Editing what’s on and off the graph

The government’s Halloween press conference was an obvious example to use in my article for Computer Weekly on the good, bad and ugly of data visualisation during the pandemic. Before one slide headed ‘England new SPI-M combined projection bed usage’, chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance actually said “this is a complicated slide”. No argument there (see below). Professor Chris Whitty charged through 10 slides in under seven minutes.

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Au revoir, Ojeu

In a few hours’ time, those of us who watch UK public sector will say au revoir to one of our most generous providers of stories. From 1 January 2021, UK public sector procurement notices – announcements that an organisation is thinking about or offering to buy something, has bought it or has cancelled its plans – will no longer appear on Tenders Electronic Daily, aka TED, aka the Supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union, aka Ojeu. Continue reading “Au revoir, Ojeu”

Covid-19 coronavirus in England mapped by cases per million

Good to see that a team including George Bennett at the BBC and Leo Falcomer-Dawson at Bloomberg have set up Covid Live UK, a similar population-adjusted map covering all of the UK rather than just England, updated daily. Nice to note the organisers eventually came to the same conclusion that I did, which is that shades of blue are the way to go.
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Supporting students: the role of data analysis in improving welfare

Article by SA Mathieson, Guardian Labs, (Transforming the student experience series paid for Jisc), 8 March 2019

Students are increasingly concerned about their mental health. One in six people aged 17 to 19 in England has a mental disorder, according to NHS Digital, and students are increasingly reporting mental health conditions to their institutions – 57,305 disclosed one in 2016-17, nearly six times as many as in 2007-08, according to data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

Dr Dominique Thompson, who worked as a university GP for nearly two decades and now advises universities on mental health, believes that students are under increasing pressure from an overly competitive society and a tyranny of perfectionism, all magnified by social media. “People are accepting that we have to do more for our young people,” she says. Continue reading “Supporting students: the role of data analysis in improving welfare”