April 12, 2021

Briefly

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  • Henry Cooke for the Dominion Post “A routine report on the Government’s mental health services was delayed for over a year as officials battled behind the scenes over plans to dramatically reduce the amount of data in it”
  • A letter in response by Len Cook (former  NZ and UK chief statistician): “Few important agency statistics are prepared in order to comply with a law; rather, they maintain  public trust and inform practitioners in the field of progress and conditions across the populations of importance”
  • Kate Newton writes in the Sunday Star-Times about the impact of pre-departure Covid testing, “In the two-and-a-half months prior, the average (mean) case rate was 0.66 new cases per 1000 people in managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ). In the following two-and-a-half months, the daily rate has fallen – but only slightly — to 0.55.”
  • Derek Thompson in the Atlantic on vaccine misinformation “In a crowded field of wrongness, one person stands out: Alex Berenson.” 
  • Dan Bouk and danah boyd: The technopolitics of the U.S. census “Almost no one notices the processes that produce census data—unless something goes terribly wrong. Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder argue that this is a defining aspect of infrastructure: it “becomes visible upon breakdown.” In this paper, we unspool the stories of some technical disputes that have from time to time made visible the guts of the census infrastructure and consider some techniques that have been employed to maintain the illusion of a simple, certain count. “
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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
    Steve Curtis

    In response to the Stuff story which claims the data shows ‘Pre-departure testing seems to have had little impact on the number of Covid-19 cases being detected at the border.

    Souixie Wiles comes to different conclusions from the data
    https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/12-04-2021/siouxsie-wiles-the-data-behind-the-decision-to-suspend-arrivals-from-india-in-nz/
    The data from beginning of year shows those from overseas had a 5% positive rate, but this month those from India alone had jumped to 10% positive and the upward trend could see the numbers overwhelm the MIQ facilities and the care they require.
    It seems one country is skewing the results.

    BTW , I love the term techno-politics and it might just end up as ‘the word’ of this decade.

    4 years ago

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      I don’t read Siouxsie as disagreeing with that — she is arguing that the closure of arrivals from India is justified, which is a different issue. You get broadly the same conclusion on the effectiveness of pre-departure testing if you exclude the recent spike of arrivals from India: it isn’t having a huge effect, but it may be having a modest effect.

      4 years ago