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When does a single vote count?

david's picture
Submitted by david on Sat, 30/07/2011 - 5:28pm

1,362 Cambridge academics recently voted on ‘no confidence’ in the universities minister David Willetts, and this resulted in an exact draw with 681 voting each way: by the rules it meant the motion, or ‘Grace’, was not passed. A natural question to ask is: what was the chance of this happening?

Cats, cancer and confusion

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Wed, 27/07/2011 - 11:38am

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.

Mobile phones: where did the story go?

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Sun, 17/07/2011 - 1:14pm

This Friday's xkcd comic was about mobile phones and cancer. Regular readers of UU will know that I've shown an interest in that subject before, here, here and here. The main point of the comic was good, but what's this "another huge study" on phones and cancer in the first frame of the comic, and why hadn't I heard about it?

World cup cephalopod fever

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Thu, 23/06/2011 - 12:59pm

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

Another ghastly graphic in the TImes

david's picture
Submitted by david on Thu, 16/06/2011 - 10:42am

The Times has got another classic graphic today, which manages to be hideous, misleading and incomprehensible all at the same time - quite a feat. Why is this a pie-chart? Never mind, it all provides fine material for getting laughs when giving talks.


hideous, misleading and incomprehensible all at the same time

Spinning mobile phones

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Mon, 06/06/2011 - 2:10pm

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?

Mobile phones: where's the uncertainty?

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Fri, 03/06/2011 - 2:36pm

The media in the UK and many other countries have been full this week of stories about mobile phones and brain cancer. Some were really pretty scary - the Daily Express gave a SHOCK WARNING: MOBILE PHONES CAN GIVE YOU CANCER. But others were much more cautious. The BBC reported that a link between phones and cancer was "not clearly established" and that "the evidence was too weak to draw strong conclusions from." What's going on?

Statistician's ESP prediction comes true!

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Fri, 20/05/2011 - 1:15pm

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.

Coffee and breast cancer

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Wed, 11/05/2011 - 11:21am

The media today are full of reports that women who drink lots of coffee might reduce their risk of developing one type of breast cancer. For instance, the BBC reported on it here, and the Daily Mail here. But is the evidence really there?

Heart disease screening: where did the uncertainty go?

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Tue, 10/05/2011 - 1:19pm

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.

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