Three-fold variation in UK bowel cancer death rates (?)

I've taken the headline from this BBC story. The three-fold variation is between Rossendale, in Lancashire, where there were 9 deaths per 100,000 people, and Glasgow City, where there were 31 deaths per 100,000. It's based on this press release from the charity Beating Bowel Cancer,

Surgeons create Frankenstein numbers?

david's picture
Submitted by david on Thu, 29/09/2011 - 7:50am

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.'

Divide and rule: getting rates in a mess

kevin's picture
Submitted by kevin on Wed, 28/09/2011 - 2:54pm

I've been a bit inactive in here for a few weeks, because I've temporarily moved to Berlin. But it turns out that one can find bad presentations of risk in the German media too, and here's one, pointed out to me by my new colleague Jan Multmeier. The topic is a serious one: suicide rates in German troops serving abroad, and the error involves dividing by the wrong thing when calculating rates.

The dangers of 'don't worry'

david's picture
Submitted by david on Tue, 27/09/2011 - 7:48am

(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.

Get under the table?

david's picture
Submitted by david on Fri, 23/09/2011 - 8:26am

The remnants of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) are due to hit the earth later today and NASA have put up some details of their risk assessment. But this doesn't say where their '1 in 3200 chance of anyone being hit' comes from, and so can we get this figure from a back-of-an-envelope calculation?

Lottery league tables

david's picture
Submitted by david on Thu, 15/09/2011 - 11:13am

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.

Visualising uncertainty

david's picture
Submitted by david on Thu, 15/09/2011 - 9:54am

We have had a review paper published in Science called Visualising uncertainty about the future, although it primarily focuses on probability forecasts.

You may access the full paper by following the links below.

Visualising uncertainty about the future

david's picture
Submitted by david on Mon, 12/09/2011 - 10:51am

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

possible-hurricane_0.jpg

possible hurricane paths

Visualising Cochrane Summary of Findings

iconA visualisation of the Cochrane Summary of Findings table for adjuvant radiotherapy after surgery for cervical cancer.

Spotting a hoax using statistics

david's picture
Submitted by david on Wed, 03/08/2011 - 6:10pm

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.

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