Norway Exports More Porn Than It Imports

NEWS that British pople are ugly occupies minds on the internets, where Nadia Knows explains that such PR-driven surveys are as credible as a Daily Express phone poll - the results are delivered in percentages so as not to let on that only two people voted, and one of them was looking to “**** Off With Granny”.

A ‘Brits are among the world’s ugliest’ story has done the rounds today, with coverage on the Telegraph, Reuters and CNN. It’s based on some statistics from a dating site that accepts only ‘beautiful people’. (Look ma, no link!)

The site was set up in Denmark, where everyone is uniformly gorgeous and eating an open sandwhich while making jokes about the Swedes, who are looked down upon by the Norwegians. They are the most desired. The Norwegians are the only peoples in the EU not operating a porn-trade deficit.

As ever, the science behind the statistic is spurious (even if we disregard subjectivity), and the headlines are predictably reductive and designed for click-harvesting.

The story simply calculates the percentage of accepted people against the number of applicants. This doesn’t take into account the number of applicants per country – so if 100% of Brazilian women were deemed gorgeous, but only three of them joined up, the outlook is rather different.

There’s more in the Forums.

Anorak

Posted: 13th, November 2009 | In: Media Comments (8) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink