Getting good information to government
On the positive side: there’s a conference of science advisers and people who know about the field here in Auckland at the moment. There’s a blog, and there will soon be videos of the presentations.
On the negative side: Statistics Canada continues to provide an example of how a world-class official statistics agency can go downhill with budget cuts and government neglect. The latest story is the report on how the Labour Force Survey (which is how unemployment is estimated) was off by 42000 in July. There’s a shorter writeup in Maclean’s magazine, and their archive of stories on StatsCan is depressing reading.
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 »
As soon as the gov’t started blindly cutting their budget (read long census form) officials at stats Canada warned that it will likely affect the quality of the information. Not only researchers will suffer subpar references on population characteristics, but now it’s going to hit it where it hurts: job estimates. Not to worry: the government is relying on accurate, representative and reliable Kijiji for job estimates (Kijiji is an eBay/Craiglist like service).
10 years ago