More deaths due to climate change? Or maybe not.
Coverage of a paper just published by Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health included dramatic headlines such as the Guardian's Heat-related deaths will rise 257% by 2050 because of climate...
View ArticleIt's cherry-picking time: more poorly reported science being peddled to...
Today the Daily Mail trumpeted âFor every hour of screen time, the risk of family life being disrupted and children having poorer emotional wellbeing may be doubledâ, while the Daily Telegraph said...
View ArticleA heuristic for sorting science stories in the news
Dominic Lawson's article in the Sunday Times today[paywall] quotes me as having the rather cynical heuristic: "the very fact that a piece of health research appears in the papers indicates that it is...
View ArticleNumbers and the common-sense bypass
Yesterday the Sunday Times [paywall] covered a talk Anne Johnson and I had given at the Cheltenham Science Festival about the statistics of sex, and the article said read more...
View ArticleUsing metrics to assess research quality
The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) is carrying out an independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment, and are encouraging views. I have submitted a (very...
View ArticleAnother tragic cluster - but how surprised should we be?
Sadly another passenger plane crashed yesterday - the third in 8 days, the Air Algerie flight on July 24th, the TransAsia flight in Taiwan on July 23rd, and Malaysian Airlines in Ukraine on July 17th....
View ArticleUsing expected frequencies when teaching probability
The July 2014 Mathematics Programmes of Study: Key Stage 4 (GCSE) specifies under Probability read more...
View ArticleWhat's the most likely age to die?
Itâs all very well telling someone their life expectancy but this does not communicate the variability around that central value. But the life tables published by the Office for National Statistics...
View ArticleIs prostitution really worth £5.7 billion a year?
The EU has demanded rapid payment of £1.7 billion from the UK because our economy has done better than predicted, and some of this is due to the prostitution market now being considered as part of our...
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Sub-editing in the Times
A story in monday's Times had the following dramatic headline:read more...
View ArticleLuck and Cancer
I was on Radio PM and BBC News Channel yesterday discussing the study published in Science " Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions ". This had...
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Misleading conclusions from alcohol protection study
The Daily Mail today declared that "Drinking is only good for you if you are a woman over 65", while the Times trumpeted that "Alcohol has no health benefits after all".read more...
View ArticleSensationalist promotion by the World Cancer Research Fund
Today the Daily Telegraph featured the powerful headline "Just three alcoholic drinks a day can cause liver cancer, warns new study" , based on a press release from the World Cancer Research Fund...
View ArticleWas anyone right about the pre-election polls?
There has been much wailing and gnashing of blogs since the dismal performance of the pre-election polls last week. These had confidently and consistently predicted a rough tie in vote-share between...
View ArticleWhy live interviews are a particular challenge for statisticians.
I like doing live interviews for radio or TV â itâs exciting and they canât edit what you say. The programme is almost inevitably running late, so last Saturday morning when I did an interview...
View ArticleIs it fair that a single bad outcome should label a surgeon as an outlier?
Surgeons are increasingly subject to statistical monitoring, and named results may be made publicly available. But consider a surgeon in a low-risk specialty who has had a successful and blameless...
View ArticleHRT, breast cancer, and the framing of risks
The way that risks are 'framed' can make a big impression on their apparent magnitude. The controversy following the recent report by NICE on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) provides a fine...
View ArticleJeremy Hunt, the Guardian, and the importance of getting the stats right
On Thursday November 19th the printed version of the Guardian had the headline âExperts dispute Hunt's claim on weekend hospital treatmentâ [online version here]. But it was not only Health...
View ArticleMedicine, poison, poison, poison, â¦â¦
Yesterday the Chief Medical Officer announced new guidelines for alcohol consumption. The Summary says,read more...
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