Open government…

What's our favourite MP, Paul Uppal, spending our time and money on now?

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government with reference to the answer of 27 March 2012, Official Report, column 1063W, on statistics,
(1) if he will request a formal pre-release investigation into the tweeting by a BBC journalist on 2 December 2012 of the section 16 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 notification letter issued by the UK Statistics Authority prior to it being issued on 6 December 2012;
(2) whether any staff of the UK Statistics Authority communicated to the BBC the intention to make a notification under section 16 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 prior to the formal notification on 6 December 2012.

Not the most accessible use of English, I grant you, but trust me: he's up to no good. The background is this: Housing Minister Grant Shapps - the epitome of smug Tory spivvery - got caught being, let's say, 'creative' with statistics, beyond the flexibility we usually expect of government ministers.

The Labour Party reported his abuse of the facts to the Statistics Authority, whose duty it is to vet and assess all figures used by government - a fine and essential organisation. The SA agreed that there's a problem and wrote to Mr Shapps asking to review his department's approach to stats, and Mr Shapps told them to sod off and then mentioned the war in the course of his attack on Labour's (admittedly poor) record on house-building.

Enter Mr Uppal. Is he overjoyed that a housing or statistics scandal is being exposed by a free press determined to hold power to account? No, don't be silly. He wants the whole thing hushed up, and is trying to start a witch-hunt against the civil servants he suspects notified the BBC of the decision to investigate Shapps' department.

Did the Bolshevik Broadcasting Authority suborn some fellow-traveller in the UK Statistics Authority in an attempt to subvert the sterling work of Mr Shapps?

In respect of (ii), when considering such matters the Authority's staff will provide officials in the relevant department(s) with information on the Authority's intentions. Officials at the Department for Communities and Local Government were therefore informed in respect of the Authority's intentions.
The Authority's staff will respond similarly to enquiries from interested parties, and following a subsequent enquiry to the Authority representatives of the BBC were advised of the Authority's intention to write to Ministers under section 16 of the 2007 Act.

Er… no. They clearly phoned up and asked what was happening. As the department had been notified, the Stats Authority released the information. Perfectly properly.

Another Uppal own goal

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a Very Boring Issue. Paul Uppal MP seems to believe that the BBC and the UK Statistics Agency (headed by Sir Michael Scholar, whom Boris Johnson called 'a Labour stooge') are in some kind of conspiracy against the government.

Uppal's popped up in Parliament once more to push this theme - implying that the UKSA illegally put pressure on the Housing Minister to improve his statistics after the BBC did some digging.

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office pursuant to the answer of 12 March 2012, Official Report, column 56W, on Homes and Communities Agency: statistics,
(1) if he will place in the Library a copy of the UK Statistics Authority guidance on communicating notifications under section 16 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 and any guidance on the practice of pre-releasing notifications;
(2) on what date the Board of the UK Statistics Authority took the decision under section 16 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 to write to the Minister of State for Housing and Local Government and to make a notification; and whether that decision was made at a formal meeting of the Board.

Poor man. The minister's reply not only stresses that the legal processes were followed, but he's forced to admit that the Housing Minister has failed to respond, a breach of his duties!

The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.
Letter from Sir Michael Scholar KCB, dated March 2012
As Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, I am replying to your questions asking (i) for a copy of the UK Statistics Authority guidance on communicating notifications under section 16 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 and any guidance on the practice of pre-releasing notifications
and (ii) on what date the Board of the UK Statistics Authority took the decision under section 16 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 to write to the Minister of State for Housing and Local Government and to make a notification; and if that decision was made at a formal meeting of the Board
Section 16 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 sets out the requirements placed on the UK Statistics Authority (referred to as the 'Statistics Board' in the Act) in respect of the process for making notifications under that section. The Statistics Authority complies with these requirements in all cases, The Statistics Authority ensures that all notifications under this section are laid before Parliament as the Act requires. Once the notification has been laid, a copy is placed on the Authority's website. The Authority's notification to the Minister of State for Housing and Local Government in respect of statistics produced by the Homes and Communities Agency and the Tenant Services Authority was sent to the Minister on 6 December 2011, laid before the House on 7 December 2011, and published on the Authority's website on 8 December 2011.
As Chair of the UK Statistics Authority I took the decision, following discussions within the Authority, to make a notification to the Minister of State for Housing and Local Government under section 16 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 in respect of statistics produced by the Homes and Communities Agency and the Tenant Services Authority. This was reported to the Authority Board at its meeting on 16 December 2011.
Under section 16 of the Act, the Minister, as the appropriate authority, is required to provide the Statistics Authority with a statement as to whether he intends to make a request for such an assessment. No reply has yet been received.

