Quibans 63: Car crime

This article from the Cmabridge News could be used as an opportunity for students to comemnt on the way the data has been presented and on the conclusions that have been drawn.

The riskiest places to park your car around Cambridge, according to police stats

Vehicle crime hot spots around the city

Bottom of Form

The riskiest places to park your car in the Cambridge area have been revealed - and you may be surprised to find out where the safest spot is.

Cllr John Hipkin, who represents Castle ward on Cambridge City Council, said: “What these statistics reveal is that no part of the city or, indeed, county is immune from this sort of opportunistic crime.

“I would call upon residents to be extremely vigilant in not leaving articles of value visible in their unattended cars, especially at night.”

These were the worst hit policing areas in 2016:

1. Cambridge South

This was the worst area for vehicle crime with a total of 448 recorded incidents. The worst month was October with 57. With a population of 62,000, the area includes Cherry Hinton, Coleridge, Teversham, Romsey and edges of the southern part of the city centre.

2. Cambridge North

Second on the list with 374 vehicle crimes reported. November was the worst month at 49. The area has a population of about 60,000.

3. Huntingdon

A total of 370 vehicle crimes were reported here, with September the worst month at 44. The area has a population of almost 68,000.

4. Histon area

The Histon policing team covers a wide area and a population of almost 56,000. It suffered 315 vehicle crimes with the worst month August, with 40 reports.

5. St Neots

There were 243 vehicle crime reports with 36 in the worst month, July. It has a population of 45,000.

6. Cambourne

The policing district covers a wide area and 218 reports of vehicle crime were reported across the villages, with April the worst month with 42 reports. The policing area has a population of 50,000.

7. Sawston area

With a population of 42,000 this area had 177 vehicle crimes reported to police. The worst month was April with 24 incidents reported.

8. St Ives and Ramsey

This area suffered 168 incidents of car crime. With a population of 55,000, the worst months were October and August with 20 each.

9. Ely south

With a population of 36,600, a total of 96 car crimes were recorded. The worst month was June with 12 of the crimes reported.

10. Ely north

A total of 46 car crimes were reported here with thieves more prolific in February with 21 vehicles attacked. It has a population of 27,000.

11. Ely city centre

A total of 41 vehicle crimes were reported in the city centre. The worst month was April with 9. The population is 20,000.

12. Cambridge city centre

The city centre had the fewest vehicle crime reports at just 34. The worst months were December and November at five each. The population is about 7,000.

Comments (1):

This table might be useful:

	Crimes	Population
1. Cambridge South	448	62000
2. Cambridge North	374	60000
3. Huntingdon	370	68000
4. Histon area	315	56000
5. St Neots	243	45000
6. Cambourne	218	50000
7. Sawston area	177	42000
8. St Ives and Ramsey	168	55000
9. Ely south	96	36600
10. Ely north	46	27000
11. Ely city centre	41	20000
12. Cambridge city centre	34	7000

Comments (2):

Making a spreadsheet to show the number of crimes per 1000 residents would seem to be reasonable and sensible.  If you do this the area that jumps out as being out of place is Cambridge City Centre.  Why might this be (cars might be damaged where they are parked for the day/evening, rather than just outside someone's home, and Cambridge will have lots of visitors)?

The pmcc is 0.89, indicating a strong correlation between the number of crimes and the population of the area.

Source:  http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/most-risky-places-park-your-12961143

Quibans 62: TV Debate?

In the Guardian:

"that's an ambitious door target"!

The election is 7 weeks away.  Can Theresa May talk to 7 million people before then?





Here are some of the things my classes did:

If there are 4 people per household and she goes to 200 houses per day then she will talk to about 40,000 people over 49 days.  [Is 200 houses per day reasonable?]

Dividing 7 million by 49 gives 142,000 people per day to talk to.  This is 1.65 people per second.  (Long enough to say "hi", but not "vote for me"?  And there is no time for sleep, food, etc.)

Our school has 2000 students.  It seems plausible that you could get them all in a big hall and address them altogether.  It would be necessary to have 71 of those big meetings per day to talk to 7 million people.

142,857 people per day divided by 4 for a household, gives 35,740 houses per day.  A 5 min conversation with each would require 2796 hours in each day.  [We discussed rounding ...]


Source:  

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/20/the-snap-corbyn-rules-may-coalition-of-chaos

Quibans 61: Easter Eggs

From the Daily Mail:

How much exercise will it take to burn off your Easter egg?

