Tagged: Gus Reed
Europe: 10 centuries in five minutes
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From the Centennia Historical Atlas via Gus Reed.
Vandalizing the census – cont.
Gus Reed really hates the long census questionnaire:
I admit to some disappointment that you have so totally and uncritically capitulated to the Forces of Social Planning on the census issue. Contrarians need to be contrary. Apart from the indisputably careless design of the long form (or the sloppy posting of an unedited version), there are a couple of things that rankle:
Many of the questions are sort of inherently interesting, but that doesn’t mean they should be asked. What government policy hinges on knowing the birthplace of my parents (#25)?
I like this statement attached to the race/ethnicity question: “This information is collected to support programs that promote equal opportunity for everyone to share in the social, cultural and economic life of Canada.” It would be good discipline to have such a statement attached to each question, or at least each section. If the statement is not succinct and understandable, then it’s a good indication that someone’s just fishing: “We want to know where your parents were born because your government is considering a system of preferential immigration based on national origin.”
More argument, and Contrarian rebuttal, after the jump – photos included!
Census: a mistake in the long form
Contrarian reader Gus Reed has found a mistake in Census Canada’s long form questionnaire — or at least in the sample that appears on the agency’s website.
It seems to me that at the top of page 5 the columns should be labeled “Person 3,” “Person 4,” and “Person 5″ – continuing the logic of page 4. Is it my PDF reader that’s wrong, or did StatsCan send out 2.4 million errors?
StatsCan hasn’t sent out anything yet, and there’s still time to fix the error, along with the much more serious mistake of making the long form voluntary. But Gus is right. The headers are inconsistent in a way that might lead respondents to omit information about some household members, or else enter responses in the wrong place. It’s hard to describe the problem without looking at the form, but this ought to be fixed.
Gus has a lot more to say about the long form. Stay tuned.
Crime as altitude – feedback
Contrarian friend Gus Reed doesn’t think altitude maps add much to our understanding of complex social issues:
These graphs don’t meet the minimum standard for clarity. Your pal Edward Tufte would be appalled. What is the scale of the z-dimension? Are we to suppose that the high peak for narcotics is on the same scale as the high peak for prostitution? Absolute numbers? Percentages? Logarithmic? I’m suspicious that McCune is mixing his units.
And I don’t like the fundamental assumption that it’s OK to smooth this kind of data. Consider the three hills of prostitution down by Fisherman’s Wharf. They are almost certainly hotels, yet they have volume and give the impression that prostitution is a spreading neighborhood crime wave. Better to use some more accurate and consistent visualization like dots (as on the SFPD KML files from which this is taken).
Furthermore, as some commenter about halfway down McCune’s post says, the unit isn’t crime, but incident reports. It would be instructive to map donut shops, say, as a reality check. Or distance from police station. Are they maps of crime, or just maps of cops?
This kind of simplistic use of numbers is fraught with pitfalls. It makes a complicated phenomenon into a simple problem of location. It usually turns out that peaks are located over poor neighborhoods, and it encourages a two-dimensional approach to crime. It’s easily fudgeable. Give me some numbers — “the use of hyperbole on Boulardrie Island” — and I can make it look very bad for you. At the very least, we are entitled to know what the z-scale is.
Chris Macormick, more a fan of visual thinking than Gus, makes the same point about underlying poverty, and offers this poverty map of the Bay area, by Catherine Mulbrandon of Visualizingeconomics.com, as corroboration:
Zoom in on downtown SanFrancisco, and the correlation is evident, albeit at low resolution:
Chris writes:
Altitude maps of crime are interesting as a way to see patterns easier than perhaps numerical rates do. However they disguise other patterns in the same way, eg. class, policing.
Disgaggregated crime statistics show spatial variations in crime, whether they’re presented visually or numerically. But when comparing income distribution in SF to crime distribution some loose associations are available:
Prostitution is tightly localized in several poor areas Narcotics is more widespread but also in poor areas Theft is more widely distributed and extends in rich areas olicing is probably more prevalent in poor areas, especially for the victimless crimes of sex and drugs, and he crimes depicted are by definition lower class crimes. I would like to see a map of tax evasion, price-fixing, insider-trading, embezzlement, tax fraud, environmental pollution and other cozy crimes of the powerful… Just saying.
What’s the difference between a “no queers” sign and a set of steps?
Haligonian Warren Reed has a sobering take on our discussion about potential “cures” for people with Down syndrome:
I am still stuck on the Down Syndrome thread. As Canadians with disabilities will tell you, Canada has a medical model of disability. The approach is, “let’s fix what’s wrong with you,” rather than, “let’s fix what’s wrong with us.” Hence the inaccessible buses, devilish sidewalks, and antediluvian building codes. The result is a hidden and large group of people who are disenfranchised, undervalued, ignored, and sometimes abused. See the shocking account in Monday’s Chronicle-Herald.
One of my big defeats was an unsuccessful complaint against poor building codes I made to the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission in 2006. I thought it was pretty compelling, but the HRC are evidently a bunch of cowards who declined to get involved in improving lives.
I’m not disappointed anymore—just angry. Can you explain the difference between a “No Queers” sign and a set of steps confronting a wheelchair user? Chances are your local MLA maintains an inaccessible constituency office. A government that can’t include it’s most vulnerable citizens loses its moral authority.
This kind of systematic discrimination creates a climate where disabled people are second-class. Is it a surprise that they’re abused by those who should be protecting them? For people in wheelchairs and people with Down Syndrome Canada is a disappointing, dangerous place.
