Statistics, statistics, statistics

The Canadian government has decided to no longer make filing the long census report mandatory. From now on it will be purely voluntary. This has had many people up in arms since let’s face it, without a little coercion pretty much nobody will fill it out. We probably won’t say, "Hey this is intrusive, I’m not filling it out." , we’ll just put it aside on the hall table with all the other stuff we just don’t want to deal with right now and hope it’ll go away by itself. The great Canadian way, procrastination.
The effect this will have is that the sample will not be as random as it should be but will only consist of  "do-gooder" or as we say in French « teteux »,  who always pass in everything. You know the ones when we were in school, the ones who always handed in their stuff on time and when the teacher asked for a 500 word essay would write a 5000 word master’s degree instead. Do we really want government policy to be dictated by what the do-gooders think? It’ll be as if the teacher’s pet helped dictate the school rules for the rest of us poor smucks...
Now after that, you are probably wondering when the hell I’m going to get to the point. Well the point is this, Mrs. BB just showed me the neatest thing about Blogger. In the dashboard there is a tab called stats and it gives you all the statistics about your blog, how many people visit, who visits, which of the posts are the most popular, for today, this week, this month and forever since the beginning of time micro seconds after the Big Bang and all of this with graphs, maps and percentages. It’ll even tell you which bowsers were used  for the visits.  It also gives you access to all the comments ever written in your blog. Rather neat don’t you think. Completely useless of course, but neat none the less. (Yes I know, you probably have known about this forever, hummm maybe I was asleep when they talked about it.)
I also discovered the other day that using Google docs you could set up a form linked to an spreadsheet page and embed this form in an internet page and have people answer questions that are compiled in the spreadsheet. We were looking for a way to put a school questionnaire on the internet and compile the answers we’d get from the students. So there it was a simple way of doing things and to top it all off, it is absolutely free which is a big plus when you teach in a public school.
Maybe the Canadian government should set up a blog, embed a form and let google compile the stats for them. ;o)