Even if you're dedicated to your fitness regime and healthy eating, you might be tempted to allow some leeway for an Easter treat. But before you crack open that chocolate egg, it might be worth noting just how much exercise you'd have to do to burn off all those extra calories.

There follows a table of values, provided below.  I have added to it the weight of the Easter Eggs (taken from elsewhere in the article).

If you can't see all of the data then you could use the image that follows, or copy and paste into Word or Excel (this works best from IE rather than Chrome).

EGG	CALORIES	WALKING	RUNNING	SWIMMING	SIT-UPS	SQUATS	BURPEES	Weight (in g)
DairyMilkXL	1,758	5.9hours	3hours	2hours	5.2hours	2.1hours	3.7hours	331
CadburyCaramel	1,683	5.6hours	2.9hours	1.9hours	4.9hours	2hours	3.5hours	331
Mars	1,623	5.4hours	2.8hours	1.8hours	4.8hours	1.9hours	3.4hours	331
Flake/Wispa	1,562	5.2hours	2.7hours	1.8hours	4.6hours	1.9hours	3.3hours	295
DoubleDecker	1,549	5.2hours	2.7hours	1.7hours	4.5hours	1.9hours	3.2hours
Oreo	1,528	5.1hours	2.6hours	1.7hours	4.5hours	1.8hours	3.2hours	278
Snickers	1,429	4.8hours	2.5hours	1.6hours	4.2hours	1.7hours	3hours	274
M&M's	1,385	4.6hours	2.4hours	1.6hours	4.1hours	1.6hours	2.9hours	268
Minstrels	1,357	4.5hours	2.3hours	1.5hours	4hours	1.6hours	2.8hours	262
Aero	1,259	4.2hours	2.2hours	1.4hours	3.7hours	1.5hours	2.6hours	235
Yorkie	1,033	3.5hours	1.8hours	1.1hours	3hours	1.2hours	2.2hours	192
ToffeeCrisp	1,004	3.4hours	1.7hours	1.1hours	3hours	1.2hours	2.1hours	176
MiniEggs	980	3.3hours	1.7hours	1.1hours	2.9hours	1.2hours	2hours	187
CremeEgg	922	3.1hours	1.6hours	1hour	2.7hours	1.1hours	1.9hours	186
KitKat	943	3.1hours	1.6hours	1.1hours	2.8hours	1.1hours	2hours	180
Milkybar	886	3hours	1.5hours	1hour	2.6hours	1.1hours	1.9hours	162
Matchmaker	872	2.9hours	1.5hours	1hour	2.5hours	1.1hours	1.8hours	162
Thorntons	806	2.7hours	1.4hours	54mins	2.4hours	1hour	1.7hours	149
Smarties	680	2.3hours	1.2hours	46mins	2hours	49mins	1.4hours	122

Things to do:

What is the conversion rate between the different types of exercise?

What type of correlation would you expect between the weight of the egg and the number of calories?  Work out the pmcc.  Comment on your answer.

Answer: 

The pmcc between the weight of the egg and the number of calories is 0.993

The correlation is extremely good.  Unsurprisingly, this tells us that heavier eggs (which presumably contain more chocolate) contain more calories!

Source: 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4402510/How-exercise-burn-Easter-egg.html

Quibans 60: Two short Quibans - United Airlines / Carers

Here are two brief pieces of information from BBC articles that could be used to create short questions, or which could be explored in greater detail.

United Airlines incident: Why do airlines overbook?

Overbooking on flights happens all the time. Empty seats cost airlines money, so they offset the number of passengers who miss flights by selling too many tickets.Of the 613 million people who flew on major US carriers in 2015, 46,000 were involuntarily denied boarding, according to data from the Department of Transportation.

Question: Is that a lot of people?

Answer: It depends how you look at it.

In percentage terms, it is 0.008%

613 million people is about 10 times the population of the UK, whereas 46,000 is the population of a town.

613 million people is about a tenth of the population of the world.  46,000 is the population of 23 large secondary schools

Social care system 'beginning to collapse' as 900 carers quit every day

More than 900 adult social care workers a day quit their job in England last year, new figures reveal.  60% of those leaving a job left working in the adult social care sector altogether.  The average full-time frontline care worker earned £7.69 an hour, or £14,800 a year.

Question 1:  What percentage of the total workforce leaves that sector each year?

Question 2:  How much do you have to work to earn the stated figure?

               

Answer 1:  We need to estimate how many workers there are in total.  I predict that of the 65 million people in the country about one in 20 need some form of care.  Maybe each carer can look after 3 people?  That gives about 1 million carers. 

