No?
Ok, sorry about that. The ravages of Scrabble playing have got to be contained! So back to the statistics. I found an interesting article in Epidemiology and Addiction Quarterly, the highly respected peer-reviewed British journal. The study looks at the reading-abled population of Belgium. The stats are real eye-openers. 1994 was a watershed year for the reading epidemic in Belgium. Numbers are taken from the Institut numérologique belge and cross-referenced with the Commission des chiffres de l'Union Européenne. Essentially this study is bullet-proof.
And you know how we use pigs as test subjects because of their many biological similarities to humans? Well the same applies to Belgians for the population of Québec. This was last established by the Office national des numéros of the Québec government in 2003.
With all that cleared up, let's take a look-see at the stats.
source: Charles Krauthammer, ``Belgium On The Brink : A Longitudinal Study of Reading Habits in 1994 Belgium``, Epidemiology and Addiction Quarterly, no. 4 vol. 19, Summer 2004, p. 1357.
Truly startling! I can only hope we manage to contain this AIDS of the 21st century. So, faithful reader, if you know of any solutions, please do not hesitate to share them with me.
Respectfully yours,
4 comments:
Amresh, I know your sources are belgian, but I still thought I should mention that your graph doesn't make sense for at least 3 reasons.
i realized two things just this second: 1) i'm an idiot, 2) so is amresh...
i am an idiot because i was gonna post that even though i write long and frequent posts, i still don't have enought ime on my hands to verify sources in obscure peer reviewed british journals of epidemiology... then i looked at the graph again.
and jmo is an idiot because he has enough time on his hand to make up fake graphs like that (that make no sense at all) and post them... don't lie, i know it took you hours to post this.
it did!
i fell for it... and i'm studying epidemiology!
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