The United Nations President of the General Assembly’s High-Level Panel on the development of a Multidimensional Vulnerability Index have (September 2023) released an Advanced Unedited Version of their Final Report, and along with it the scores on that... [Read more...]

So this tweet came across my feed. To save you going there it is about a selection exercise for a job for (I think) an IT start up, described proudly by its author as “insanely hard”; and the job is to find the radius of the brown circle in this ... [Read more...]

I am working to improve my knowledge of demography. This is something I've only had a relatively superficial engagement with but it's an important part of the responsibilities of the team where I work. A key tool in demography is a "life table", wh... [Read more...]

Motivation I usually talk about statistical inference as having one of three purposes: estimating some finite and defined population parameter, like the mean income of mechanical apprentices in 1890s London or the number of 5-9 year olds living in... [Read more...]

This interesting paper came out recently: A test of the predictive validity of relative versus absolute income for self-reported health and well-being in the United States, by David Brady, Michaela Curran and Richard Carpiano. It uses a large sample of... [Read more...]

Simple use of the draw_pac_map() function Last year I blogged about making a choropleth map of the Pacific, dealing with a few technical details like getting the map centred on the Pacific, using exclusive economic zones (EEZs) to colour things in for... [Read more...]

Motivation and key points So this tweet came across my feed. It refers to this article, Statistical Control Requires Causal Justification by Wysocki, Lawson and Rhemtulla, published in June last year (2022) in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psyc... [Read more...]

During the Covid-19 global health crisis, the organisation where I work - the Pacific Community, or SPC - compiled and published weekly updates on Covid-19 incidence, mortality and vaccination rates. This only recently stopped with the WHO determining ... [Read more...]

In a workshop session on data visualization earlier this week, Christophe Bontemps of the Statistical Institute for Asia and Pacific (SIAP) used as an example a range of infographics attempting to show, on a map of Asia and the Pacific, the proportion ... [Read more...]

Motivation In engaging with this Twitter thread four months ago, I discovered that there was a whole set of statistical methods that I knew nothing about - transforming data that is in the form of a simplex. Common examples of this sort of data would ... [Read more...]

I wanted to draw my own nice, clean map of the Pacific Island countries and territories that I work with in my day job; and a workflow I could use for producing statistical graphics with it, particularly choropleth maps. I am going to build this into m... [Read more...]

New job! I started an exciting new job just over a month ago. I am the Director of the Statistics for Development Division at the Pacific Community, which is commonly known by its now-old acronym the SPC (this used to stand for the South Pacific Commi... [Read more...]

Sad about Twitter pile-ons So this is a blog post about smoothing data that has been generated over time, and a bit about Twitter being mean. To cut to the chase, here’s my own version of the data in question. This is the Senate vote for nominations ... [Read more...]

A short post today to get me back in the swing of it, after a four month break - my longest since starting the blog. But a short post with a warning - this is something that nearly caught me out and has potentially catastrophic but silent (ie unnoticed... [Read more...]

Motivation So, there’s been a recent flurry of attention to the stock market. It prompted last week’s post. But it also reminded me to bubble up to higher in my priority list a project to create a database of daily security prices and short positions... [Read more...]

Like many people around the world I have been watching the rise and fall of share prices in the US retail chain GameStop with interest. There is plenty of narrative and interpretation of what happened around and time will provide many details that are ... [Read more...]

One of the more interesting projects I worked on in 2019 could be loosely described as building a Shiny app for the Royal Melbourne University of Technology (RMIT). But this wasn’t just any Shiny app. It was the front end for a big analytical data buil... [Read more...]

The other day while looking for something else altogether, I stumbled across naval-history.net, a website aiming to preserve historical naval documents and make them more available. I’m not sure if it’s still being actively worked on; the creator and k... [Read more...]

Terence Wood, Chris Hoy and Jonathan Pryke recently published this paper on The Effect of Geostrategic Competition on Public Attitudes to Aid. I was interested a) because of my past professional engagement with public attitudes to aid (my very first re... [Read more...]

You should all go watch Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) Earlier this year I watched Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) and wow, I cannot recommend this movie enough. Not only is it by far the best Hamlet I have ever seen (on stage or screen), it has a fair claim... [Read more...]