MSE News: ’Women's state pension petition secures second Parliamentary debate

saver861

bowlhead99 wrote: »

So, firstly, there is no clear 'spike'. But since the 96k on Christmas eve, the 60% per ten day growth rate has fallen off, the curve started to plateau. There are some logical reasons for this.

I'm not sure what you would call a spike then. MSE article reports a rise of 24,000 signatures in just three days. The current average is 1350 per day.

If the rate of 24,000 in three days was average then the petition would now be at around 800,000. Somehow I think we disagree on what a spike is!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/family/2015/12/mps-to-debate-womens-state-pension-changes-as-79000-sign-petition?_ga=1.191950703.434486696.1436005824

bowlhead99 wrote: »

So, there is nothing in that to suggest that the patterns of petition signups were heavily driven by MSE or that there's a 'spike' correlating with MSE announcements. Whatever MSE themselves might like to claim about their success and far reaching impact.

I'm afraid you are losing it a bit there. Unless you can point to something else that happened that week then how else can you deduce a) there is no spike and b) that if you will agree there was a spike that it did not correlate to the MSE announcement.

bowlhead99 wrote: »

This could have been caused by any number of things.
-Perhaps a WASPI tweet was picked up by someone else with a lot of followers.
-Perhaps the number of 'shares' of a support group on facebook surged as a consequence of the natural ebb and flow of social networks.
-Perhaps the topic was 'trending' because it was a dry week for news and there was no real competition.
-Perhaps the kind of people who would blog about this stuff are women in their 40s to 60s and they mentioned it in their popular blogs about the Strictly Come Dancing final on 19 Dec.
-Perhaps people were motivated to sign up after reading the news articles written about the Westminster Hall debate from a week or two earlier. We know, don't we, that 50s women are not expected to keep on top of news announcements as they come out in real time, but will get to them in their own good time, so maybe a 2 week 'delayed reaction' is to be expected.

Yep .. and there will be a probability for each of those scenarios .... I'll let you do the Math ....

bowlhead99 wrote: »

So, even if there was a spike, which there wasn't,

Well would a temporary increase in the region of 500% be then?

jem16 wrote: »

Saver861 has gone a little quiet on providing a link to them so I can only conclude that;

Quiet? Me? hmmmm .... not normally. However, there is a correlation between the amount of posts I make and the weather!!!! Check it out if you like ..... you will see a spike in the number of my posts corresponding to poor like out door weather.

jem16 wrote: »

a) the statistics aren't available and he was making the whole lot up

As above you can work out the simple outlines easily ....

jem16 wrote: »

b) he is able to see the statistics which would of course be available to the Waspi campaign.

Could be a secret agent for them even ...... I'm actually putting in for a Bond like WASPImobil .....

colsten

Apologies if this link has been posted before, I have only just seen it and think it makes an excellent read.

http://www.coppolacomment.com/2015/12/here-i-stand-i-can-do-no-other.html

jem16

saver861 wrote: »

As above you can work out the simple outlines easily ....

Not what you said though.

saver861 wrote: »

You can look at the weekly average and the average for the week that MSE put their name to it. You will see the spike.

saver861 wrote: »

Could be a secret agent for them even ...... I'm actually putting in for a Bond like WASPImobil .....

I'm sure it will be a fetching purple colour - now where have I seen that username before........

jem16

colsten wrote: »

Apologies if this link has been posted before, I have only just seen it and think it makes an excellent read.

http://www.coppolacomment.com/2015/12/here-i-stand-i-can-do-no-other.html

It's been posted before but as you say an excellent piece well worth the reminder.

Pollycat

hyubh wrote: »

Please cut out the repeated accusations of opponents being paid to post what they are posting here. No one on this board is a plant or a stooge for an anti-WASPI organisation (i.e., a 'shill').

Well, I might be one of these:

Scotswimmen wrote: »

a quick Internet search can reveal hundreds of reputable sites re: how Government paid Shills & Trolls are manipulating Social Media, with “psychology-based influence techniques”especially when anything Political is being debated.

Perhaps the Government paid me to infiltrate MSE to 'manipulate Social Media' to derail WASPI's campaign.....

Now, let me just check....I joined MSE in January 2007....that would be 4 years before the 2011 changes were even introduced. :think:

WOW! What an omniscient Government that was.....:T

Pity they didn't tell me the lottery numbers for the big payouts over those 9 years......

saver861

saver861 wrote: »

You can look at the weekly average and the average for the week that MSE put their name to it. You will see the spike. Without a better explanation you would then have to conclude the obvious.

jem16 wrote: »

Not what you said though.

hmmm thats what I said above ... exact quote. By saying 'you can look at the weekly average' I meant 'you can work out the weekly average' not you can physically look at the numbers on a site somewhere.

Now I would have thought that would have been a piece of pie for all those so well up on numbers, and dates, and spa dates, and amounts, and years to go, and years remaining, and how much to put by, and .... and ..... and ....

saver861 wrote: »

I'm sure it will be a fetching purple colour - now where have I seen that username before........

