Interesting Links for 31-07-2013

[andrewducker]

• Declaring the death of the Final Fantasy series
  (tags: games )
• The pace of modern life: UK v Denmark
  (tags: uk life society denmark )
• BBC Trust admits a key programme on Welfare State was biased
  (tags: politics uk welfare bbc )
• Psychotherapy via internet as good as if not better than face-to-face consultations
  (tags: psychology internet therapy )

Comments

[drdoug]

The flags thing seems well bogus to me on a quick scan - no way is infant and child mortality in Burkina Faso that high, nor malaria or HIV prevalence in Angola. Which makes me suspect the other implied numbers are made up too.

[andrewducker]

Oh good, I was hoping someone would fact check that for me!

(The data is 8 years old, but even so...)

[erindubitably]

Yeah, I don't get how those flags are supposed to represent those figures. this says about 420,000 people in Angola have HIV/AIDS*, this says 3.5 million people have malaria, and various pages on the internet debate how much 'access to health care' people have but most place the figure around 40%. So how does that work in terms of the colouration of the flags?

*a far smaller percentage than a lot of surrounding countries, making it surprising that they chose Angola.

[steer]

I don't think the EU 15 oil production is that bad either. The best report I can find is that in 2005 it was 20% home produced 80% import for the EU15 nations -- that's the EU 15 flag. The flag looks more like 99%.

The Burkina Faso thing (good spot on the flag) must be orders of magnitude out... the life expectancy at birth by the CIA world factbook is 55 years. 78.3 infants die before age 1 per 1000 births. If only 5% of children made it past 3 as that flag indicates, you'd need evey woman to have 40 children just to sustain the population (averaging 1 surviving male 1 surviving female child to reproductive age).

[drdoug]

[steer]

Red is proportion of awesomeness I accord to Doug, green is proportion of awesomeness I accord to creator of original flags. :-)

No criticism intended of Mr Ducker for bringing said flags to our attention -- though I start to suspect he's using the "interesting links" as a fact-checking service. :-)

[andrewducker]

It's more that I don't fact-check all of them before posting, on the assumption that someone will leap in and do it if I'm too busy :->

[steer]

Heh... that's the best approach. And if it was all true and accurate we'd have no fun snarking about it.

[drdoug]

Yeah. If it were "Uncontroversial and thoroughly fact-checked links" they would be a lot less interesting and the comments would be much less fun.

[atreic]

Oh god, yes, these flags have been debunked over and over. They're very _cute_, just not very _right_. But then they were designed for an _ad campaign_

http://www.blackandwhitecat.org/2008/02/25/meet-the-world-and-totally-misrepresent-it/

[andrewducker]

Thank you!

[drdoug]

Thank you so much for posting that - saved me losing half a day to duplicating their work :-)

I'd have also mentioned that Colombia's biggest legal exports are crude oil and coal, way ahead of coffee and bananas, with gold well up in the running too. (See eg http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_map_export_2009_Colombia.jpeg) And that almost certainly there were many Americans in favour of invading Iraq despite not being able to locate it on a map.

I probably wouldn't have been able to resist titling it "Vexing Vacuous Vexillology", so the world dodged a bullet there.