Wednesday, July 29, 2020

NZ's New Algorithm Charter a world-first!

Hi,
"New Zealand’s government says it is the first in the world to produce a set of standards for how public agencies should use the algorithms that increasingly drive decision-making by officials about every area of public life" says the Guardian newspaper. At the moment these standards have no legal teeth, but baby steps in the right direction. At least public bodies can be held up to account for why they aren't meeting the standards. Next, we need legislation like the European GDPR. Read the NZ Government's press release here.

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Coronavirus (COVID-19) global data resource

Do you need more data about Covid-19? This is an excellent source of global data, updated each day, from Our World in Data. You can download the data set and analyse it yourself or use their visualisation tools. All their code is open source.

There is one caveat in that all the data is gathered in different ways in different countries. So, as you've heard politicians say, direct nation to nation comparisons must be treated with some caution.