lederhosen

So, in case I haven't mentioned it several dozen times already, I've spent most of the last year working on the design for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey, at the most abstract end of the process. After rather a lot of algebra and lots of meetings and spreadsheets, I wrote a selection algorithm that combined population information, state and regional accuracy requirements, and data on other surveys going back seven years ('cos we need to avoid annoying the same people all the time) - all that stuff has to be used, but in a complicated random fashion to avoid bias. All this stuff went in, it selected about seven thousand blocks and communities from across Australia, and I handed those selections on to the survey-operations people who pass it on to regional officers who allocate the blocks to interviewers, who then go out and tromp from door to door looking for Indigenous people - about as far from my end of things as it gets.

Yesterday afternoon, sitting at home, we got a knock on the door... "Hello, I'm ---- from the Australian Bureau of Statistics..."

Sadly, none of us were actually eligible for the survey, but it was lovely to run into my 'baby' in such an tangible way. Also, since most of my involvement with NATSISS now is of the "OMG things going wrong must fix!" variety, it was heartening to hear from the interviewer that he was enjoying the work and had found quite a few Indigenous people to survey.

Was also entertained to discover that