david's blog

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 headed “Three alcoholic drinks a day can cause liver cancer, new research finds”.

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.

President Barack Obama recently spent 3 days in Delhi, and it’s been claimed that during this period the air pollution knocked 6 hours off his life. So who was responsible for this number?

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”.

A story in monday's Times had the following dramatic headline:

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?

It's well-known how misleading it can be to use average (mean) as a summary measure of income: the distribution is very skew, and a few very rich people can hopelessly distort the mean. So median (the value halfway along the distribution) income is generally used, and this might fairly be described as the income of an average person, rather than the average income.

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.

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. Does this mean that flying is becoming more dangerous and we should keep off planes? The following analysis may appear cold-hearted, but is not intended to diminish the impact of this tragic loss on the people and families involved.

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.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++