I estimated how much the population of Helsinki (capital of Finland) grew in 2012. I knew from the news that the growth rate is considered to be steep.
I knew there are currently about 500 000 habitants in Helsinki. I set the upper bound to 3 % growth rate or 15 000 residents for now. With that rate the city would grow twentyfold in 100 years which is too much. But the rate might be steeper now. For lower bound i chose 1000 new residents. I felt that anything less couldnt really produce any news. AGM is 3750.
My second method was to go through the number of new apartments. Here I just checked that in recent years about 3000 apartments have been built yearly. Guessing that the household size could be 2 persons I got 6000 new residents.
It turned out that the population grew by 8300 residents which is highest in 17 years. Otherwise it has recently been around 6000. So both methods worked well. Both have the benefit that one doesnt need to care whether the growth comes from births/deaths or people flow. They also didn’t require considering how many people move out and how many come in.
Obviously i was much more confident on the second method. Which makes me think that applying confidence intervals to fermi estimates would be useful.
I estimated how much the population of Helsinki (capital of Finland) grew in 2012. I knew from the news that the growth rate is considered to be steep.
I knew there are currently about 500 000 habitants in Helsinki. I set the upper bound to 3 % growth rate or 15 000 residents for now. With that rate the city would grow twentyfold in 100 years which is too much. But the rate might be steeper now. For lower bound i chose 1000 new residents. I felt that anything less couldnt really produce any news. AGM is 3750.
My second method was to go through the number of new apartments. Here I just checked that in recent years about 3000 apartments have been built yearly. Guessing that the household size could be 2 persons I got 6000 new residents.
It turned out that the population grew by 8300 residents which is highest in 17 years. Otherwise it has recently been around 6000. So both methods worked well. Both have the benefit that one doesnt need to care whether the growth comes from births/deaths or people flow. They also didn’t require considering how many people move out and how many come in.
Obviously i was much more confident on the second method. Which makes me think that applying confidence intervals to fermi estimates would be useful.