This morning Radio New Zealand covered a story (audio) where Tomatoes New Zealand (TNZ, the growers association) was asking the Government to introduce compulsory labeling for irradiated products (namely imported Australian tomatoes), stating that consumers deserve an informed choice (TNZ Press Release). Two points that I think merit attention: Food irradiation is perfectly safe: it… Continue reading Protectionism under another name
Category: policy
Scraping pages and downloading files using R
I have written a few posts discussing descriptive analyses of evaluation of National Standards for New Zealand primary schools.The data for roughly half of the schools was made available by the media, but the full version of the dataset is provided in a single-school basis. In the page for a given school there may be… Continue reading Scraping pages and downloading files using R
A word of caution: the sample may have an effect
This week I've tried to i-stay mostly in the descriptive statistics realm and ii-surround any simple(istic) models with caveats and pointing that they are very preliminary. We are working with a sample of ~1,000 schools that did reply to Fairfax's request, while there is a number of schools that either ignored the request or told… Continue reading A word of caution: the sample may have an effect
Some regressions on school data
Eric and I have been exchanging emails about potential analyses for the school data and he published a first draft model in Offsetting Behaviour. I have kept on doing mostly data exploration while we get a definitive full dataset, and looking at some of the pictures I thought we could present a model with fewer… Continue reading Some regressions on school data
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… Continue reading Updating and expanding New Zealand school data