October 7, 2013

Briefly

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  • There’s not as many of you as we thought: the new Census figures are out with the total population. There will be no new Maori-roll electorate, but the North Island will get a new general-roll electorate. Fortunately, the NZ redistricting procedure is very boring, compared to, say, Pennsylvania. Election nerds are reduced to arguing about the potential impact on electorates such as Epsom.
  • All the more-interesting results from the Census are still to come: here’s their release timetable
  • The US did not get its monthly unemployment figures last month, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics is shut down. Pew Research has a list of the other data the government won’t be releasing
  • A couple of articles from the online magazine Nautil.us: one on statistics in the courtroom (US-oriented, but still interesting) and one on coincidences.
  • Almost coincidentally, James Curran is giving a public lecture this Thursday, 7pm, on forensic statistics: his professorial inaugural lecture.  Everyone welcome.
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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 »

Comments

  • avatar
    Andrew Robertson

    Hi Thomas

    I notice that Stats NZ say this about the difference between the census count and their June 2013 estimate.

    “The population number is lower than New Zealand’s estimated resident population, as it doesn’t include New Zealand residents overseas at the time of the census or the estimated number of people who didn’t complete the census. This shows the value of checking our population periodically with the census.”

    I’m a bit confused about this. I thought both the estimate and the actual count exclude those overseas. Is the number of people not completing enough to explain a difference of around 228,750?

    Just keen to hear your thoughts. Their quote makes it sound as though these factors completely account for the difference, but perhaps they are just part of the reason? I assume the more detailed results will help to clarify things.

    Cheers
    Andrew

    11 years ago

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      My understanding is that people ordinarily resident in NZ who are temporarily overseas are still counted in the estimate, but are not counted in the census. According to Stats NZ there were 205000 trips overseas by NZ residents in August 2013. According to MED, the average duration of a trip is 20 days, so that would account for about half the shortfall.

      NZ citizens who are resident overseas aren’t counted in either number (there’s a lot more than 228000 of them).

      11 years ago