Yeah - the colour thing is giving me a real old headache... do I go with pink ..... or yellow with black stripes .... or black with yellow stripes .... thing is, I'm more a green man myself ...

mgdavid

!!!!!!!
has she gone yet?
is it safe to come out?

Twopints

mgdavid wrote: »

is it safe to come out?

Only if you give 20 years notice, in writing. :beer:

bowlhead99

saver861 wrote: »

I'm not sure what you would call a spike then. MSE article reports a rise of 24,000 signatures in just three days. The current average is 1350 per day.

Well would a temporary increase in the region of 500% be then?

Comparing a period of time when 24000 were obtained in three days to now when 4000 are raised in three days is stupid.

The campaign reached its goal of the 100k signatures required to make government consider a debate a month ago; the principle of a parliamentary debate was agreed weeks ago, after the 100k signatures, ahead of the backbenchers debate of 7 January; and it is public knowledge that it will be debated again in Westminster tomorrow. There is no reason now for anyone to sign a petition to make the government aware of the cause and stimulate a debate.

Plus as mentioned in previous posts, we are close to saturation and everyone who has been interested in this since October has already signed if they are going to. As such, it would be very surprising if 24000 people NOW signed in the next 3 days, for example. THAT would be a spike.

[my list of perfectly sensible examples of why volumes of extra traffic was driven towards the petition website in w/c 14 Dec]

Yep .. and there will be a probability for each of those scenarios .... I'll let you do the Math ....

Well, although I am not an expert, the probability of each of those scenarios occurring is probably in the 50-100% range. Shall we round up to 100%? Or would you think we should "do the Math" and conclude 0%?

I'm afraid you are losing it a bit there. Unless you can point to something else that happened that week then how else can you deduce a) there is no spike

Well, I explained that there was not really a 'spike' caused by MSE, just natural exponential growth of a campaign which was reaching its peak in those two weeks, a short while after the Westminster Hall debate, as more and more people told their friends and became aware. Clearly, there will be heavy days and light days within a particular week (I was using 10-day periods rather than weeks in my earlier example as those were the only stats I had) ; but the pace of growth in December - as absolute numbers rather than percentages - would be expected to be higher than in November.

So some high numbers is not an unexpected spike but merely continuation and snowballing of popularity through media including MSE but not, by any stretch of the imagination, exclusively them.

b) that if you will agree there was a spike that it did not correlate to the MSE announcement.

I warned you earlier about confusing correlation with causation. I can tell you, the increase in signatures that week correlated positively with the number of birthday parties my niece has attended (adding two to her lifetime score) and correlated inversely with the average length of my hair at the time - as I had a hair cut.

I appreciate you are just dismissing our reasoned comments as fantasy and it must be entirely MSE's fault that "they" achieved 7-8000 signatures a day while nowadays the campaign only gets 1350 a day. It is easiest for you to just read the first line of your linked MSE article which says that a campaign that they supported has added 24000 signatures:
" a major petition backed by MoneySavingExpert gathering a further 24,000 signatures in just three days", and jump to the conclusion that those signatures came from their readers.

What did MSE say if you actually read further down the page?

Support for the WASPI petition has snowballed this week. On Monday MoneySavingExpert and its founder Martin Lewis pledged to support it, we featured the campaign in our weekly email and there's been much wider media coverage of the WASPI campaign and parliamentary lobbying too.

So, they noted that they had featured it and there has been much wider media coverage of the WASPI campaign and parliamentary lobbying too

This makes it extremely difficult for you to conclude that 24000 votes came from their readers - it could be 1000 from them and 23000 from everyone else, for all you know. They claim 10 million people get the email. About 50 million adults see media generally. As someone else pointed out, even if the 24000 were from MSE readers and exclusively due to MSE rather than duplication in other media... 24000 signups from 10 million is a pretty underwhelming lack of support.

Thanks for playing though.

saver861

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Comparing a period of time when 24000 were obtained in three days to now when 4000 are raised in three days is stupid.

Allllll right ... let me break it down for you .. ... real simple like.

The petition has been running for about 100 days and current signatures is 136000 - work it out daily average. 1360 I get.

However, lets go with your over 100k rationale .... so lets ignore that.

Up to 14 December it had been running for around 60 days and had 55,000 signatures at that date. work it out ... I get around 916 per day.

Now, in the three days from 14 Dec it got 24,000. .. work it out. I get around 8,000 per day.

Sooooooo .... it went from 960 per day to 8000 per day for three days. Not a spike??? Mannnnn ... how high does a spike have to be before its a spike in your world?

bowlhead99 wrote: »

I appreciate you are just dismissing our reasoned comments as fantasy

No, not at all ...I'm still waiting for the reasoned comments!

bowlhead99 wrote: »

MSE article which says that a campaign that they supported has added 24000 signatures:

What I originally said was that around 30,000 were added the week MSE gave its backing and exposure. I said I would hazard a guess that a high percentage of those were a result of that exposure.

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Thanks for playing though.

Anytime .... now that I have put you right ... job done!!!!:D