May 20, 2022

Briefly

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  • The WHO has released new estimates of Covid mortality.  Here’s Jon Wakefield, a statistician at the University of Washington, talking about them on PBS Newshour, Radio New Zealand, BBC’s More or Less, and Checks and Balance, at The Wire in India
  • A nice new Australian electoral map, just in time for the election
  • Some interesting sound-based data display from NASA. I’m not sure how well it works as communication
  • The making of a data visualisation — all the plots that Georgios Karamanis made in the process of looking at some data and making a final graphic
  • Media Council ruling on a terrible graph accompanying a column by Shane Reti in the Northern Advocate: “Opinion pieces must be based on a foundation of fact, and should not contain clear errors of fact.  There is no doubt that the graphs presented by Dr Reti as justifying his headline and comment in his column were misleading in that they did not fairly show the trend in cases through the period.”
  • The sources of data for online panel surveys are more complicated and messy than many people expect: “We began wondering about survey data sourcing when we noticed that since 2018, the Cooperative Election Study  has included data from Dynata, Critical Mix, and Prodege. This was a shock to us because among academic researchers, the Cooperative Election Study is widely understood as a survey conducted by YouGov“
  • A Twitter thread about Tesco Clubcard, perhaps the first store loyalty programme to focus on data collection
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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
    Bill Bennett

    We could do with a similar abstracted map of New Zealand electorates. I’ve seen some in the past, but I wonder why that Australian map uses hexagons… there are ways of creating maps that do a better job of maintaining the rough shape of areas.

    3 years ago

  • avatar
    Richard Penny

    Reminded me of Thomas’s paper on hexagonal map of NZ
    https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04435

    3 years ago