Posts filed under Just look it up (284)

Automated location information can be very useful, but if the ‘location’ is an area and the automated result is a single point, it’s easy to get misled.

• I wrote about an interactive map of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks, and the pertussis epidemic it maps as being in the  Ngaanyatjarra lands in Australia’s Western Desert.
• Mapping mentions of ‘Nigeria’ to the centre of the country was one of the problems of the 538 piece on kidnappings last week
• An analysis relating right-wing politics to porn viewing, among its other issues, had a lot of users mapped to Kansas, because that’s where the centre of the USA is.
• Wayne Dobson, who lives in Las Vegas, doesn’t have your cell phone. His house is where a lot of ‘uncertain location’ phone positions get mapped to.

Following up on the “net tax” tangle, Keith Ng has a step by step explanation of how income tax and income distribution has changed over recent years in NZ.

You can also play with the visualisation yourself. Or, if you want to see the arguments about it, they’ll be on his Public Address post.

Keith Ng has his annual interactive graphic of budget changes up at Public Address, and will soon have a graphic showing how overall forecasts have changed over time.

[update] And Harkanwal Singh has his version up at the Herald

Attention conservation notice: I have to write this post because I’ve spent too much time on it otherwise. You don’t have to read it.

There was an episode of “Yes, Prime Minister” where the term “Human Resource Rich Countries” was being posed as a replacement for “Less Developed Countries”, meaning “poor”. “Resources” is a word that can mean lots of different things, which is why I spent more time than was strictly sensible investigating the following graph

The graph appeared in my Twitter feed last Monday. It’s originally from a campaign to give Australia a school funding model a bit more like NZ’s decile system, as recommended by a national review panel, so it is disturbing to see New Zealand almost at the bottom of the world.

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Via Stuff and the DimPost

Tens of thousands of well-off pensioners are claiming up to half a billion dollars in superannuation every year.

With government debt at more than $60 billion, critics say the wealthy are asking their children and grandchildren to fund their so-called retirement.

Ministry of Social Development figures revealed more than 26,000 people with total income of more than $70,000 a year claimed superannuation last year. At current rates, this could add up to $570m a year before tax..

From last year in the Herald via me

Imagine the public outrage if it were discovered that more than 80,000 New Zealanders were receiving wages, salaries and investment incomes of more than $6 billion a year, but were also receiving a benefit from the Government.

…

Income figures this week from Statistics NZ show more than 80,000 New Zealanders over the age of 65 receive wages, salaries and investment returns of more than $6.5 billion a year while claiming NZ Super.

The benefits to those 80,000-plus seniors are costing poorer taxpayers at least $1.3 billion a year. Many of these beneficiaries will be retired judges, politicians, chief executives, doctors, diplomats and lawyers who are well able to look after themselves.

It seems the problem is only half as bad now, without any policy changes.  Either that, or people really don’t know where they would like to draw the line.

Today, Wiki New Zealand came to our department to talk about their work.  I mentioned them in late 2012 when they first went live, but they’ve developed a lot since then.

The aim of Wiki New Zealand is to have ALL THE DATAS about New Zealand in graphical form, so that people who aren’t necessarily happy with spreadsheets and SQL queries can browse the information. Their front page at the moment has data on cannabis use, greenhouse gas emissions,  wine grape and olive plantings, autism, and smoking.

 Check them out. 

From Stuff: “New Zealand’s worst air is not where you think“.  That’s not actually true. New Zealand’s worst air, according to the story, is pretty much where I thought it would be, in coastal Canterbury and Otago.  However, if you search the Stuff website for the term “air pollution”, you get:

So if you expected Auckland to be the worst, you know who to blame.

Wiki New Zealand, which has information on all sorts of things, has a graph showing animal use for research/testing/teaching in NZ over time.  The data are from the annual report (PDF) of the National Animal Ethics Advisory Committee.

Here’s a slightly more detailed graph showing types of animals and who used them, over time.

It’s also important to remember that nearly all the livestock and domestic animals weren’t harmed significantly — research on things like different feed or stocking densities still counts.  Most of the rodents and rabbits ended up dead, as did about a third of the fish.

The two big increases recently are commercial livestock (most of which are no worse off than they would be anyway as livestock) and fish at universities. The increase in fish is probably due at least in part to substitution of zebrafish for mice in some biological research.

No, I don’t know what the government departments did with 40000 birds in 2009. [Update: thanks to James Green in comments, I now do. I]

[Update: here’s the data in accessible form]

An infographic tweeted by Bill Gates recently on the world’s deadliest animals

He’s trying to make the point that malaria is a really big deal, killing more people than human violence, which is true, and which is the impression from the infographic, so it’s not misleading in that sense.

However, mosquitos don’t rend people limb from limb. The mosquito deaths are due to mosquitos infecting people with malaria parasites. The human deaths, however, are just directly due to violence. If  he’d included deaths due to human-human transmission of infection (influenza, tuberculosis, HIV, …), humans would easily be at the top of the list again.

From the ACC

Julius Caesar was warned to beware the ‘Ides of March’. And perhaps Kiwis should take extra caution this Sunday.

That’s because April the 13th last year was the day on which the highest number of injuries happened during 2013.

Of course, April 13th wasn’t a Sunday last year. ACC helpfully give us the top five days last year for injuries

• 13 April – 8,067 claims
• 6 April – 8,024 claims
• 11 May – 7,988 claims
• 18 May – 7,757 claims
• 8 June – 7,732 claims.

What do all these days have in common? Well, let’s just say that the ACC warning for Sunday April 13 may be a bit late.