Support for changing asylum working rules is lower than a campaign suggests.
Does the British public support those seeking asylum being able to get a job? There are limitations on asylum-seekers working in the United Kingdom. After a year-long wait for a decision, they can get “shortage occupation list” jobs.
Refugee Action, a charity backing changes in the rules, claims: “We also…
Opinion polls take up another constitutional role: this time in Scotland.
Alister Jack MP, the Secretary of State for Scotland in the UK government, said:
If you consistently saw 60 per cent of the population wanting a referendum — not wanting independence, but wanting a referendum — and that was sustained over a reasonably long period, then I would acknowledge that…
To accompany my book, I created a website using the distill package.
With David Spiegelhalter, I co-authored a book of Covid-19 statistics. For the book, I wanted to create a website hosting the graph code, reviews, and purchase links. Some elements of this site remain a work in progress.
Using R Markdown, one package and limited coding can produce a site. …
Data wrangling is not what some people would call fun.
I co-authored ‘Covid By Numbers’ to help explain epidemic statistics. Penguin Random House published this book on 7th October 2021. We finished major updates to the manuscript back in May. That means some graphs and statistics in the book refer to figures published back in that month. …
StatsWales publishes Covid-19 vaccine wastage statistics.
According to Our World of Data, over six billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines went into arms. In an operation of this scale, some doses will go unused. A recent Telegraph headline stated: “UK to throw 800,000 AstraZeneca doses in the bin after take-up falls”.
In the Delta waves, are children more at risk?
How SARS-CoV-2 affects children is a major concern, with outbreaks in schools.
One question is: for children, does the Delta variant mean higher hospitalisation rates? There are two main mechanisms:
- Greater transmission: the Delta variant spreads with more ease than other variants.
- Greater severity: the Delta variant induces more serious…
What is the vaccine coverage by age groups in England?
On 9th September, Public Health England published a vaccine surveillance report. Robert Peston, the ITV political editor, highlighted statistics about unvaccinated case rates.
The concern was the population denominator in England, affecting interpretations of case rates. Many people covered this issue, including James Ward, Colin Angus, and BBC’s More and…
A holiday for statisticians went to Manchester this year.
The Royal Statistical Society international conference went to Manchester for 2021. This conference had both in-person events — some of which were online — and online talks.
Opening the conference
Organisers asked me to help open the conference with presentations about Covid-19 statistics. This talk was to focus on my voluntary work with…
A poster and presentation at the RSS conference featured flawed analysis.
An analyst from the Pension and Population Research Institute gave a rapid-fire talk. This was a five-minute talk at the Royal Statistical Society conference in Manchester. That talk (plus a poster) asserted a strong link between abortions and breast cancer. …
Analytical decisions affect estimates when working from identical data.
When analysing data, what decisions do we make? Given a problem to solve, there are many dividing paths we could take. Those decisions could affect outputs of our analysis, such as estimates and intervals.
A pre-print analysis gave the same data and question to 73 research teams. The data involved…
