Thursday, February 12, 2015

What happened in England in 2009?

Aaron Dover (http://www.thezionion.com/2015/02/08/the-fraudulent-rise-in-uk-antisemitism/) calls the report on "Antisemiticism Incidents" "fraudulent."  He has a point.  But there actually is interesting information in the data (http://www.thezionion.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screenshot-2015-02-08-19.40.02.png), namely the high number of incidents in 2009 and 2014.  Those positive anomalies occur across several types of incident.  If we knew what happened in 2009, maybe we can understand some of what is happening in 2014.

Even taking the "Antisemiticism Incidents" data at face value, the high number of incidents in 2014 are not predictive.  There is nothing in the data that says 2014 is the start of increasing number of incidents.  2014 could be high like 2009, and 2015 can be normal like 2010.  In other words, 2014 is like 2009, an anomaly.   

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