My Popularity Ratings

As a Lean Six Sigma project manager, obsessed by reliable data, and strong connections between data and conclusions (Phew – that’s quite a mouthful), I have set out to find a source of data with strong correlation with my popularity. (Double Phew - don't stop now)

Where should I look? I could sponsor a survey to ask my friends, “If you were asked about Colin, would you say he was:

A - “Not at all Grumpy”
B - “A bit Grumpy”
C - “Generally Grumpy”
D - “Very Grumpy”
E - “He’s not a bad chap, despite what they say about him”. Thank you, Nigel Rogers

However, I did not go for this. I might find out something that would be better hidden. (Colin is unanimously a very ungrumpy person; not grumpy at all, despite all his efforts to the contrary).

In the event, I decided to find clues about myself in Spam. I have been saving Spam, from my email inbox, since the 22 March and have today reached 1,000. It has taken 20 days to reach this magical number. As Mark Hookey, Global Lean Six Sigma programme manager extraordinaire, taught me, the Baseline Indicator is 50 pieces of Spam per day.

Not exactly overpopular then. Only 50 messages per day. But can this be broken down further? We need further analysis. We need to stratify the data. Strong stuff.

353 items are encouraging me to take part in online gambling
290 messages are trying to sell me cheap pharmaceutical products
241 notes have been telling me how to do improbable things to various unprintable parts of my anatomy

Surprisingly, 107 of these unwanted pieces, designed to waste internet bandwidth were trying to sell me software.

I have no idea what 83 of them are, as they beckon me with a cheerful “Hi, Bud”, a reference to a central European beer, perhaps.

37 are telling me that I can get 80% off Viagra (some are 81%. Why 81%?)

Now you can do some arithmetic, and tell me how are left over. But what tentative conclusions (or hypotheses, as we technical people say) would you draw from this rag bag of statistics. (Are these numbers statistically valid, I hear you say. Those of you, who have been watching the U.K. general elections, will be asking “What is the margin of error?”

Conclusion 1 – he has too much time on his hands to produce this load of old cobblers
Conclusion 2 – he cannot add up.
Conclusion 3 – he is probably lying. He knows jolly well that Bud is a beer.
Conclusion 4 – It really is not true what they say about him.

Now I am back to place an online bet on how long the Conservative / Lib Dem coalition will last.