I'm sorry to waste your time with such tedious stuff, but it is instructive. It shows that Uppal has absolutely no interest in good governance or reliable statistics. Instead, politics to him is a war of attrition between his party and the rest of the world. Everyone's against him, whoever they are. He has no intellectual ability to understand that Scholar (who was a thorn in the side of the Labour government too) has a serious job to do, one that benefits the public. To Uppal, anyone who halts the juggernaut of total Tory domination is the enemy. It's genuinely worrying and pitiful that such small-minded, mean-spirited people get elected. Still, in this case, little Uppal's made to look foolish again.

Uppal: drearily predictable

As readers of Plashing Vole, you'll be a connoisseur of Boring Issues. So you won't be particularly surprised that our favourite MP is launching a Boring attack on the BBC. Warning:  Boring material coming. Do not operate heavy machinery while reading. 


It all started innocuously enough:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office
(1) what discussions the UK Statistics Authority have had with representatives of the BBC on the issue of Homes and Communities Agency statistics during 2011;
(2) what media briefings the UK Statistics Authority gave to the BBC on the issue of Homes and Communities Agency statistics.

What an odd - and Boring - question, I thought. Wonder what it's all about. It struck me that Boris Johnson recently called Sir Michael Scholar, the head of the UKSA, 'a Labour stooge' for ticking the government off for using dubious and unverified statistics. With this in mind, and knowing the Tories' hatred for the BBC, I suspect that Uppal is suffering a persecution complex at the hands of proper mathematics and what Tory MPs used to call the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation in the 1980s. 


So - and this is where it gets really Boring, I looked up the story and the correspondence between Sir Michael and the HCA. It turns out that the statistics for building affordable homes (the HCA's job) are a) awful and b) thoroughly massaged by the HCA to make themselves look better in press releases. The BBC established that the total number of houses built came to 454. In the whole country. Then Mark Easton started to look into the HCA's communications strategy and smelled several rats around the use and strategic release of statistics. 


Enter Sir Michael Scholar, whose entire job it is to ensure that whenever the government quotes figures, those statistics are reliable and mathematically significant - no touching up for PR and political purposes. Thankfully, the Statistics Agency post all their correspondence on the internet. No doubt much to Paul Uppal's conspiracy-minded disappointment, there's no documentation linking him to a BBC plot against the government - but there is a chillingly polite letter from Scholar to the Housing Minister Grant Shapps demanding to know why Housing and Communities Agency statistics aren't sufficiently rigorous ('National Statistics') and when he might expect them to be so. This, you should understand, is the Civil Service equivalent of taking Shapps down a dark alley and administering several sharp blows to tender parts of his anatomy, before delivering a warning about future conduct. 


According to the Cabinet Office, 

The UK Statistics Authority received one telephone enquiry from a representative of the BBC asking for an Authority view on the release of statistics produced by the Homes and Communities Agency on 22 November 2011. The Authority responded by confirming that it would wish to review any particular statistical issues or concerns that were raised before commenting further.

…the Minister, as the appropriate authority, is required to provide the Statistics Authority with a statement as to whether he intends to make a request for such an assessment. No reply has yet been received.

So despite Uppal's tedious whinging, he's actually exposed a plot to discredit an independent and impartial government agency, attacked the BBC and revealed himself - yet again - as a small, mean, partisan and untrustworthy individual happy to perform his duty as part of a propaganda machine. Far from the BBC persecuting the government, Grant Shapps is refusing to commit himself to making sure that the statistics he's been using in press releases and interviews will ever be accurate or impartial. 


A good morning's work. 

Learning from the Ancients

A friend of mine gave me an intriguing book recently, More Essays of Today, edited by F. H. Pritchard and published in 1928. I added it to the pile and only got round to leafing through it a couple of days ago.

Each essay is 3-5 pages long, is often quirky, if not whimsical. And yet - so far they're remarkably relevant: perhaps the title was prophetic. The first essay is J. C. Squire's 'Moving a Library', an amusing little squib reproducing most accurately the mental and physical terrors of the undertaking - something my friends will appreciate, having help me out devotedly when I moved house.

