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Times Labs Blog

Experiments in web journalism

Wine, not cider, hit hardest by Darling’s tax riseMarch 26

Britain knows no outrage, it seems, like that of soon-to-be-more-highly taxed cider drinkers.

From the minute Alistair Darling declared a 10 per cent above inflation duty increase on cider, enthusiasts rallied to voice their opposition.

A ‘Leave our cider alone!’ Facebook group had several thousand members within hours. West Country media described the measure as “a tax on the West Country”; producers angrily declared the increase would swallow up any possible price rise they might have made this year. Even Downing St has been been called upon to reconsider.

All the while, suggestions about the increased cost of cider on a ‘per pint’ basis ranged widely - from 10p, to 20p, and beyond. Really? Would the price of a Bulmers go up by 20p? We decided to look a little closer at the data.

Our research - the data for which is here - suggests that the actual ‘per pint’ (568mL) price increase in regular strength cider that would result from passing on Mr Darling’s tax rise is 2.4p.

Alcohol duty, with the exception of spirits, is charged on a ‘£ per hectolitre’ basis. (From this weekend, the duty on regular strength cider (1.2-7.5% alcohol) will rise from £31.83 to £36.01. In actua

Extras, extras: how different airline prices stack upMarch 10

Airline passengers around the world will pay as much as €41 billion in ancillary charges this year – in extras like baggage, seat reservation and credit card charges. Extras now make up an average 12 per cent of airlines’ revenue according to researchers at the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, but in the case of short-haul European flights, including the one we investigated above, this percentage can be closer to 40 per cent.

What we wanted to do with this table was take a typical flight booking and compare the extra fees charged by the main carriers operating in the UK. The first two blocks in each column, in pink and red, are the basic fare and taxes (in the case of easyJet taxes are included in the fare).

Looking at the chart, it would be hasty to presume that Flybe is the least competitive airline on price. In this case, for flights on these specific days in May, between the UK and Malaga, the Flybe fare, plus extras, is the highest. However, fares vary according to the demand and taxes vary according to route, so you would need to do more thorough investigation across different flight times and dates to make any conclusions about average fares.

What we’re interested in is the extras. Hover your mouse over the graph above and you’ll see the breakdown by charge in each column. What stands out immediately is that there is still a divide between the original “low cost carriers” and the “traditional full service airlines”. Th

How safe is your password?March 10

Not to get too personal, but…how long is your password? Late last year, some 32 million passwords were stolen from a US-based social networking site, and the data, which made its way into the public domain, gave researchers an opportunity to examine with what type of words we secure - or attempt to secure - our closest digital secrets. The results - shown above, with larger squares representing more popular passwords - suggest that, for many of us, a simple combination of numbers does just fine. Just under 300,000 people in the sample, for instance, set their password as ‘123456′, and nearly 50 per cent used popular names or words that you would find in a dictionary. Only a fifth of 1 per cent of the passwords were considered “strong”. ScanSafe, a security firm, advises that a password should contain no fewer than 14 characters, and ideally comprise a mixture of letters, numbers and special characters: $%& etc. (It’s trivial for a hacker to cycle through words in a dictionary when attempting to break into an

Why Russians see a different Kind of BlueFebruary 1

Ever since Homer spoke of the “wine-dark” sea (and probably before), we have attributed colours to objects. The bars on the right illustrate the responses of more than 500,000 people to an ongoing online survey asking them to associate colours with words.

Sometimes our colour associations are “diagnostic” - heat being red, for example - but they can also be semantic, a product of culture: we associate red with danger because our society has tended to make warning signs red.

Our response to colour is also partly physiological. Humans are trichromatic, meaning we have three colour receptors: for red, green, and blue. Most other mammals have only two, which, one theory goes, is what helped set man apart: we could more easily distinguish ripe fruit in trees.

An emerging view in scientific literature, however, is that language, as much as anything, shapes the way we perceive colour. Russian, for instance, has two totally separate categories for light and dark blue, and in a remarkable study of native Russian and English speakers in the Sixt

Best value ski resorts: by lift pass cost and length of runsJanuary 21

Thinking of heading to Verbier this winter? You’ll find better value at Courchevel. We collected data from 15 ski resorts: total length of runs (km), total length of runs for the regional ski pass, if available, and cost of a six-day regional peaktime ski pass (named in brackets after the relevant resorts). To “read” our mountain: the further to the right skiers are, the greater the total length of runs at that resort; the higher up they are, the larger the ski region, and the taller the skiers, the greater the cost of a ski pass. The ultimate resorts - by these criteria - are higher, but with a shorter skier (Morzine does well). It’s not surprising to find Verbier at altitude, but the taller skier denotes pricey skiing. Bear in mind we’ve only included ski areas that are linked by lifts (hence Banff isn’t included, and Aspen doesn’t perform as well as you might expect because its mountains are a bus ride apart).

Had we allowed bus-linked regions, Aspen - with Les Deux Alpes and St Anton - would have carved up the competition. Austrian resorts are not as expensive as French or Swiss ones, and skiing in Bulgaria is cheap, but you might get