Articles
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Capital in the FRS and WAS
December 11, 2024
Category: Blog Tags: DataOver the summer I built a microsimulation of Legal Aid for the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB)- note on that to follow.
My SLAB contact asked a lot of good questions, especially about data.
One thing that came up is how different capital data is in the FRS and Wealth and Assets Survey.
I don’t really know why this is.
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Modelling Legal Aid
June 21, 2024
Category: Blog Tags: ConferencesA quick write-up of a little microsimulation of Legal Aid that I’ve written for the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB). It was fun, though I crashed a few deadlines and took some unexpected turns.
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IMA Conference 2024
January 12, 2024
Category: Blog Tags: ConferencesJust on the way back from the 9th World Congress of the International Microsimulation Association in Vienna. Northumbria allowed Howard Reed and me to go to present our NIHR work.
It was fun. Met some good people, heard some interesting papers, and our presentations went fine, I think.
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Some things I've written (part 1)
June 21, 2023
Category: Blog Tags: AffordabilityHere’s a bunch of stuff I wrote (mostly co-wrote) when I was IFS. I’ll add a something on post-IFS work presently.
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Presentation at Juliacon
August 8, 2022
Category: Blog Tags: IMAI gave a short talk on the model at Juliacon 2022.
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Updating Population targets
July 10, 2022
Category: Tags: ProgrammingNotes (rough) on updating weighting targets. It’s finnicky and boring, with nothing quite adding up without some hacks. One difference this time is that I’m trying to gross to the household populations (excluding students in student residences and those in care homes). Though this produces problems of its own.
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Updating
January 1, 2022
Category: Blog Tags: ProgrammingThis is just a reminder to me. There are so many steps to keeping a model like this up-to-date. And no real way of automating the process, sadly.
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Pension Contributions
January 1, 2022
Category: Blog Tags: ProgrammingDunno if this is quite right, but …
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Two New Interfaces
January 1, 2022
Category: Blog Tags: ProgrammingI’ve built two new interfaces for the model. One is a simple budget sim and the other a specialised Basic Income model.
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To-Dos
January 1, 2022
Category: Blog Tags: ProgrammingIt’s like painting the Forth Bridge, this. I’ve got to get back to the day-job stuff that pays the bills. Here’s a rough list of what I think currently needs to be done. It’s a lot. There are lots of TODOS and FIXMES dotted through the code - I count 256 of them. Often these are notes about duplicate code, bad naming practices, or things that I’ve hard-coded which should be parameterised. Often things that need checked again.
Here are the main things, I think:
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The International Microsimulation Association
January 1, 2022
Category: Blog Tags: IMAI gave a short talk on the model at this years’ International Microsimulation Association Conference.
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Scotland's Kinkiest Families
November 14, 2021
Category: Blog Tags: IncentivesI’ve finally put some of this model out into the world - to almost zero response so far, but that’s OK.
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Frontends
November 13, 2021
Category: Blog Tags: ProgrammingThis thing isn’t going to be of much general use if people can’t interact with it.
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Output Starts to Arrive
November 13, 2021
Category: Blog Tags: Inequality -
Inequality Weirdness
November 13, 2021
Category: Blog Tags: ProgrammingSo I’ve started getting some output out of the model. I’ll do some posts on the full aggregate results presently (pretty encouraging so far), but one odd one stands out: my version of Scotland is a disturbingly equal society compared to what everyone else thinks.
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Testing, Testing
November 13, 2021
Category: Blog Tags: Unit TestingThe model now has a huge test suite, all of which passes, but I worry about test coverage still.
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The Legacy to UC Transition
November 12, 2021
Category: Blog Tags: Tax CreditsWe’re in the middle of the move from the Legacy Benefit to Universal Credit transition. Modelling this is tricky.
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Scottish Disability Benefits
September 7, 2021
Category: Blog Tags: DisabilityA series of new Scottish disability benefits are moving towards implementation.
Kind of the point of this model is to capture changes like this.
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Incomes Again
May 20, 2021
Category: Blog Tags: Arrays,JuliaHere’s a nice thing I discovered today - kind of rediscovered, as I’d asked about this a while back but it’s only just clicked.
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Benefit Woes
May 20, 2021
Category: Blog Tags: BenefitsStill plodding on with this. I did a fairly big refactor of how incomes where handled, and that’s simplified things bit. Need to do another one to cut down some of the huge enumerations used for employment and education status and the like, and simplify many of the crazily long names.
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Local Matters
May 20, 2021
Category: Blog Tags: Local TaxesNow that I have merged in SHS data, with postcodes, I’ve been doing something with it.
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Merging SHS and FRS Data
February 7, 2021
Category: Blog Tags: Data MergingSome notes as I try to add some Scottish Household Survey Data to my FRS based dataset.
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Notes on Releasing Julia Packages
January 19, 2021
Category: Programming Tags: Releases | JuliaA lot has happened since I last posted. I’ll write about it when I’ve got my head around it.
For now …
Getting a release ready in Julia is painful and embarrasing for me. I keep getting things mixed up.
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I 💓 Antipatterns
December 16, 2020
Category: Programming Tags: Anti-patterns | JuliaI was reading JuliaLang Antipatterns by Lyndon White.
I’m a guilty man. STB violates (at least) two of these antipatterns pretty consistently.
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Some Programming Notes
December 15, 2020
Category: Programming Tags: Type SystemsI really like Julia. It’s a really nice combination of a ‘proper’ structured programming language and a data exploration tool. But it has its quirks.
One I’m struggling with is finding a good way to build a package with multiple modules. I want a seperate package for each main component, but to have one Scottish Tax Benefit Model package. You can kinda-sorta manage it with child packages, which is what I’m using, but it’s akward. I might write up something about this: Ada does this right.
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Getting Somewhere, and a Mild Rant
December 15, 2020
Category: Blog Tags: Programming.. 3 months later.
The Covid test I mentioned last time was negative. But 4 weeks ago I had another test, just on a vague feeling, and that one was positive. So it’s been a tricky few weeks. I’ll maybe write an entire entry on this.
On the model: I’ve been fitting it in amongst paid work, so progress is slower than I’d like.
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Making A Start
July 8, 2020
Category: Blog Tags: ProgrammingI’m writing a Scottish Tax Benefit model, and I thought I would blog my progress. I’m writing this mainly just for me, as a kind of journal; I really would be rather disturbed if anyone read much of it (but, if you do, welcome..). As much as anything I’d like some practice writing a few hundred words every day.