In a careful study published last week, Socioeconomic position and the risk of brain tumour: a Swedish national population-based cohort study, the authors examined the association between the socio-economic status of men and women in Sweden with diagnosis of brain tumours over 18 years. One of the main findings is shown below.

Remember all those autism stories over the last few weeks? You don’t? There’s a reason for that.

On Thursday November 19th the printed version of the Guardian had the headline “Experts dispute Hunt's claim on weekend hospital treatment“ [online version here]. But it was not only Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt who gave a misleading statement – the Guardian also made a serious error about statistics.

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 career, until a combination of circumstances, possibly beyond their control, contribute to a single patient dying. They then find they are officially labeled as an ‘outlier’ and subject to formal investigation, all because of a purely statistical criterion. Is this fair?

I like doing live interviews for radio or TV – it’s exciting and they can’t edit what you say. The programme is almost inevitably running late, so last Saturday morning when I did an interview for Radio 4’s Today I remembered my media training and had prepared carefully to get my points over before they cut me off.

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".

But these headlines are without serious foundation, and through no fault of the journalists.

I was on Radio 4 PM (starting at 37:09) 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 been reported by much of the press as showing that “the majority of cancer cases are down to sheer bad luck”.

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 National Accounts and contributing an extra £5.3 billion to GDP at 2009 prices, which is 0.35% of GDP, half that of agriculture. But is this a reasonable estimate?

The July 2014 Mathematics Programmes of Study: Key Stage 4 (GCSE) specifies under Probability

{calculate and interpret conditional probabilities through representation using expected frequencies with two-way tables, tree diagrams and Venn diagrams}.

- the brackets and bold case means this comes under additional mathematical content to be taught to more highly attaining pupils.

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 personal) response, using HEFCE's suggested headings, which is given below in a minimally-edited version.

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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

more people are having sex in their teens, roughly 30% before the age of 16.

Yesterday the Daily Mail trumpeted “For every hour of screen time, the risk of family life being disrupted and children having poorer emotional wellbeing may be doubled”, while the Daily Telegraph said that "for every hour each day a child spent in front of a screen, the chance of becoming depressed, anxious or being bullied rose by up to 100 per cent”.

More or Less recently featured Jody Aberdein talking about the cluster of 6 cycle deaths in London over a 2 week period.

The paper with the details of the analysis can, for a while, be freely obtained from Significance magazine.

What a strange organisation the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) is. They say that a press article is inaccurate, but consider it reasonable that the inaccurate headline remains uncorrected.

Following the consultation discussed previously on this blog, the Department for Education has announced the revised content for GCSE Mathematics.

Compared to the current content, the most notable changes are (a) separation of probability and statistics, (b) removal of the data-cycle, (c) increased material.

The proposed content for probability is as follows:

When on holiday at Whitby we took this photo of this extraordinary memorial to Mr and Mrs Huntrodds.

I was very saddened by the death on Friday of a Boris-bike rider in Whitechapel High Street, particularly as I am a frequent and enthusiastic user of the scheme. But as a statistician, I also immediately wondered how surprised I should be about the fact that this was the first fatality of the bikes.

The Daily Mail headline below is unequivocal – statins cause a 20% increase in muscle problems.

There is reasonable public outrage at possible criminal conspiracies to adulterate meat products with horsemeat, and additional concerns raised about the presence of the anti-inflammatory known as bute.

Some of the coverage of yesterday's story about drinking in pregnancy and IQ of children was not entirely accurate. The Times reported that 'women who drink even a couple of glasses of wine a week during pregnancy are risking a two-point drop in their child's IQ', and 'children whose mothers drank between 1 and 6 units a week - up to three large glasses of wine - had IQs about two points lower '(than mothers who did not drink).

The L’Aquila story gets even murkier.

With others, I made some comments for the press about the recent paper (abstract, figures and tables freely available here) on cancer in rats fed GM maize and Monsanto's Roundup pesticide.
[ Full paper should also be available here].

Warning, this is for statistical pedants only.

After all the recent coverage of the possible harms of red meat, I've done an article explaining how, if we believe the figures, eating quite a lot of extra red meat each week will take, on average, a year off our life.

Bowel cancer screening 'does cut deaths', said the BBC News website today, in a report on a study using data from the NHS Bowel Cancer Screening Programme in England, published in the magnificently named journal Gut. Wow, I thought, that was quick, the programme has been going only since 2006 and didn't cover the whole country till 2010. Have they really found clear evidence of an effect on death rates already?

Lots of press reports in the last couple of days on how UK women are the fattest in Europe, for example in the Daily Mail and on the BBC News website. I'm still in Berlin, and it was in the papers here too. The tabloid-style Berliner Kurier went with the headline "Man, they are fat, man", while the N24 news service went with "British and Maltese are the fattest Europeans". But is it another dodgy league table?

