Tuesday, January 22, 2008

One Step Forward and Two Steps Back

hmm.. got this in an email... not entirely certain what to make of it.. feel like pinky and the brain watching everything kinda erupt as deaths and births play with the figures.. makes me feel like we have some sorta barcode and we're checked in as we come into the world (born in SA) and we're taken off the system just as the heart stops beating.. makes it all seem surreal, this thing called life and this box of nationality and censorship and population dynamic! check it out and let me know your thoughts.. as you contemplate the changing figures - the mortality of infants and other age groups.. the adding in new births and yet more as people's progressing ages allow them to move up to bigger age status groupings.. this thing of numbers is quite surreal.. and what of the figures regards HIV positive folk? Gosh thats more than the population of Limpopo Province or Western Cape's entirety. More than the number of whites in the country generally. More, by five times.. than the number of Indians. More more more. Less in some cases. One step forward and two steps back.. Paula Abdul had that irritating song with the animated cat.. Surreal imagery breeds some odd arb memory!

What is the population of South Africa on Tuesday, 22 January, 2008?
Issued by: Eighty20

Eighty20 has launched a population clock at www.eighty20.co.za/popclocks that gives an estimate of the population of South Africa right now. Not only that, it has created dynamic clocks so you can see the estimated population of Gauteng right now, or the number of men, or the number of black people, or the number of people who are HIV positive.

There has been a lot of debate recently regarding the accuracy of statistics in SA. Debate is always good (as it shows people are at least thinking about these issues). One issue that is relevant is the time lag between the gathering of data and release to the public. The latest South African census data is as at 9 October 2001, but was released in its entirety in 2003, and the next census is not going to take place this decade.

Other databases like AMPS, the General Household Survey and Labour Force Survey are released annually, or biennially at best.

The Eighty20 SA population clocks give you a good estimate of the population of South Africa, by several segments, right now.

Go to the website www.eighty20.co.za/popclocks and watch the numbers update in real time.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree, m'lady. It is somewhat surreal to watch a bunch of moving numbers and feel that you're made privy to some secret information base on people passing between the worlds of life and death!

JT

Anonymous said...

what counts is what they cannot keep count of!

the girl in green

Anonymous said...

its kind of scary, all these moving numbers. makes me feel dizzy.

Anonymous said...

Am trying to imagine how it would look having spinning numbers like these in relation to the words I use. People say that I talk really fast. Hehe.

The Verb

Shafinaaz Hassim said...

conspiracy theories! lol.. JT: secret information base? dude, you watch way too many sci-fi schizophrenia inducing movies! hello greengirl. are you ecofriendly? value in the immeasurable. for everything else theres mastercard :P
diatribe: stop spinning around! or is it them pills that look like smarties? ;)
verb!!!!! you're alive!!!!

My dartboard said...

we are just numbers. this is what happens when you let the world be run by accountants.

bugger.

Anonymous said...

its kind of scary hey. when you just a number! a statistic. like crime stats. like so many mundane number crunching stuff of which you just become a single dot!

the girl in green.