It’s run in three stages – the regional heats, area finals and the national final. In each round, teams go head to head with teams from other schools: they present their view of the economy and what they think the base rate should be to hit the Government-set target. However, since this challenge is about monetary policy in general, and in view of the recent quantitative easing, the students can also tinker with the money supply. The teams are then judged on the quality of their presentation and their reasons behind their choices. Last year, the competition attracted 285 teams. The finalists were invited to visit the Bank of England and meet the Governor, and also got a chance to win some of the £26,000 worth of prize money for their school.

One challenge schools face with the Target 2.0 competition is access to the data on which the decisions are to be based. The Bank of England website provides a list of the relevant economic data but in a flat form – usually a long column of dates with corresponding figures. Therefore it can be difficult for students, already pushed for time with A-level preparation, to wade through all the data, let alone begin to understand the relationships between series. That’s where we can help; we’ve uploaded the data recommended by the Bank to the Timetric site, where you can immediately share, compare, and graph it. Nearly 200 series are here:

http://timetric.com/topic/target-two-point-zero/

What’s more, to make things even easier, we’ve grouped the data into subgroups around specific topics: money/markets, demand/output, labour market, costs and prices and international economy:

http://timetric.com/report/target-2.0-topic-list/

Data from Timetric.

The tools we use shape how we solve the problems we face. Timetric’s designed to help you solve problems through data. So what does this mean for services like ours?

Tools Shape Thought

With Timetric, we aim to make it easy for you to ask questions of, and draw conclusions from, the world’s statistics. In that light, here’s the key quote:

Our tools shape the questions we ask; therefore they shape the answers we get, and therefore they shape the conclusions we draw.

This is a hard problem. Several of us at Timetric have a background in scientific research. Our products are used by journalists. Journalists and scientists have a responsibility to be honest and trustworthy. We don’t take the responsibility this places on us lightly.

Google famously coined “don’t be evil”, but it goes further than that. Your credibility, if you rely on us, depends on our credibility, which makes credibility our business. We want you to trust the conclusions you draw using Timetric. That’s why we built it. So here’s how we work, and what we promise to you:

• We’ll always publish the original source of our data directly alongside it.
• We’ll give our data the best and most helpful titles we can, and we’ll surround it with as much supplementary information as we can find, so that you can work out if it’s really the data you need.
• We won’t editorialize or fudge data. The data on Timetric is the data as we received it — all we do is transform it into Timetric’s native format and clean up any mechanical errors we find in it. What you get is the best and most transparent version of the statistics we serve that we can give you.
• We’ll keep our visualization and analysis tools as simple, as easy to use, and as transparent as we can make them.
• If you find mistakes in our data, and you tell us about them, we’ll fix them — and what’s more we’ll tell you what we did to fix them.
• When we make mistakes — as everyone does — we expect you to call us on them. We’ll discuss them openly with you, and again, once we’ve diagnosed the problems, we’ll tell you what we’re doing to fix them.

We take your integrity very seriously. So we can do that, we take our integrity very seriously. Without that commitment, no information service deserves your trust, and your trust is the most important thing you can give us. Every day, we come to work knowing we need to earn that trust, and we’re grateful that you choose to use Timetric. We won’t forget what that means.

It wasn’t a good night for the Lib Dems. However, with the current electoral system, it’s hard to see how it could be a good one:

(thanks to Michael Dales for the analysis).

Each Lib Dem vote is about a quarter as effective as a Labour or Conservative vote at getting an MP elected. Oxford East and Oxford West and Abingdon elected one Conservative and one Labour MP.

Oxford West and Abingdon

Oxford East

One strong Labour first place, one weak third; same for the Conservatives. The Lib Dems actually outpolled the other parties across the two seats — and not by a little, by roughly 20% — but get nothing. Oxford is an extreme example, but that story played itself out all across the UK.

Something else which I hadn’t realised, but which charting the election made clear: Labour seats declare earlier than Conservative ones. There are a few causes behind that: smaller, more urban seats, so it’s easier to collect the ballot boxes — the Sunderland operation being the most spectacular example! — and, in general, lower turnout. There’s been quite a bit of research on that, but loosely-speaking Labour supporters stay at home in safe seats. You can actually see this effect on Michael’s graph above: the number of votes per Labour MP rises from around 20,000 in the early stages of the election to its final value of 40,000 as the evening, and morning, wear on.

This really shapes how the election story gets reported. For the first few hours of a general election, all of the early seats declaring are Labour-held, and usually they’re ultra-safe, because they’re the ones which get counted quickly. The really safe Tory seats are rural and the driving alone takes longer, and the marginals get people to turn out and vote. The drama in the election is always going to come right at the end, for purely mechanical reasons if nothing else. Maybe that’s why even the boring bits of election-night TV are so compelling!

One last thing – you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to keep up with the busiest declaration times! By 3am everyone’s a bit bleary-eyed, even on a good day, and when a seat’s declaring every twenty seconds…

Here’s all the data – total votes and total seats for everyone.

At Timetric, we’re on a mission to get the world’s statistics to you in a form which you can use. A lot of those numbers start their lives in local and national governments, so part of the job is talking, and working, with people in government.

Today is the Government 2010 conference in London, and I’m going to be there. What’s more, I’m going to be covering it live all day on Twitter at @walkingshaw and over on Davepress. It’ll be much easier with your help, though! Have a look at the agenda, and if you’ve got anything you’d like me to cover in more detail or to relay to the conference, please get in touch.