Briefly
- There’s a survey put out by the World Bank with what it calls basic financial literacy questions. Lots of people didn’t give the intended answers. As Felix Salmon explains, that’s because they were silly questions:
Nothing useful can be learned by going up to poor workers in, say, Afghanistan (to take the very first country on the list), and asking them this question. They don’t have banks, and if they do have banks they don’t have savings accounts, and if they do have savings accounts they don’t hold on to them for five years, and if they do hold on to them for five years they’ll probably end up with nothing at all…
- Graeme Edgeler explains again why you don’t need deliberate wrong answers in the flag referendum
- The government is asking for public comment on “Draft Guidelines for Natural Health Products Evidence Requirements.“
- Some things shouldn’t be maps. One example is homes of 187 victims of child homicide over the past 23 years, mapped with the 2013 deprivation index in Stuff. On top of the inappropriateness of the map, and the time misalignment, there does actually exist serious research on risk factors for child abuse, both here and abroad: it’s not a matter of Stuff ‘discovering’ things.
- David Spiegelhalter on an example of misreporting of criticism of misreporting of stats
- NZ Herald ‘Insights’ section continues to be good: time series of rental costs across NZ.
- US artist Chad Hagen has a lovely set of prints titled “Nonsensical Infographics“, with the form of data visualisation but no content
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 »