Covid-19 testing in England’s secondary schools: the story so far

Last week, secondary schools in England reopened for all pupils, after several months of semi-closure due to the Covid-19 pandemic. During that period, most teachers were busy labouring hard to conduct their lessons remotely, often persevering with minimal extra resources and inconsistent central guidance. A smaller proportion were still going to school, in order to … Continue reading Covid-19 testing in England’s secondary schools: the story so far →

Code-efficient alternatives to CASE WHEN statements in SQL

The CASE statement in SQL is the archetypal conditional statement, corresponding to the "if <A> then <B> else <C>" construct in other languages. Here's a quick refresher on what it looks like. Imagine we have a data table consisting of people, their ages and the number of years they've lived at their current and previous … Continue reading Code-efficient alternatives to CASE WHEN statements in SQL →

Should an AI’s opinion of your personality affect whether you get a job?

Source: Retorio At first glance, that question may feel like a perfect example of Betteridge's law of headlines, the adage which states that if a headline ends in a question mark then one can usually assume the answer is no. That might well be the case here, but it doesn't seem like it's stopping some … Continue reading Should an AI’s opinion of your personality affect whether you get a job? →

Official UK Covid-19 vaccination progress data

Now that the Covid-19 vaccination program is under way, data fans might be interested in obtaining the stats of how the UK is doing in terms of vaccinations administered so far. The NHS is publishing a variety of these reports and, even better, the underlying data here. The most comprehensive data there is likely the … Continue reading Official UK Covid-19 vaccination progress data →

Solving the the case of the 6cm man with assertive programming

Liam Thorp, political editor of the Liverpool Echo, was recently surprised to receive an invite to receive a Covid-19 vaccine. Whilst the UK does seem to be numerically ahead in absolute terms of many (but not all) other countries when it comes to at putting first-doses into people, we're still at the stage where only … Continue reading Solving the the case of the 6cm man with assertive programming →

Do Millennials have no friends?

I recently read an article claiming that 22% of Millennials say they have no friends. And then many other articles with the same figure. This made me feel sad. Some of the articles further distinguished between "close" and "best" friends, so here we're presumably talking about just any friend of any level at all. Sure, … Continue reading Do Millennials have no friends? →

How to be happy: the data driven answer (part 1)

A fundamental goal for many people, explicit or otherwise, is to be maximally happy. Easily said, not always so easily done. So how might we set about raising our level of happiness? OK, at some level, we're all individuals with our own set of wishes and desires. But, at a more macro level, there are … Continue reading How to be happy: the data driven answer (part 1) →

Using R to run many hypothesis tests (or other functions) on subsets of your data in one go

It's easy to run a basic hypothesis test in R, once you know how. For example, if you've a nice set of data that you know meets the relevant assumptions, then you can run a t test in the following sort of way . Here we'll assume that you're interested in comparing the differences in … Continue reading Using R to run many hypothesis tests (or other functions) on subsets of your data in one go →

Extracting the date and time a UUID was created with Bigquery SQL (with a brief foray into the history of the Gregorian calendar)

I was recently working with records in a database that were identified by a Universally Unique Identifier, aka a UUID. These IDs are strings of characters that look something like "31ae75f0-cbe0-11e8-b568-0800200c9a66". I needed to know which records were generated during in a particular time period, but sadly there was no field about dates to be … Continue reading Extracting the date and time a UUID was created with Bigquery SQL (with a brief foray into the history of the Gregorian calendar) →

Average age at menarche by country

A question came up recently about variations in the age at menarche - the first occurrence of menstruation for a female human - with regards to the environment. A comparison by country seemed like a reasonable first step in noting whether there were in fact any significant, potentially environmental, differences in this age. A quick … Continue reading Average age at menarche by country →