Kings Cross Station now not only has a platform 9$\frac{3}{4}$, but also a platform 0. And for the numerically challenged, there are repeated announcements that 'customers are advised that Platform 0 is situated next to Platform 1'

I suppose the Underground platforms will now have to be given complex numbers.

David Cameron has prominently commented on the recent performance tables concerning adoption in local authorities, in particular the proportion of children whose adoption placement occurs within 12 months. But are the local authorities really as different as they have been made out to be?

The BBC News website and Radio 4 news both led this morning on the Royal College of Surgeons' report on emergency surgery. The BBC web site states that
'A report by the college highlights figures that show that about 170,000 patients undergo emergency abdominal operations each year. Of these, 100,000 will develop complications and 25,000 of these patients will die.'

(appeared in the Times, 26th September 2011) - pdf here

Now that the rogue US satellite has crashed into the Pacific we can all come out from under our beds. The biggest bit of the satellite was about the weight of an adult gorilla, although not as soft, and travelled at 100 mph so it sounds rather ominous, but people only take up one 80,000th of the earth’s surface so it would be more than an unlucky day if anyone had been hit. 40 tons of debris got scattered over mainland USA after the Columbia shuttle disaster and nobody was injured, although NASA afterwards concluded there had been around a 1 in 4 chance of some casualties.

The Daily Mail and other media sources have featured league tables for the 'luckiest parts of the country' based on the proportion of the population that have become millionaires by winning the lottery. Straight Statistics have done a nice demolition job on this absurd story, pointing out that any comparison should be based on the number of tickets sold, not the population.

A great use of a 'spaghetti plot' of multiple model predictions for Hurricane Katia in this NBC news bulletin .

possible hurricane paths

A report claiming that users of the Internet Explorer browser had lower IQs than users of other browsers has been revealed to be a hoax. I had been asked to comment on the report by BBC Technology and had got suspicious about the figures. The perpetrators of the hoax, which had received extensive coverage, have listed the reasons why they should have been detected, but did not include 'dubious statistics' in their list.

If mobile phones don't cause brain tumours, what does? Well, according to stories today in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, it might be cats. Or at any rate a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, one of whose hosts is the domestic cat. But don't go exiling your kitties yet; the admirable Ed Yong has explained in his blog that the study in question doesn't establish anything of the sort.

World cup fever is again gripping the globe - well, perhaps not so strongly as last time, but the Women's World Cup football finals are about to begin in Germany. And as the excitement builds, the aquarium chain that brought us Paul the "psychic" octopus is rising to the new challenge. Paul himself has ascended to the great aquarium in the sky, so the search is on for a worthy successor

When it comes to causing cancer in humans, is using a mobile phone as risky as talcum powder, or as risky as coffee, or as risky as the notorious insecticide DDT? Actually we don't know, as I explained in my previous blog entry on last week's IARC announcement on mobile phones and brain cancer. That didn't stop the media comparing the risk of mobile phone use with all these things and more. But why did different newspapers make different comparisons?

In our article on ESP and the significance of significance, I made a prediction on the controversy surrounding psychologist Daryl Bem's paper "Feeling the Future" - the one that claimed to find evidence for some forms of ESP (extra-sensory perception). "This one will run and run", I boldly prophesied. And so it came to pass.

The UK news media have reported quite extensively a newly published paper by Wald, Simmonds and Morris on screening for cardiovascular disease (CVD) - that is, disease of the heart and blood vessels (principally heart attacks and strokes). The paper concluded that screening should be based on the patient's age alone, and not on other risk factors for CVD. But I'm not going to examine the conclusion - I'm interested in the way the authors dealt with uncertainty.

The New York Times has published an excellent (well, I thought so) article called Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?. What's particularly good about it is the clear but thorough way that it explains the problems of looking for causes of rare diseases, and describes the methods used for dealing with uncertainty in this challenging context.

The recent study on alcohol and cancer published in the British Medical Journal is a fine piece of epidemiology and attracted a lot of coverage of the estimate that 10% of male cancers and 3% of female cancers could be attributed to alcohol. But while it is useful as a description of what happens in populations, as usual when translated to an individual it stops looking so impressive.

Statistical significance testing is a pretty tricky concept. We're planning to post an article on it soon, but until we get round to it, here's a link to something excellent on the topic from the xkcd Web comic. They're illustrating exactly what people misunderstand. Maybe we needn't bother with the article after all...

Most school textbooks contain messages about health. But there's no known evidence for about a quarter of the messages. At least, that's the position in Granada, Spain, according to a report in BMC Public Health.

Philip Tetlock, an academic psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is famous in forecasting circles for his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? He reported on a 20-year research project on expert forecasts in many different fields, and, to summarize crudely, found that most of the experts were pretty hopeless at forecasting. Now he's involved in another project to try to do something about this.

