Census questions - view on the website

The 2026 Census was in the media a few weeks back for all the wrong reasons.

The issue is about whether the questions of sexual orientation and gender identity should be included in the 2026 Census.

McNamara fallacy - view on the website

Usually having named something after you is a positive experience, at least for statisticians.

The tortoise and the hare - view on the website

“It is so much more fun to be a little richer than you were yesterday, than merely to be rich.” — Alice Wellington Rollins

I'd restate the above quote as "velocity is more important than position".

People in orbit and skeleton counts - view on the website

Last week, a new record was set for the number of people in the Earth's orbit at one time: 19.

What's special about 19? Not much. Is knowing that 19 people are currently in space any more important or useful than when your child learns that the Stegosaurus had 19 plates on its back? No.

Pain diaries and stamps - view on the website

Keeping a pain diary probably isn't something you discuss with your health practitioner. The idea is as simple as it sounds: When you feel pain, you note down where the pain is, how much you feel, and, if so inclined, what caused it.

In a couple of weeks, you'll have enough data to find patterns and adjust. The person who told me of this idea happened to realise that two days after their hard gym session for the week, they felt pain. They split the hard session up, and that resolved one data point. They slowly worked at their diary over time to find what we'd call correlations in statistics.

Looking for happiness in the future - view on the website

I recently read the following quote from a book written a century ago by Thomas Mitchell.

"People are always looking for happiness at some future time and in some new thing, or some new set of circumstances, in possession of which they some day expect to find themselves. But the fact is, if happiness is not found now, where we are, and as we are, there is little chance of it ever being found. There is a great deal more happiness around us day by day than we have the sense or the power to seek and find."

Spending differences and boring questions - view on the website

There are very few examples of exponential growth - poorly designed surveys might be one of the few examples that we all suffer through.

There are broadly two types of surveys:

Rainfall and Olympic pools - view on the website

We can't imagine scale. Our ability to estimate anything large, complicated, or opaque is poor.

Area is often referred to 'as the number of football fields,' and volume is 'the number of Olympic pools.' Do you know the area or volume of either? No. Me neither.

As a side note, in looking up the number of Olympic pools in Sydney harbour (238,000), I came across that 'Sydharb' is a unit of volume of water in Australia - 562 gigalitres.

Last year, I helped someone build a shed (7m by 12m). During the week, it drizzled on and off most days. Only when we had the roof up but not installed the gutter could you see the water running off the shed. In this brief construction period, it was apparent how much water was falling over a relatively small area.

If you'd asked me to estimate the volume of water coming off the roof based on the rain I’d seen all week, I would have been off by more than I could imagine. I've spent considerable time in the rain and am generally good at estimation.

Did it matter that I was wrong with my estimate? No. The water would be stored in a tank, and we didn’t need to do anything with this information.

Whatever you're estimating should matter more, and you're probably no better than I am.

Next time you're in a meeting, and someone says, 'I think it's about', remember that a poor guess is worse than no guess.

If you're going to bother guessing, spend the time and effort to come up with a reasonable approximation.

Eye colour and portfolio types - view on the website

In any introductory statistics course, you'll learn that the four types of data are nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio. You'll be assessed on this with a multiple-choice question: What data type is Celsius? Then promptly forget this information, probably for the rest of your life.

Unlike most aspects of statistics, the names are instructional. Nominal means no order. Ordinal means there is order, but the gaps have no meaning. Interval means there is order and the gaps are equal. Ratio means there is order, the gaps have meaning and zero means what you'd expect (nothing).

Whilst this is in theory useful, few, if any people will ever use analysis techniques for data other than ratio. I wish the notes I taught to had the following diagram.

If you're keen to read up in more detail Statology, Statistics by Jim and GraphPad have more examples on this topic.

Ice sculptures and production lines - view on the website

If you want to find commercial value in data, the approach will have more in common with an ice sculpture than a production line.

If I looked at how your organisation uses data and saw most of the effort is automation, I'd say you're running a production line. Taking analytical tools from manufacturing and applying these to other industries has failed more than it has succeeded.

If I saw an enormous amount of effort to answer one question with beauty and grace I'd say you're producing an ice sculpture. The sculpture takes planning, and there's risk. From the first cut with the chisel, you need to know what you're working towards. You don't have the luxury of 'seeing what's interesting'.

You want your data analytics to be like an ice sculpture so that people will engage with the work, not glance over it. Few casually walk past an ice sculpture, and even fewer marvel at a production line.

To deliver on the promise of data analytics, spend more time thinking about ice sculptures and less time about production lines (yes, even if you're in manufacturing).