Natstats opened on Wednesday evening and had its first full day today. For those who aren’t aware, it’s a conference all about statistics organized by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, with the theme of this event being around “Measuring what counts: economic development, wellbeing and progress in 21st century Australia”. It’s only the second time it has been staged but judging by the success thus far and quality of speakers, certainly not the last. I’ll leave official reports of talks etc to others but I would like to share some stories from people I’ve had the pleasure of talking with during the conference today. I invite attendees to add their own stories in the comments section.
Landlines
Here’s an odd one to start with. Associate Professor Warren Laffen works in the Institute for Social Science Research, which is part of the University of Queensland. He is involved in a huge range of research projects and one in particular caught my interest. It’s a study they only recently commenced comparing profiles of people who have only mobile phones to those who use only landlines. Why would you want to do that? Well, apparently some phone surveys only use landline numbers and the idea behind this research is to find out how the results of such surveys might be biased because of this. It struck me as rather obscure but at the same time, I could understand the purpose and value in running such a study. It’s the same with many stats collected – they may not be of value to us all but for some, they are very important and meaningful. I formed a picture in my mind of the “landliners”: homely elderly folk sitting around knitting and never having churned from Telstra to another provider, let alone considered moving to a mobile. I was a little surprised when I sat down for the Natstats dinner this evening and discovered that my 20-something year old neighbor and her husband, both with white collar jobs, living in Hobart, had only one landline to share at home and no mobiles.
Wikiprogress Crowd Sourcing
Philippa Lysaght from OECD introduced me to an intriguing idea for a statistical Web site in Wikiprogress. Partially funded by OECD, but also from many independent supporters, the idea behind this innovative site is to measure progress of societies from around the world. Read more about what it’s all about here. Being a wiki, it gathers statistics from any members of “the community” who choose to contribute. There are various indicators based on official stats on the site, as well as data created and shared by individual researchers, academics and the like. An obvious question statisticians would have about this is how the quality of the data is ascertained if everyone has the freedom to contribute. Well, that’s part of the challenge for Wikiprogress and something that Philippa said they are working hard to keep on top of. They certainly have plenty of officially sourced statistics that have been contributed, and working out reasonable ways of accepting and presenting statistics from related (or not) communities is something that they are managing so far. Perhaps they might help us to find a middle path that can help reconcile the gap between official and community statistics (see the earlier post about community koala data vs official sources), especially given there are so many things we want to count and only so many statistical organizations around to do the work.
Another interesting thing to see was the level of Twitter use at the conference. Jeanette Cotterill, who was the lead person at ABS responsible for organizing the event (well done, Jeanette and team!!), explained that there had been some concerns about making Twitter an official part of Natstats communications, but the decision was taken that it was a good opportunity to engage with people and indeed, so far there has been some happy Tweeting from a number of participants, as well as from the official @Natstats2010 Twitterer. Seeing as it’s a stats conference, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note something about Twitter use in stats: there were 10 unique people on Twitter on this first day tweeting about Natstats, out of an overall attendance of around 500. Maybe someone can work out how that profile compares to the proportion of Twitter users in the population at large: are Natstats attendees more or less likely to use Twitter than other folk?
Trust
I’ll close with another statistic, this one from the ABS chief statistician, Brian Pink. He noted that 92% of the Australian public trust official statistics. Oddly enough, that stat doesn’t come from the ABS but from an independent survey that the ABS has commissioned to find out more about public opinion around official statistics. You’ll have to wait for World Statistics Day on October 20 to find out more about the results.
Well, thanks so much to the many people who attended Natstats and have made it a thoroughly enjoyable experience for myself and my colleague Mark Humphreys and no doubt many others. Please do feel free to add you own sentiments or stories about Natstats in the comments. I wish you well on day two and look forward to speaking with many of you at our booth (and if you mention this post, you’ll get an extra lolly of your choice).