

The state and statistics

Riding the data wave

The swell of freely available official information, and its consequences

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Readers' comments




Indeed, one of the main difficulties is that the data that is out there still needs to be transformed into something usable for software programs to display.
Training users in order to replace their old habits is difficult.
There's no mention of how much advertising the apps that use government data have done, if they're supported by ads, how much they cost, etc. How accessible are they and do people actually know about them?
Perhaps software developers are better off targeting the businesses and the government since management can mandate the use of apps and provide training for them as well.






You can Google "Executable English" to find this.



We have been looking at ways to release useful NHS data without compromising privacy of patients by replacing identifying characteristics name, address, etc. with a simple code representative of the patients location. Thus each episode in a hospital has no private information - just a code between 1 and 41.

These numbers can be a link to other data sets. For example, the amount of pizza people consume. Unsurprisingly, we found that people that eat pizza frequently are more likely to have coronary disease.

We have yet to think through how this compares with the recent study that eating red meat shortens your life.

But we suspect that this geo-demographic methodology can be used as an inexpensive way of looking for possible health effects. Do see "Unlocking meaning from private data" (http://www.beacon-dodsworth.co.uk/blog/general-news/unlocking-meaning-fr...)

Comments welcome.

P.S. We hope the Secretary of State can use this method to unlock the meaning from health statistics. See "An open letter to the Secretary of State for Health" (http://www.beacon-dodsworth.co.uk/blog/general-news/set-our-data-free-an...)

Geoff Beacon

Beacon Dodsworth Limited



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