I went to a talk this week at my son’s school by Paul Dillon, from Drug and Alcohol research training Australia. I had heard great things about Paul as a speaker, but not the thing that impressed me most – he had great statistics! So time for a blog postContinue Reading
I’ve just published my annual round-up of my non fiction reading for last year here. Do go and read the whole post, but here I’ll just mention my absolute favourites for the year (or at least the ones I keep telling people to go and read): Dark Emu: Aboriginal AustraliaContinue Reading
Depending on how you measure it, Australia is generally in the top 5 countries in the world for life expectancy. And we continue to improve. But Australia shamefully has an enormous gap in life outcomes between indigenous and non indigenous people. And over the period that of these statistics, while both indigenous and non indigenous mortality has improved, the gap has widened, with standardised indigenous death rates going from 164% of non indigenous rates to 172% of non indigenous rates between 2003 and 2017. So we may be the lucky country, but we certainly aren’t lucky for everyone.Continue Reading
Everybody Lies, What the Internet Can tell us about who we really are, by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is an economist and data scientist. He uses data, particularly massive data about google searches, to draw conclusions about human behaviour. I loved this book, and to the frustration of my family, IContinue Reading
Factfulness, Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think by Hans Rosling (with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund) Hans Rosling is the person who introduced me to Ted Talks, with this classic talk on visualising the world through statistics. I’ve used it aContinue Reading
The Sydney Morning Herald published its annual analysis of public and private school enrolments last week. So I thought I’d have a look behind the stats to see if there is more nuance when you dive a little deeper. The Herald’s key message was: An annual stocktake of the nation’sContinue Reading
There’s recently been a bit of interest in Julia Lessing‘s post here – Is there really a gender gap for actuaries? So I thought it was time to look at the most recent statistics. I had a look at the latest information from the Australian census (using my new favouriteContinue Reading
In what is now my traditional first post of the year, I’ve written my usual round-up of my reading for the year here. A fairly eclectic set of books, with perhaps a bit more memoir than normal. My two favourites were these: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu The Bad-Ass LibrariansContinue Reading
I rarely see mortality statistics from Australia. So here from Actuarial Eye is an infographic you can use whenever someone wants to know just how afraid of crocodiles they should be. Wishing an enjoyable festive season to all of my readers – and try and avoid all of theseContinue Reading
Prompted by a friend, I’ve been taking a look at the data for NSW school suspensions, particularly for aboriginal students. You have to get deep into the NSW Board of Education website to do this (and convert pdfs into excel spreadsheets!) but it is worth it. In Australia, we haveContinue Reading