About 900 per day is 900 x 365 per year, which is approx. 300,000 who leave their job, and 180,000 (60% of them) leave the sector.  180,000 out of 1 million leave each year, so about 18% (approx 1/6) leave each year.

The article states:  Data gathered by the charity Skills for Care, shows that in 2015-16 there were more than 1.3 million people employed in the adult social care sector in England.

Answer 2: This is for 1925 hours of work.  I don’t know whether the newspaper has taken the hourly figure and multiplied by 38-hour weeks over 50 weeks in the year, or whether this is genuinely what most carers do.

Sources: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-39556910

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-39507859

Quibans 59: Greenpeace vs Coke

From an email sent by Greenpeace:

What questions?

Here are some ideas:

1) How many bottles per year in the UK?

2) What percentage of the global bottles are sold in the UK?

3) How much landfill would the bottles (in the UK) take up per day?

4) In Germany they charge a deposit of ¢25 (you pay an extra 25 cents when you buy a plastic bottle of drink, but if you return the empty bottle (via a Reverse Vending Machine) they give you the 25 cents back).  At the current exchange rate, what would the total deposit be on the UK bottles?  What percentage do you estimate would not be returned?

5) In 2015, 93.5% of plastic bottles were recycled in Germany.  If we managed to get a similar percentage in this country, how many bottles per day would be recycled?

Answers:

1) Using upper and lower bounds on the 16 million per day (and then multiplying by 365) I get somewhere between 5.7 billion and 6.0 billion bottles per year.

2) This means about 6% of the global bottles (and presumably the global drink sales) are in the UK.

3) If we assume the bottles are crushed to half their size and that the majority will be 500ml bottles then we could say that each bottle will take up about ¼ litre.  Multiply this by 16 million to get 4 million litres, which is 4,000 cubic metres.  Lots!

4) The students will need to look up the current exchange rate.

5) If the 16 million figure is assumed to be exact then 93.5% of that is 14.96 million.

Sources:

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/sites/files/gpuk/the-case-against-coca-cola.pdf

https://waste-management-world.com/a/bottle-deposits-responsible-for-high-pet-recycling-rate-in-germany

Quibans 58: Term-time holidays

This news story was widely reported. This one is taken from the Daily Mail because their graphic is useful:

Now end the school holiday rip-offs: Parents hit out at having to pay more for breaks after the Supreme Court rules children CAN'T miss lessons

Travel companies must stop ripping off families for breaks during school holidays following a landmark Supreme Court ruling, critics demanded last night.

Parents, heads and politicians called on ministers to ‘cap’ the price of summer getaways, which can rise by more than £1,000 at the end of term.

Firms were accused of ‘holding law-abiding parents to ransom’ after a father yesterday lost his fight against a £60 fine for an unauthorised term-time trip.

The ruling means families will face a fine or prosecution if pupils take even half a day off without permission. Parents now have little choice but to book within school holidays, leaving them at the mercy of travel firms charging sky-high prices. Lib Dem education spokesman John Pugh said ‘greedy’ firms must ‘stop exploiting hardworking parents’.

‘Travel companies are holding law-abiding parents to ransom,’ he said. ‘They should be forced to cap the cost of trips in school holidays so they are not so completely out of step with holidays a week earlier or a week later. Travel companies should not be allowed to profiteer off the back of hardworking parents.’

Nearly 150,000 families were issued penalties for taking children out of school without permission during term time in the last school year – raking in a total of almost £9million for 145 councils in England, according to The Independent.

Questions: 

Clearly, we can fill in the gaps in the image.  Are there any other questions we can ask/answer?

• If you treat the £60 as an additional cost for the price of your June holiday (which becomes £120 because the figures assume a family of two adults, two children), how much does it increase the cost of each holiday?
• What is slightly odd about the figures about the number of fines?

Answers:

The full image is below.  Note that the while the percentages can be calculated in a way that agrees with the newspaper’s figures, the other values can’t (because of rounding issues).  The upper/lower bounds could be calculated if you wish …

The £120 of fines increases the cost of each of the holidays by: 

8%

15%

3%

4%

2%

£9 million divided by 150,000 families is £60 each.  This would mean each family was fined for taking exactly one child out of school.  It seems a little surprising that none of the families had more than one child.  Presumably this has just been clumsily phrased in the article and should read “Nearly 150,000 penalties were issued for taking children out of school…”.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4388318/Now-end-school-holiday-rip-offs-Supreme-Court-ruling.html