I was beyond excited when my third-hand car finally reached 99,999km, then reverted to “zero” because it only had five dials. Win!
Barometers, rain gauges, tide clocks, bathroom scales, creek markers and thermometers have always fascinated me. Numbers, clusters, trends and statistics, I can’t be the only person who has ruled columns in little notebooks and filled them with Very Important Figures, surely?
Advances in technology have seen, for the most part, handwritten logbooks replaced with impressive digital modelling, where data is presented in ways that make old-school graphs look positively cartoonish.
At the onset of COVID-19, I watched the Johns Hopkins University global case count in horrified fascination as infection numbers clocked over, and the red bubbles of spread ballooned.
Once the bubbles became a blanket, I switched my attention to The Economist’s daily graph which predicts who is most likely to win the upcoming US election.
Like the COVID-19 map, the data is somehow both surprising and unsurprising — surprising it’s not a shoo-in for Biden, unsurprising that the Johns Hopkins infection bubbles so closely align with the Trumpsupporting states.
But while there are many visual aids to track global events, there is a local issue that could do with the efforts of a local computer graphics guru.
We already have a handy Twitter account that posts the daily capacity of the Ross River Dam. To say I wasn’t glued to this leading up to the floods would be an understatement, it is somewhat helpful now to understand the dam has more than 100 per cent capacity, because when it reached 214 per cent I nearly lost my mind.
But what if car theft numbers were entered on a daily graph, so that these singular occurrences viewed as weekly, monthly and annual totals could be seen for what they are, an epidemic of plague proportions?
Back when Queensland’s road toll was reaching new, unheard-of heights, the number of lives lost was printed on the front page of the Townsville Bulletin every day.
The number rose, and rose, but with increased awareness, it finally slowed.
So maybe we could do the same with stolen cars.
Seeing the running total from our region won’t stop the thefts, but it might send a more direct message to those responsible for finding a solution.
The QPS site features spreadsheets divided into crime categories, but no totals; and as more and more friends find themselves car-less, let’s see these numbers, and the year-to-date total.
Meanwhile, as contemporary record-keeping evolves, you have to hand it to Townsville for its home-grown data of a different kind.
Tried buying toilet paper or pasta this week?
Reports of a local COVID-19 case created a supermarket panicbuying frenzy.
No need for official alerts, our “pasta and loo paper’’ system is as finely tuned as any barometer.
But like cyclone watch, it’s hit or miss; and since the “Townsville’’ case was actually in Brisbane, can we please go back to un-panicked buying?
There’s enough for everyone, just trust the data.