August 2, 2013
Briefly
- A good story in the Herald about a survey of health risk behaviour in NZ high-school students. Things are improving, as the story says. There’s even a link to the real research. Pity about the headline.
- Short free-access piece in the Listener on estimating and understanding risks of death. There’s a longer cover story in the paid-access or squashed-tree versions, also by Mark Broatch.
- The NZ Science Media Centre has a new edition of its Desktop Guide for Science Reporters. It’s also valuable for people reading science stories — especially those by journalists who haven’t read the guide.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Some of the change in risk patterns is due to demographic changes in the general population and demographic changes in schools. Now that School C/UE/Bursary don’t stop the flow of kids into upper secondary school there is a greater diversity of kids staying in school, especially Pacific kids, who have different patterns of risk behaviours than European kids.
The self-harm thing is concerning … perhaps alcohol use in teens was self-medication for anxiety that, now alcohol use has decreased, is being expressed as self-harm.
11 years ago