Tuesday, December 06, 2005

NUMBER CRUNCHING

You'd think with all the technology the modern state uses to monitor its citizens, that someone could come up with a more reliable way of estimating crowd numbers.

The organisers of Sunday's pro-democracy march in Hong Kong claimed 250,000 people took part, while an actuary lecturer from Hong Kong University put the numbers as low as 60,000 to 80,000.

The police seemed to hedge their bets by opting for 120,000.

Even allowing for propaganda from different sources inflating or deflating the numbers, in any other walk of life, such sketchy number crunching would result in bankruptcy or instant dismissal.

Perhaps in future everyone going on a pro-democracy march should be required to have their thumb print scanned by electronic turnstiles at Victoria Park, thus ensuring a fair and accurate tally.

I can't see any problem with that, can you?

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good idea. Of course whichever way you look at it, 99.9% of people including the infirm, the hospitalised, the very young, and anybody who happened to be abroad did not turn out so they obviously support the CE don't they?

4:58 pm

 

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