Group items tagged

Nice discussion on privacy, "How much do you value your privacy? Does it bother you what social media companies, governments know about you - your money, your body?"

The proposal to drug test welfare recipients keeps on bouncing back. The most recent attempt, announced last week, is now the third proposal since 2017. But the tenacity with which the government is pursuing this agenda reflects, not necessarily a fixed policy position, but rather a moral stance. And this moral stance conflicts with that of the proposals' critics. Are we doomed to countless repeats of the same policy proposal? Or, as the Australian Social Policy Conference heard in Sydney this week, can we use philosophical arguments to help break the deadlock?

House prices rise, affordability expected to worsen despite property slowdown later this year: CBA By business reporter Michael Janda Updated about 3 hours ago Auction sign on house replaced with sold sign Photo: Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart led gains for the month, quarter and year. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore) Related Story: Property investor borrowing drives credit surge Related Story: Property investors lead home loan surge Related Story: Wealthiest suburbs among most vulnerable to mortgage stress Map: Australia If you thought it was hard to get into the housing market, it may yet get worse unless the Federal Government changes tax policies to reduce investor demand. Key points: Sydney home prices up 16pc over 12 months, Melbourne up 11.8pc CBA economists call for "gradual reforms to both supply and demand issues" Bank regulator likely to intensify investor loan crackdown That is the warning of economists at Australia's biggest mortgage lender, the Commonwealth Bank.

'Middle Australia' earns much less than the government would have you believe and women continue to earn much less than men. ...The 2014-15 taxation statistics released last week revealed that the median taxable income of the 9.95m Australians with a taxable income was just $54,543. If you earned more than that, then you earned more than at least half of Australians.

the BBC has uncovered a sombre data gap that may be having a profound effect on good governance for some countries in Africa. Only eight out of more than 50 African countries investigated by the BBC have a compulsory system to register deaths, meaning many lack a complete view of mortality trends. This could be having a far-reaching influence on a number of key policy areas - including resource allocation and understanding the impact of Covid-19.

Statistics have played an important role both in our understanding of the coronavirus pandemic, and our attempts to fight it. The RSS sets out ten lessons the government can learn, and a series of recommendations for what they should do now, to ensure that the country's data infrastructure is prepared for the next crisis - whatever form it takes.

in our research, which involves talking to statisticians, public servants and journalists who produce and communicate the statistics that govern our lives, people say overwhelmingly that faith and trust are essential parts of what makes statistics useful. Despite the objective and impartial appearance of statistics, it is a web of people and human processes that makes them trustworthy.

Mashable's series Algorithms explores the mysterious lines of code that increasingly control our lives - and our futures. The world in 2020 has been given plenty of reasons to be wary of algorithms. Depending on the result of the U.S. presidential election, it may give us one more. Either way, it's high time we questioned the impact of these high-tech data-driven calculations, which increasingly determine who or what we see (and what we don't) online. The impact of algorithms is starting to scale up to a dizzying degree, and literally billions of people are feeling the ripple effects. This is the year the Social Credit System, an ominous Black Mirror-like "behavior score" run by the Chinese government, is set to officially launch. It may not be quite as bad as you've heard, but it will boost or tighten financial credit and other incentives for the entire population. There's another billion unexamined, unimpeachable algorithms hanging over a billion human lives.

As Omicron surges through the community, getting the right answer from a Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) is not as straightforward as reading one or two lines off the kit. RATs are a convenient diagnostic tool to detect COVID virus fragments in nasal secretions or saliva. They are designed to be self-administered and give an answer in minutes. Detecting infection early is critical to preventing spread and allowing persons at risk of severe disease to get timely access to close monitoring and new life-saving therapies. As governments plan to distribute tens of millions of RAT kits to schools and workplaces in coming weeks to help Australians work and study safely, it is important that we understand how to best use this diagnostic tool to reduce transmission and unnecessary disruptions to our lives and economy.

Excellent analysis from the FT (you'll need to login to view via the link) that uses knowledge of the Mean and Median to show that some companies have reported incorrect (fabricated?) pay-gap information! One in 20 UK companies that have submitted gender pay gap data to the government have reported numbers that are statistically improbable and therefore almost certainly inaccurate, a Financial Times analysis has found. Sixteen companies, each with more than 250 employees, reported that they paid their male and female staff exactly the same, that is they had a zero average gender pay gap measured by both the mean and median. Experts on pay said that it was highly anomalous for companies of that size to have median and mean pay gaps that were identical because the two statistics measure different things. The mean gap measures the difference between the average male and female salary while the median gap is calculated using the midpoint salary for each gender.

Maths quiz. If you take a Covid test that only gives a false positive one time in every 1,000, what's the chance that you've actually got Covid? Surely it's 99.9%, right? No! The correct answer is: you have no idea. You don't have enough information to make the judgment.