"Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics": the "death of paper money"?

UPDATE: The BRC 'Key Results' table (pictured below) emerged as correct following a conversation with a BRC source who agreed their message lacked clarity. As such, please take the below with a pinch of salt. 

Last week a number of media outlets reported a BRC (British Retail Consortium) story on "the death of paper money" (also here) or how "UK shoppers use less cash" (also here). 

The key point, as summarised by the FT: 

[Cash] use has declined as a percentage both of number of transactions, which was down 6.7 per cent, and total money spent, which was down 9.7 per cent.

and an infographic from City A.M.: 

At the source, the BRC Cost of Payment Collection Survey 2012, lists the following: 

accompanied by the following text: 

Cash is still, however, the dominant payment method by number of transactions, accounting for 54.4 per cent of transactions. However, even this is down by 6.7 per cent during 2012 (2011: 58.3 per cent).

The value of cash used by customers to make payments, whilst accounting for 28.9 per cent of total turnover, is down from 32.0 per cent last year. Cash turnover is down by almost 10.0 per cent year on year.

and the following tables

     (1) % of turnover by number of transactions

    (2) % of turnover by value

Focusing on the top two metrics, by now you may have spotted that cash decline as both a proportion of the total number of transactions recorded by the survey and a proportion of total money spent, was calculated as such: 

(1) 6.7% is the difference between 54.35% and 58.27% (3.92%), over 58.27 (0.067273%) times 100 or 6.727%%; and

(2) 9.7% is the difference between 28.93% and 32.03% (3.1%), over 32.03 (0.096784%) times 100 or 9.678%%. 

While correct, this approach is potentially misleading, especially when representing thousands of millions of transactions and billions of pounds.

Using absolute yearly figures rather than percentages (i.e. yearly percentages of cash times total turnover) the results show a different picture: 65.58m fewer cash transactions in 2012 than in 2011 and £4.36bn less cash used at retailers. As such, cash use has declined by 1.2% when accounting for transactions and by 7.6% when accounting for payment method, making the death of paper money perhaps less imminent to British consumers, at least for the time being. 

Top 5 Visualisations that Made History

To show the extent to which data visualisations empower people to not only understand but also take charge and transform their environments, Tableau created the following presentation. It features five historical visualisations that got us thinking a bit differently about otherwise embedded paradigms.

The 5 most influential data visualizations of all time from Tableau Software

FoI Data Mapped: Primary Care Trusts delay response to cosmetic surgery query

How much does the NHS spend on cosmetic surgery? Which procedures are financed more often? Which are the most expensive? Which body parts get "adjusted" on the NHS the most?

Eight in ten Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) in England failed to share such cosmetic surgery data requested under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. Just 15.33% of the PCTs in the country  have responded fully* and in a timely manner to an FoI asking for the number and cost of cosmetic operations they fund.

Over 150 NHS individual PCTs and clusters were asked in January for any "information" held on "hospital episodes of cosmetic surgery" including, but not restricted to, the following:

•  types of cosmetic operations that were conducted;
•  details of reasons for carrying out the operations;
•  any details on the operations;
•  a breakdown of costs;
•  a list of hospitals they were carried out in. 

Five months on, most failed to provide this data.

According to the NHS website, cosmetic procedures are rarely funded. Coupled with the "clinical reasons" requirement (that any individual seeking such an operation would need to fulfil) it made for the most common explanation provided by PCTs in their replies.

As such, since cosmetic surgery is funded only in exceptional circumstances and for clinical reasons (never cosmetic), the FoIs came back saying that the NHS doesn't "routinely" pay for such procedures and in some instances an additional internal policy outlining the conditions needed to get such a procedure on the NHS was attached.

The map below shows which PCTs did provide the required data, in a reasonably accessible format and in a timely manner. You can access the Fusion Table behind it here. Please note that a few PCTs are not represented on the map as no kml files were found for their boundaries. If you come across these, please contact me so we can update the map. The full record of complete (Y) and incomplete (N) responses can be viewed in this spreadsheet (draft).

Further posts will outline more results from this data.
As always ideas, feedback and comments are much appreciated.





*i.e. Provided reasonably acessible figures (data)

Comment: We're surrounded by data, but is it a new field or just a trend?

Whether we like it or loathe it, data is all round us. We are increasingly leading our lives in a binary context with infinite data-sets flowing around us and code-lines designing our lifestyles, so why is it that data journalism is still regarded as a new field?

This was especially underlined with the launch ofthe latest Data Journalism Awards at the end of January. "We often see this sort of journalism awarded in very different categories, and we felt the domain of data journalism is yet to be recognised properly as a standalone discipline," said the Deputy Director for the Global Editors Network, Antoine Laurent.

"We're still only seeing the beginning of this,” added the Director of the European Journalism Centre, Wilfried Rutten “but data journalism is going to be very big. People used to ask me, 'what is this crazy stuff you are working on?', but with the support of Global Editors Network and Google they can't ask that anymore."

The Guardian made quite a big, yet factual based, claim that their data journalism practices date back to the 19^th century. Indeed their example is impressive, but it also makes me wonder whether we’re putting too much weight on data journalism today.

As with all industries journalism has segmented heavily in the past century, but if you really think about it haven’t reporters always been required to make sense of figures and base their stories on them? How is this different then? Can we straightforwardly define data journalism and, if so, would we just end up with more new fields (finding data, crunching data, visualizing data, etc.)?

I’d like to start this blog by asking if data journalism is a new field. The poll will be up for a week at the end of which I’ll check the results. Please be sociable and vote or leave a comment below :-)