Goodsmithing

Founder of Scale. Data Scientist. Neuromusicologist.

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Qalys are good and Dalys are bad

Quality years? Yes, please.

Disability years? No thanks.

That’s the difference between these two adjusted life year metrics.

A Quality Year is simply a year lived in full health.

A Disability year is a year lived with disability.

The metrics for Qaly are straightforward: 100% is perfect health, 0% is, well, dead.

For Daly the metrics are similarly straightforward if you simply consider iy as a measure of how disabled you are. How disabled are you with a broken leg? Maybe 15%? (This is a good time to note that both Qaly and Daly are subjective measures, which gain power through comparisons and statistics.)

How disabled are if you’re dead? That wouldneed to be 100%. We can get into some interesting meta math and consider that torture ahould be ranked even higher than death, but death’s finality and irrwversability can serve as its trump card here and we’ll let it hang on to the...

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Infographic: Mobile Money Driven by the Poor

As Google, Apple, Paypal, Mastercard and the entire banking community fights over mobile money, we decided to look to the power users to find out what the near future of monetary exchange might look like. The World Bank’s treasure trove of open data on mobile banking is a well stocked pantry for the data hungry. Welcome to our first data snack - the infographic below.

Percentage of Population Using Mobile Money

Separated by Income Levels

Top Ten Countries Using Mobile Money - Usage by Income

We looked at the top ten countries in percent of population having used their phones to send and receive money. Turns out, even in countries with the highest use - countries that are all among the world’s poorest - it remains the poor within those countries who use mobile financial services more frequently. In each of the ten countries, the poor used mobile banking more than the rich.. A higher percentage of the bottom 40% in income were users...

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