Two open-data links
Actually existing open data in Australia (via @juhasaarinen):
The number of datasets available on the Government’s open data website has slimmed by more than half after the agency discovered one third of the datasets were junk….
“We unfortunately found that a third of the “datasets” were just links to webpages or files that either didn’t exist anymore, or redirected somewhere not useful to genuine seekers of data,” Sheridan said.
Do-it-yourself open data in NZ : Graeme Edgeler on the Official Information Act
Some time last year [note: 2010], I realised that you could find stuff out by asking the Government. It used to be I’d have had a discussion with someone, or read a news story or made a blog comment and thought to myself “I wonder if they …” or “how many …” and I wouldn’t try to find out. And then once – for some reason – likely the personal satisfaction of knowing I was right about something – I flicked off an email to a government department asking them for some small piece of information.
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 »