TheTimes.jpg Counting the EFF Real figure less than 6000 Ray Hartley, The Times, Johannesburg, 18 November, 2015 A lot has been written, including on the pages of the Rand Daily Mail [blogsite], about the "huge" number of marchers who put on red T-shirts and descended on the JSE stock exchange a couple of weeks ago. So much so that a vast figure of between 40000 and 50000 has been frequently quoted, usually accompanied by warnings of how powerful the EFF is because it can bring this number of people out to demonstrate. But what was the true figure and can it be accurately established? Well, I've done my very best using two photographs: one shot from a drone above the Sandton crowd and another from a tall building in the city centre where the marchers gathered. There is no full picture of all the marchers, to my knowledge, but these two images appear to have the vast bulk covered. Counting the EFF.jpg I deployed two different methodologies. With the city centre picture, I divided the march into blocks of equal size. I then counted the number of marchers in the easiest to count block and multiplied this by the number of blocks. I added blocks to make up for the "invisible" part of the crowd obscured by buildings. Even though it is quite likely that the density of marchers diminished from the centre to the periphery, I assumed that there was an even count. I added 20% to allow for the fact that perspective was diminishing and the area captured by blocks further away was probably higher. With the drone picture in Sandton (this one shows that it covers all marchers well), I divided the picture into a grid and then, literally counted each marcher in each grid to arrive at a total. I then allowed for additional marchers not in the picture by generously adding multiples of the blocks on the edge of the frame. Counting each marcher was simply a matter of counting the dots, so to speak. Where there was a sea of dense dots, I was generous in over-counting. I included what might have been bystanders at the periphery. I was surprised, time and time again, to find that what appeared to be a huge sea of red turned out to be less impressive by detailed head count. Perhaps there is something to the populist love of a "uniform" - a mass of people in a single colour can overwhelm the senses. I was astonished to discover that my two figures differed by a mere 200-odd people. So I feel I can state with reasonable certainty that the number of marchers was: 1. City centre = 5689 marchers 2. Sandton = 5859 marchers There you have it. <http://www.rdm.co.za> www.rdm.co.za From: <http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2015/11/18/Can-you-count-on-the-EFF> http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2015/11/18/Can-you-count-on-the-EFF -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "YCLSA Discussion Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
