Evolving notes, images and sounds by Luis Apiolaza

Category: data curious (Page 2 of 2)

Ordinal logistic GM pigs

This week another ‘scary GMO cause disease’ story was doing the rounds in internet: A long-term toxicology study on pigs fed a combined genetically modified (GM) soy and GM maize diet. Andrew Kniss, a non-smokable weeds expert, mentioned in Twitter that the statistical analyses in the study appeared to be kind of dodgy.

Curious, I decided to have a quick look and I was surprised, first, by the points the authors decide to highlight in their results, second, by the pictures and captioning used in the article and, last, by the way of running the analysis. As I’m in the middle of marking assignments and exams I’ll only have a quick go at part of the analysis. As I see it, the problem can be described as ‘there is a bunch of pigs who were fed either non-GM feed or GM feed. After some time (approximately 23 weeks) they were killed and went through a CSI-like autopsy’, where part of the exam involved the following process:

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Updating and expanding New Zealand school data

In two previous posts I put together a data set and presented some exploratory data analysis on school achievement for national standards. After those posts I exchanged emails with a few people about the sources of data and Jeremy Greenbrook-Held pointed out Education Counts as a good source of additional variables, including number of teachers per school and proportions for different ethnic groups.

The code below call three files: Directory-Schools-Current.csv, teacher-numbers.csv and SchoolReport_data_distributable.csv, which you can download from the links.
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New Zealand school performance: beyond the headlines

I like the idea of having data on school performance, not to directly rank schools—hard, to say the least, at this stage—but because we can start having a look at the factors influencing test results. I imagine the opportunity in the not so distant future to run hierarchical models combining Ministry of Education data with Census/Statistics New Zealand data.

At the same time, there is the temptation to come up with very simple analyses that would make appealing newspaper headlines. I’ll read the data and create a headline and then I’ll move to something that, personally, seems more important. In my previous post I combined the national standards for around 1,000 schools with decile information to create the standards.csv file.
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New Zealand School data

Some people have the naive idea that the national standards data and the decile data will not be put together. Given that at some point in time all data will be available, there is no technical reason to not have merged the data, which I have done in this post for an early release.
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