The respected and influential Cochrane Collaboration has just published a systematic review of research on different ways of presenting risks and reductions in risk in a health context. It won't come as a surprise to regular readers of this website that they concluded that some aspects of the presentation really do make a difference. But maybe there are a few surprises in their detailed findings.

Did an article in the Times [paywall] today on the forthcoming EU Court of Justice ruling on whether gender can be taken into account when setting insurance premiums. I think this is an important and interesting topic, but articles in the financial pages have been very dull and so tried to make this a bit lighter in tone. Text of article is here.

Ben McGarry pointed out this blog entry about an article published in Sexually Transmitted Infections Online that says some rather odd things.

The Daily Mail and other papers carried the story about the Banwell family whose third child shares a birthday, February 5th, with two older siblings, and this time they got the odds right at 133,000 to 1!

Tom Scott has a marvellous web page, click here, that lets you check whether the place you live is on an ancient mystical energy highway. At least, it does if you live in England. If not, you can try one of the example postcodes he gives, or indeed the postcode of UU HQ here in Cambridge, CB3 0WB. Just don't forget to check the important warning that Tom gives after you've got your results.

After their previous attempt at a Nightingale rose, here is another ghastly example from today's edition of the Times. Shouldn't someone tell them?

Perhaps Japan's acceptance rate looks more than twice the size of China's

The bunting was out on Tuesday for the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the first statistics department in the world at University College London! UCL was home to the great developments in statistics both before and after the department opened in 1911, with Karl Pearson as Professor of Applied Statistics, endowed by Francis Galton who had just died.

This article found an association between mobile phone use in pregnancy and behavioural problems in childhood, with an additional association with the child using a mobile phone before they were 7. I was not the only one reported as being sceptical, but the study is predictably getting a lot of coverage particularly in pregnancy advisory websites.

This month's Nrich has a fine collection of exercises on uncertainty, chance and coincidences, designed to be useful for primary schools to sixth forms. Have a look at the great lottery simulator, and try your hand at spinning 10 heads in a row like Derren Brown (there's a simulator if you get bored).

Got an article in the Times about the Walkers Crisps forecasting competition. Since then have won another £10. Shame the paywall means there is no point in linking to the online version.

I have just won £10 in the Walker's Crisps Rainy Day promotion. Each packet of crisps has a code that allows you to choose a 2km x 2km square in the UK or Republic of Ireland in which you think it will rain in a couple of days time. I won after only three entries at a crisp cost of £1.20, which seems quite a good deal.

We are working with the Met Office on a project comparing alternative ways of presenting uncertainty about short-term weather forecasts, and have a 6-month internship available for a PhD student. See this link for details.

A recent study showed no evidence of an adverse effect of moderate consumption of alcohol during pregnancy and subsequent child development. But the Department of Health has commented "After assessing the available evidence, we cannot say with confidence that drinking during pregnancy is safe and will not harm your baby. Therefore, as a precautionary measure, our advice to pregnant women and women trying to conceive is to avoid alcohol."
Is this still a tenable position?

The Inter-Academy Council (IAC) recently produced a report on the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) which got a lot of publicity, but almost no coverage was given to what the IAC said about the IPCC's way of handling uncertainty. It makes interesting reading.

This is an article that appeared in the Times on Friday July 2nd - sadly everyone now has to pay to access Times articles online.

Who is exposed to the greater lethal risk: a member of the UK forces serving in Afghanistan, or an average patient spending the night in an English hospital? Of course the question can’t be answered exactly: it all depends on who we mean and how we measure risk. But statistics can give us a ball-park figure that may be surprising.

Do you reckon you have good statistical skills? Now's the chance to prove it in two forecasting competitions that are running this month, both of which feature the Eurovision Song Contest.

In the first televised election debate last Thursday, David Cameron stated that “I have a man in my constituency … who had kidney cancer who came to see me with seven others. Tragically, two of them have died because they couldn't get the drug Sutent that they wanted..”. How reasonable was it to claim that two would not have died had they had access to Sutent? Some statistical analysis can give us an insight.

Do you think that kids are being over-protected and need more risk in their lives? If so, you may be surprised to find that the Chair of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) agree with you.

The English Outdoor Council has just released a fine report by Tim Gill,
"Nothing ventured: balancing risks and benefits in the outdoors" which "explodes the myths about safety on school visits and gives real reassurance to teachers"

There has been extensive coverage of a box of 6 eggs found to be all double-yoked:an event that was given odds of a trillion to 1 against. This was based on the British Egg Information Service saying 0.1% ( 1 in 1000) eggs were double-yoked, and so getting six of these required these odds to be multiplied 6 times. In fact this gives 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, but which was reported as a trillion (now usually taken as 1,000,000,000,000).

The Daily Mail did a good demolition of this story, and it is a good example of what can go wrong when people try and work out chances.