August 14, 2019
Briefly
- From the UK Office of National Statistics, some fascinating graphs about the age distribution of deaths by suicide and by drug poisoning. The graphs make the generational differences really clear: it’s my generation in both cases.
- From the comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the issue of mathwashing by AI
- From Radio NZ: discussion of Auckland Transport’s new CCTV camera network.
- New York Times on how people perceive their incomes as high/medium/low
- “Data Visualisation in the Humanities”, from New Left Review. “What interests us is visualization as a practice, in the conviction that practices—what we learn to do by doing, by professional habit, without being fully aware of what we are doing—often have larger theoretical implications than theoretical statements themselves.“
- Why does Google Maps have a fake New York neighbourhood called “Haberman”?
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 »
The UK suicide graph rather implies that those born around 1970 are at greatest risk … the peak suicide death rate follows that cohort.
5 years ago
This also makes me wonder about the Lead hypothesis. The linked article wants to make it about personal choice:
“One possible explanation could be that this generation has a higher proportion of long-term heroin users with failing health and are therefore at greater risk of poisoning, according to Public Health England.”
But that makes it odd that suicides move in parallel. Lead paint gets banned awfully close in time to this inflection and is followed by lead gas bans.
I don’t think this is the only explanation but keeping it in mind might be an alternative to the idea that this generation is just self infliciting harm because they like drugs.
5 years ago
Yes, I noticed that my generation is also the ‘peak lead’ victims. There’s a similar peak in New Zealand, where heroin use (once a serious problem) has been very rare for the past 30 years.
5 years ago
It looks like there is some protective effect about being born around 1918 … which would make people around 20 in 1939.
I would guess that it’s a disproportionately female cohort. Or, less likely, that those prone to suicide put themselves in greater harms way during the war e.g. suicide by enemy fire.
I think this is one graph where it would be more interesting separated out into male and female graphs.
5 years ago