Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Friday 4 November 2011

Rarely a fan of embedded links within low-information phrases

I like information and I like organising it and, to me, a web address (URL) contains information.

Even if an URL is embedded like this (Nicola Conte's "Jet Sounds" on YouTube) you can still see what the address is by hovering over it (unless you've switched off that particular status bar) - this just lets you know where you're clicking to, can be useful if you suspect a spam address etc.

Sometimes URLs don't contain much useful information though and I've just found a small example of some unhelpful addresses in a piece of text I wrote, but which is fortunately saved by me having written the name of the file into the text.

I have a secret stash of pointers to diabetes statistical information but... because the Office for National Statistics have recently tweaked their website this means that virtually none of their links work or redirect to ones that do, so the information below goes nowhere. I'm patting myself on the head for at least having included the document titles so I'm fairly confident I'll be able to find the files' new location.

This is exactly the same as supermarkets moving the store contents around (to get you to take a different path and buy more stuff you've not seen before) but at least they usually produce wee leaflets to guide you to where everything is.

"Data for “Deaths ONS” column (Office for National Statistics) for 1999-2005 taken from spreadsheets in Mortality Statistics: Cause (Series DH2), 2006-2009 data is from Mortality statistics: Deaths registered in England and Wales (Series DR) and 2010 from Death registrations in England and Wales, selected data tables (specifically “Death registrations by sex and single year of age, 1961 to 2010, England and Wales and UK”)."

I'll be spending a small bit of time finding the new location for these and will post them up as I come across them. I'm not too worried as even if I don't find them myself the @statisticsONS Twitter people are lovely and helpful and have reunited me with several much-loved stats files already.

Edit
I went to ONS pages, clicked on the Data tab and then searched for 'Mortality statistics' - looks useful.

Another good route in is the Browse by theme tab, then on the right hand side of the page look for the 'Causes of death' link within the Health and Social Care / Health of the Nation bit.

Yes I have been a bit careful about embedding these links :)

Mortality Statistics - deaths registered in England and Wales (Series DR) 2009
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/vsob1/mortality-statistics--deaths-registered-in-england-and-wales--series-dr-/2009/index.html - I'm also leaving the raw URL here as the nice thing is that you can copy and paste this and replace 2009 with 2008. If only everything was this simple!

In all cases the relevant one, for diabetes deaths, is Table 5.4

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/vsob1/mortality-statistics--deaths-registered-in-england-and-wales--series-dr-/2010/index.html

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/vsob1/mortality-statistics--deaths-registered-in-england-and-wales--series-dr-/2009/index.html - once there choose Data in this release and then look for 5.4
- eg Table 5.4 Deaths: underlying cause, sex and age-group, 2009: Chapter IV Endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/vsob1/mortality-statistics--deaths-registered-in-england-and-wales--series-dr-/2008/index.html

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/vsob1/mortality-statistics--deaths-registered-in-england-and-wales--series-dr-/2007/index.html


http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/vsob1/mortality-statistics--deaths-registered-in-england-and-wales--series-dr-/2006/index.html

That's as far as it goes...

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