Tim Bennett’s blog – Electron Soup

I set out to discover whether media reports of violence against Indians in Australia are overblown or accurate. I was surprised by the result.

The recent murder of Nitin Garg lead to a flare-up from Indian media outlets about the dangers of violence towards Indian students studying in Australia. This follows on from a spate of similar activity in 2009. My belief was that a media frenzy has created the impression that Indians are disproportionately the victims of violent crime. Seeking to dispel this myth, I went in search of hard evidence.

To begin with, there were 43971 crimes against the person (PDF) in Victoria in 2008/09 (Victoria Police). For a population of 5,427,700 (ABS) that is a rate of 1 crime per 123 people. Police in Victoria say that 1447 people of Indian descent were victims of crime in the twelve months to October 2009. 2006 Census data puts the Indian-descended population of Victoria at 52,854 giving a figure of 1 crime per 37 Indians. Even allowing for population growth to 60,000 Indians in Australia, this seemingly leaves Indians in Victoria at three times the risk of crime as all other Victorians.

Now, there are all sorts of problems with my methodology. For instance:

• Are Indians in Victoria from the same demographic spread as the rest of Australia, or do they skew younger? (Younger people are more likely to be victims of violent crime.)
• Have I undercounted the Indian population of Victoria? Census data ought to include international students (of whom nearly 100,000 are Indians nationwide), but does it?
• When police are quoted saying 1447 Indians were “victims of crime”, is this the same as the official statistics’ category “crimes against the person” or does it include property crime as well?

What other mistakes have I made, and how much are they likely to affect the numbers? I wish I had better data, to begin with.

I’m not really in a position to answer any of these questions, but these numbers certainly opened my eyes. I think more details should be sought, but on the face of them I’m no longer convinced that violence against Indian students is a media beatup.

Summary: Install this Greasemonkey script for Firefox and the videos will stop autoplaying.

Some Fairfax news websites (including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Brisbane Times) inflict videos on their users which begin playing after 5 seconds. For instance, this story: Pakistan turn the screws on luckless Australia.

You’ll notice a couple of obnoxious things. First, you need to interrupt your browsing to hit “stop” on the video player. Second, you have to watch a thirty-second ad before the real content starts. And third, the video doesn’t start automatically if you remove “autostart=1″ from the end of that URL.

After getting fed up with this behaviour, I wrote a script to do something about it: Remove Fairfax autoplay video links. You’ll need Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed. Afterwards, the script will do two things without your interaction. On any of smh.com.au, theage.com.au and brisbanetimes.com.au, it will:

• Check whether the current page URL contains “autostart=1″ and, if so, reload the page without that element in the URL.
• Go through all of the hyperlinks on the current page and remove “autostart=1″, so any subsequent pages visited will be free of autoplaying videos.

This script is free and cobbled together from various tutorials around the web. If you like it, please share the link with your friends. In a perfect world, Fairfax would get the picture and put an end to autoplaying videos. However, I think this tactic probably makes money for them, and so they’ll continue to sell out their user experience for more money.