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...

PACT data - very small blogpost for @Tiamat_R and @amcunningham

Prescribing Analysis and Cost Tabulation (PACT data), 2008, for the four nations. Presumably there's 2009 data but this is what I came across.

General prescribing information
NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care.
PACT Data for England.
http://www.ic.nhs.uk/default.asp?sID=1172577414129&sPublicationID=1239718155461&sDocID=4973

NHS Northern Ireland.
PACT Data for Northern Ireland.
http://www.centralservicesagency.com/files/statistics/file/PCT2008.xls

NHS Scotland.
PACT Data for Scotland.
http://www.isdscotland.org/isd/servlet/FileBuffer?namedFile=PCA%202008.xls

NHS Wales.
PACT Data for Wales.
http://www.wales.nhs.uk/sites3/docopen.cfm?orgid=428&id=117449&A03B1E2D-1143-E756-5CD9AAFEAC8087BD

Diabetes-specific prescribing data
Prescribing for Diabetes in England: Supplement - January 2002 to March 2009
Publication date September 15, 2009
http://www.ic.nhs.uk/statistics-and-data-collections/primary-care/prescriptions/prescribing-for-diabetes-in-england:-supplement--january-2002-to-march-2009
which is a supplement taking account of data up to March 2009 and published in September 2009.

Prescribing for Diabetes in England – An Update 2002-2008
An analysis of volume, expenditure and trends.
Publication date June 2009
http://www.yhpho.org.uk/resource/view.aspx?RID=9711

Prescribing for Diabetes in England
An analysis of volume, expenditure and trends
November 2007
http://www.yhpho.org.uk/resource/view.aspx?RID=45983

Prescribing for Diabetes in England - Interactive Map
(Revised version June 2009)
http://www.yhpho.org.uk/resource/item.aspx?RID=9714
or jump straight there http://www.yhpho.org.uk/atlas/dcosts/singlemap/atlas.html

General diabetes stats info, for the UK
Diabetes Community Health Profiles
http://www.yhpho.org.uk/diabetesprofiles.aspx

"The Diabetes Community Health Profiles bring together a wide range of data on
diabetes in adults into a single source for the purposes of benchmarking. The
tool allows you to download a diabetes profile for each PCT in England.

In order to locate the PCT profile you require please select a Strategic
Health Authority from the dropdown list. The tool will then generate a list of
PCTs within that Strategic Health Authority."

YHPHO*: Diabetes A-Z (rather useful)
http://www.yhpho.org.uk/default.aspx?RID=8468
*(Yorkshire & Public Health Observatory - I pronounce it yiffo myself...)

Diabetes Data Directory
Signposting to data sources relevant to diabetes.
http://yhpho.york.ac.uk/diabetesdd/introddd.asp

I'm still a bit rubbish at stats

I seem to suffer from a bit of a mental block with statistics, despite being a fan of Ben Goldacre, reading around the subject and attending classes on it. For some reason even though I can grasp it when I am in the middle of learning it, the knowledge seeps out at an alarming rate. I more or less have to start from scratch whenever I meet a new article.

Hopeless. But let's remember all the other things I'm good at :) Peculiarly I managed to get a first in statistics at university (though this was a modular exam at first year level and open book at that) but have really let the side down since then.

Abstracts don't help, writing things in a very paragraphy sort of way when what I really need is to see things written out line by line...

Effect of Valsartan on the Incidence of Diabetes and Cardiovascular Events
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/362/16/1477

Results The cumulative incidence of diabetes was 33.1% in the valsartan group, as compared with 36.8% in the placebo group (hazard ratio in the valsartan group, 0.86; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.80 to 0.92; P (less than) 0.001).> placebo, did not significantly reduce the incidence of either the extended cardiovascular outcome (14.5% vs. 14.8%; hazard ratio, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.86 to 1.07; P=0.43) or the core cardiovascular outcome (8.1% vs. 8.1%; hazard ratio, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.86 to 1.14; P=0.85).

But what I need is something more like this:

Results
The cumulative incidence of diabetes was 33.1% in the valsartan group,
as compared with 36.8% in the placebo group
(hazard ratio in the valsartan group, 0.86;
95% confidence interval [CI], 0.80 to 0.92;
P<0.001). p="0.43)" p="0.85).

Conclusions Among patients with impaired glucose tolerance and cardiovascular disease or risk factors, the use of valsartan for 5 years, along with lifestyle modification, led to a relative reduction of 14% in the incidence of diabetes but did not reduce the rate of cardiovascular events. (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00097786 [ClinicalTrials.gov].)

Actually that still doesn't help very much, I'm still a bit at sea. At this point I try applying mathematical functions to some of the available figures (basically dividing one number by another) to see if I get anywhere. I'm vaguely cheered to have spotted that 0.96 might be related to 14%...

If it's any help, I'm useless at reading maps too though I am very good at writing instructions - and delighted to hear that Mark Miodownik's lovely programme "How to write an instruction manual" has been uploaded to the @Speechification vault.

Is there an online journal club for remedial stats?