Night after night I have spent carting down two flights of stairs more books htan I ever thought I possessed. Journey after journey, as monotonously regular as the progresses of a train round the Inner Circle: upstairs empty-handed and downstairs creeping with a decrepit crouch, a tall, crazy, dangerously bulging column of books wedged betwen my two hands and the indomitable point of my chin… at times during the process one hates books as the slaves who built the Pyramids must have hated public monuments. A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one's soul. How ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print, and dead men's sentiments! Would it not be better, finer, braver, to leave the rubbish where it lies and walk out into the world a free, untrammelled, illiterate Superman? Civilization! Pah!

Unlike our current government, whose library closure plan is seemingly designed to produce the illiterate Superman, our hero recovers sufficiently to consider the much-discussed problems of how to arrange one's collection (he likes size/chronology/genre) and the 'despair' invoked by the intrusion of 'Stodge' onto the shelves of 'Pure literature' (ah, how Leavisian - I could devote a whole lecture to that one sentence) before ending on a hopeful quotation from Ruskin: 'I don't suppose I shall do it again for months and months and months'.

Serendipitously, the next essay is Reverend George A. Birmingham's 'Asking Questions', a longer and passionate diatribe on the scourge of the questionnaire. The good vicar doesn't like forms, especially those devoted to easily-available information, and those which are never actually consulted, a test he assays by inflating the size of his schoolroom to monstrous proportions then shrinking it to the size of a sentry box in each successive year.

I have never in my life been tempted to issue a questionnaire. The fact that I am forced to use this word - there being no English equivalent - proves that the thing itself is of foreign origin and that the vice is not native with us. That the word has a secondary meaning among the French, 'torturer', shows what they think of it.

Of course a pretence is made that the returns are required for the compilation of statistics… If we really prevented the compiling of statistics we ought to be given medals… for statistics are not merely useless - they are misleading, far more dangerously misleading even than the speeches of politicians…

Year by year, the number of these papers of questions increases. Year by year more of our time is wasted in writing answers. Year by year the nervous irritation consequent on wrestling with returns gets worse. 

The only remedy I can think of is to kill a few of the people who issue these forms. Perhaps five or six would be enough. The others, fearing the fate of their fellows, would be cowed into quiescence. Morally I think these executions would be as justifiable as the hanging of murderers, for we should be ridding society of pestilent nuisances. [Or if he could reach the head questioner] it would be better to try to cure him. That might be done if he were shut up in an asylum, like those provided for inebriates, and compelled to work for eight hours every day at a typewriter which had no note of interrogation on any of its keys. 

Now why did I say 'serendipitously'? Well, I'm drowning in these things. It's census time in the UK. The outsourced contract has gone to international gun-runner Lockheed Martin, which hasn't pleased many people. Some questions are contentious. After the previous census's successful Jedi Rebellion (enough people wrote in Jedi under 'religion' to skew the figures pleasingly), should we atheists stick to that or write 'no religion' (and perhaps acquire some state-funded atheist schools alongside the Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindus and Muslims).

My students are given module evaluation forms and mid-module evaluation forms. While we stir up their curriculum to suit the university's financial problems and managerial obsessions, we ask them to fill in the National Student Survey. I'm being asked to fill in another form detailing my exact work patterns under various headings.

The good Reverend was on to something. Decades before Foucault et al., George hit upon the disciplinary system: the administrative demands of the institution aren't merely a massive job creation scheme (The Hegemon has 1500+ administrators and 700 teachers) but a control system. Knowledge IS power. Making us analyse our every move and report them internalises a repressive system. It tames us, it makes us behave, it might even persuade us of the benevolence of managerial activity.

Should I be hanging my line managers from a lamp-post? Probably not. George points out that his boss, the rural Dean, has a wife and family to support, and probably hates questionnaires too. But like him, I can't help but wonder if the defenestration of those at the top (Michael Gove? Willetts? the Vice-Chancellor?) would lighten the burden somewhat…

Who'd have thought it: shallow works

One of the most consistently interesting blogs ever is OKCupid's, in which the geeks who run an online dating service crunch the figures and arrive at stunning - and statistically significant - conclusions about the human condition. It's helped, of course, by having had many millions of customers over the years, all providing demographic and anecdotal data. They prove that romance is simply a matter of statistics (which is something to think about on Valentine's Day - give your loved one a calculator or an SPSS database).

