29 Nov Si’s fact-filled Advent!
Advent facts day 25 – MERRY CHRISTMAS! No White Christmas this year. We thought we remembered way more snowy Yuletides in the 60s and 70s. But turns out there have been more since 1981 than in the preceding 20 years …as this great Met Office infographic shows.
Here at Shared Intelligence we really like good infographics – they help present complex information in ways which are easily understood and which drive discussion about important issues. One of our own examples is the theory of change graphic we produced for our evaluation of the Government’s Our Place Programme.
Check out the calendar each day to be treated to more of the facts and hidden gems we’ve discovered in our work this year!
Previous facts:
| Advent day 1 – London Waterloo sees 100 million passenger movements per annum, which is more than the main stations at Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool combined. |
| Advent day 2– Every second, somewhere in the world, an aircraft takes off which has a part made by just one Wolverhampton-based company. |
| Advent day 3 – A Dudley-based maker of sports cars kits is developing a driverless taxi-pod which has been bought by South Korea. |
| Advent day 4 – Dementia affects visual perception. Dark doormats can appear to be holes in the ground and patterned floors can appear to be moving. |
| Advent day 5 – The popularity of yoga among teenage boys is rising due to high profile male sportsmen posting their routines on Instagram. |
| Advent day 6 – The Great British skills mismatch: 40% of workers are under/overqualified for their jobs and 40% work in fields different to subjects they have studied. |
| Advent day 7 – It was long believed cholera was airborne. Dr John Snow proved it actually spread through water supply using Surbiton’s water works to prove his theory. |
| Advent day 8 – Southend’s pleasure pier is the longest pier in the world at 1.3miles! It has it’s own lifeboat station, museum, theatre, railway, and the café/TV studio used by Jamie Oliver. |
| Advent day 9 – Ice cream vans manufactured in Crewe are serving up 99 Flakes around the globe, as far afield as Azerbaijan. |
| Advent day 10 – Waterways special! The only London borough to straddle the Thames is Richmond. Birmingham has more canals than Venice. You can surf the River Severn in Gloucester. |
| Advent day 11 – Visiting a library is the only type of cultural activity where participation is just as high for people from deprived backgrounds as it is for the wealthiest. |
| Advent day 12 – Better Evidence drives consensus – scientists now agree that bone fragments, reputedly from St Nicholas’s remains (aka Santa) date from the 4th Century when Santa was known to have lived. |
| Advent day 13 – Public spending in 2015/16 outstripped tax receipts in all UK regions bar London, South East and East of England. North West spending was £22 billion more than tax-take, whereas for London it was the reverse. |
| Advent day 14 – The Southeast has the UK’s largest population of over 75s. |
| Advent day 15 – To bridge the gap between children of military families and children of civilian families the MoD and North Yorkshire Council have appointed Service Pupils’ Champions. |
| Advent day 16 – Tate Modern is the most visited contemporary arts museum in the world with 7 million visits per year and contributing £140-190m to the UK economy. |
| Advent day 17 – Jobs most at risk of being taken by robots are in transport, manufacturing, and wholesale. Jobs in education, health and social work are safest. |
| Advent day 18 – Library-based early years sessions produce an immediate improvement in mood among mums who attend with their children. |
| Advent day 19 – Evidence shows children from low income backgrounds who have intensive arts experiences in school are then 3 times more likely to attain a degree. |
| Advent day 20 – Hull is the birthplace of the Venn Diagram, introduced by Hull-born philosopher John Venn in 1880. |
| Advent day 21 – Combining health and social care is a massive financial and governance challenge but there are already around 40 integrated care organisations in England where NHS and local authority care budgets *have* been combined.
Advent day 22 – The health benefits of sport are worth £11.2bn annually to our economy. The NHS spends £8.8bn of our national income each year treating Type 2 diabetes… Advent day 23 – Over the past year UK unpaid overtime was estimated at 1.5 billion hours, with 14% of employees saying they worked unpaid hours. So friends and colleagues please… if you can, take a hard earned break! Advent day 24 – Did you know pubs make great settings for focus groups especially when public-facing services want to get views of non-users? We did exactly this for our research with Marie Curie to find out what people thought of their information services. |
| Advent facts day 25 – MERRY CHRISTMAS! – There have been more white Christmases since 1980 than there have been in the preceding 25 years. |
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