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...

28 July, 2010

Harper spokespeople argue that sending the voluntary census long form to a larger number of people will compensate for any loss of data quality due to the newly voluntary nature of the form. Milan Ilnyckyj explains the fallacy. One of the biggest challenges in statistics is collecting a representative sample: finding a subset of the population that will do a good job of approximating the whole group. When a dataset contains a lot of sampling bias and is not reflective of the general population, it is essentially worthless as a guide. That cannot be fixed by using a larger sample size, nor...

23 July, 2010

The only voice I've heard in support of the Harper government's census vandalism is that of the libertarian Fraser Institute, which believes data of the kind produced by the mandatory long form should be available only to those who can afford to pay to gather it. Coincidentally, German artist Fabian Brunsing has produced a whimsical video that hints at the dystopic world we might achieve if the Fraserites get their way (or Harper gets a majority): Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan...

20 July, 2010