Today, they've analysed the relationship between questions asked on a first date and the deeper questions to which answers are really required. For instance, if you want to know whether your date will have sex immediately, what would you ask? How about 'do you like beer'?

If not, you'd be a fool.

[female] beer-lovers are 60% more likely to be okay with sleeping with someone they've just met.

Men are apparently even easier, though I'm tempted to suggest that most men are happy to put out on the first date anyway:

predictive question	implied odds of first-date sex
Q: In a certain light, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?	'yes'⇒83%
Q: Assuming you were in the position to do so, would you launch nuclear weapons under any circumstances?	'yes'⇒82%
Q: Could you imagine yourself killing someone?	'yes'⇒82%

How do you know if someone will be a long-term match? OKCupid's users think that questions about sex, God and smoking will reveal compatibility, but the stats show that only 15% of the couples agree on all three questions, whereas 30% of the successful matches agree with each other on whether or not it would be fun to disappear round the world on a yacht, whether they like horror movies, and whether or not they've travelled around the country alone.

There's plenty more of this stuff, based on the exit questionnaires of 35,000 couples who closed their accounts because they'd met someone via the service. It's totally fascinating.

So assuming any of you have ever managed to snare a date, what do you ask to distract attention from the furtive administration of Rohypnol? I find that the best question is that old classic, 'does this old rag smell of chloroform to you?'.

This is what the internet is for

No, not porn, racism and football.

There's a story in the Guardian today about vascular surgery death rates in different hospitals - a really serious piece of investigative work, given that hospitals don't collect statistics reliably, and certainly don't like releasing them.

The thrust seems to be that bigger hospitals do more complicated surgery, so their surgeons are more experienced and so survival rates are higher. Though there are complications - small hospitals might have high survival rates by passing difficult procedures to bigger hospitals.

Ben Goldacre (of Bad Science) took the figures the Guardian made available and queried the way the statistics have been processed. Then lots and lots and lots of statisticians have reprocessed the figures in different ways. The journalist who wrote the piece is engaging in the discussion and putting Goldacre in touch with the medics who collected the data.

This is the kind of thing which occurs.

Simple linear regression is not appropriate in this case as pointed out above. You are not accounting for the fact that there is lots more random error associated with units that do fewer operations. A glm will take into account the fact that there is more precision in the rates estimated for larger units. I have performed a glm in Stata with a rather simple categorization of the number of operations into 0-50, 51-100, 101-200 and 201+.

Categorizing is generally ont a good thing to do, but as there appears to be some confusion and thus help to illustrate what is going on.

. recode ops (min/50 = 1) (51/100 = 2) (101/200 = 3) (201/max = 4), gen(ops_group)

(99 differences between ops and ops_group)

. glm dead i.ops_group, family(binomial ops) link(log) eform nolog

Generalized linear models No. of obs = 99

Optimization : ML Residual df = 95

Scale parameter = 1

Deviance = 186.5015817 (1/df) Deviance = 1.963175

Pearson = 181.6864657 (1/df) Pearson = 1.912489

Variance function: V(u) = u*(1-u/ops) [Binomial]

Link function : g(u) = ln(u/ops) [Log]

AIC = 4.721745

Log likelihood = -229.7263858 BIC = -250.0348

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

| OIM

dead | Risk Ratio Std. Err. z P>|z| [95% Conf. Interval]

-------------+----------------------------------------------------------------

ops_group |

2 | .8576235 .1563294 -0.84 0.399 .5999815 1.225901

3 | .6705549 .1181781 -2.27 0.023 .4747 .9472169

4 | .5466476 .1057056 -3.12 0.002 .3742054 .7985549

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The mortality rate is 33% lower in units with 101-200 operstions that those with 0-50 and is 45% lower in those with 201+ operations compared to those with 0-50.

The result is highly significant.

I don't understand the stats (not much call for it in Welsh literature studies) but the gloss is useful and I'm learning all the time.

Offline, or in old print media, this wouldn't happen. No paper would be open to critique like this, and you wouldn't be able to marshal the resources of all these slackers who should be working on their day jobs. Between all these people, a fascinating (nerdy) and better story is emerging. Open data is really important, as is the wisdom of informed crowds (including the critics who've engaged with Goldacre's approach).

Good for NHS users, good for the Guardian and good for the web!