Should Stats be Extinct?

I'm always interested in stats, even rough ones, so when I read the following from Peter Carrell, an Anglican who because of his job moves around from church to church congregation regularly, I was intrigued. He noted this about one church he does manage to get to fairly often:

Yesterday, participating in a service at church #1, I was very pleasantly surprised to find yet more new people than when I was there a month ago. I also performed some mental arithmetic: 80% of the large congregation were under the age of 60, with around 50% under the age of 20. By contrast, when I first visited that service several years ago, I would say 80% of the congregation were over the age of 60.

He also makes a comment elsewhere about a'religious' survey that's had some promotion recently:

It seems incredible that researchers could come up with such a conclusion [that religion is set for extinction] when other evidence points in a different direction. For instance the secularization thesis (that Western countries were becoming more and more secular) has found itself undermined by both a rise in enthusiasm among Christians as well as by immigration drawing in active adherents of many faiths.

Richard Watson

Nothing dates as fast as the future. Richard Watson.

Richard Watson, the author of Future Files, has a blog on which he discusses future trends.

He’s currently listing the 2008 Trends as he sees them.

1. Karma Capitalism
2. Rhythm & Balance
3. Making things
4. Something for nothing
5. Industrial provenance
6. Robotics
7. Data visualisation
8. Reality mining
9. Eco-exhaustion
10. Fantasy & escape
Most of these need some explanation to unpack them! The explanation is on the blog.

His 2007 Trends is now available as a pdf file free to copy, and makes interesting reading.