8 am Radio 2 News this morning, An "Official Body" advises us that there are 25,000 people living in the UK who are unaware of the fact that they have Aids. Then how the treetree hell do THEY know? Am I really paying tax on my pension to keep Numpties like this in employment? Rant over. Top of the mornin' to ya Jenny
Its all about statistics Jenny. If you take 100 people who meet criteria X, and then work out how long they met criteria X for before they found out, some figure (say 10) will have found out within a month, another figure (say 20) will have found out within between 1 and 2 months, another figure (lets say 15) will have found out between 2 and 3 months and so on. Plot those known figures on a graph and you get a curve. Then using a predictive formula such as for example Piersons Correlation Coefficient, you can work out how that curve would continue for cases that are NOT known, so for example it lets you ESTIMATE how many people have met criteria X for n months. That would just give you one estimate though. There's no way to have any confidence in that, so the question then needs to be tackled from other angles. For example, if we know that 75% of people who meet both criteria A and B, also meet criteria X, and we have reliable figures for A and B, then we can make another estimate of criteria X figures. If our second estimate is within an accepted tolerance of our first (say within 10% error margin) then we can assume the estimate is good. Beyond that the maths gets a bit over my head, but that's the most basic principles. In the case of calculating aids cases, its an important thing to estimate because of the potential impact on society as a whole. Again using mathematical models, estimates will have been made as to how much it will cost in the long run to do nothing. That cost will of course be things like treatment for a greater number of affected people (NHS costs, lost tax revenues etc). Other estimates will have been made to work out how much it would cost to make people aware of the problem and how that awareness might change things (for example, if these 25000 people knew, maybe 80% of them might take extra precautions to avoid infecting anyone else, which might save £X billion for the NHS over N years).
I was just thinking about this, and although I can see the logic in working out these estimates, Jenny still has a valid point about how much money we as tax payers spend on this sort of thing. In Britain, we are lucky to have some excellent universities, with excellent facilities. Universities are full of students, most of whom want to some how find time in between their drinking and pizza eating and 'socialising' to earn an actual degree, masters or phD. It seems to me that students currently come out of the university machine lacking one essential skill, the ability to work well as part of a team. Sure they learn that as they go along, but to my mind you're not qualified to do any job unless you can work in a real team environment because that's how actual work usually is. It also occurs to me that all this mathematical and statistical modelling that the government pays an absolute fortune for, could be equally well done by teams of students under the guidance of more experienced mentors like maybe the many doctors and professors that work at universities. The government could have a web portal where they submit documents outlining things they'd like to know (like how many people in the UK have aids and don't even know), then the universities could pick up the challenge of doing all the maths. A peer review program could happen, whereby other participating universities check each others results and test against known benchmarks, before submitting their final consolidated report back to the government. The government saves huge amounts of money because the students do all the work for free. The students benefit from real world experience of work collaboratively and having their work peer reviewed, and the universities get the prestige for having solved a government conundrum for them. We end up with a leaner, more dynamic government with pockets of expertise that can rapidly grow or shrink as needed without anybody getting laid off (after the initial laying off required to set such a scheme up of course), and money that would have been spent on quangos can go onto other things like the NHS, schools and infrastructure. Everybody wins.
Clueless,(Only Kidding), Thank God You Didn't Write, 'In Search Of Lost Time',By Marcel Proust, 4211 Pages.. I Would Be Blind And A Big Bit Disorientated, And Losing The Will To Live.
Hummm, perhaps we could pay an 'Official body' to find out if the AIDS (that you may or may not have) coulds have been caught off someone on a bus. However the chances of me having AIDS is pretty slim because I never use buses!
