david's blog

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.

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 nonsense." I stand by this, but after a bit more consideration I would like to suggest a slightly more refined version for dealing with science stories in the news, particularly medical ones.

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”.

Coverage of a paper just published by Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health included dramatic headlines such as the Guardian's Heat-related deaths in the UK will rise 257% by 2050 because of climate change. But a closer look at the numbers in the paper paints a rather different picture.

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.

In the Radio 4 documentary PISA - Global Education Tables Tested, broadcast on November 25th, a comment is made that the statistical issues are a bit complex to go into.

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.

I was of a number of complainants to the Press Complaints Commission about the Sunday Telegraph story headlined 13,000 died needlessly at 14 worst NHS trusts, as the Telegraph journalists had been explicitly told by the originator of the figures, Professor Brian Jarman, that this was an inappropriate interpretation.

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:

The government is pushing ahead with proposals for a maths qualification to be taken by 16-18 year-olds who got at least a grade C in Maths GCSE but are not doing maths A level.