In the animation below we show how risks can be ‘spun’ to look bigger or smaller, how medical treatments can be made to seem useless or to be wonder cures, and how lifestyle changes might look worthwhile or not worth bothering with. All by changing the words used, the way the numbers are expressed, and the particular graphics chosen.
Cochrane Reviews are usually taken as the gold standard in putting the evidence together to check whether a treatment works. But a new Cochrane Review that examines how much the ‘treatment’ of putting in street lights prevents injuries and saves lives seems to suffer from some major flaws which could mean the claimed benefits from street lighting are greatly exaggerated.
With one game each to play in the Premier League, we've updated our football animation to the new season's results.
You might be interested to read this article in the Times on page 14 and an associated editorial on page 2. Also in the Times Online.
We've added a version of our Survival animation that goes all the way back to 1845 in How long did we live?.
Can you spot the influence of the internal combustion engine in this data?
Florence Nightingale is well known for her selfless nursing of the sick, and her pioneering reform of healthcare. Less well known is that she was also an accomplished statistician! We take a look at some of her finest work.
Through her work as a nurse in the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale was a pioneer in establishing the importance of sanitation in hospitals. She meticulously gathered data on relating death tolls in hospitals to cleanliness, and, because of her novel methods of communicating this data, she was also a pioneer in applied statistics. We explore the work of Nightingale, and in particular focus on her use of certain graphs which, following misreading of her work, are now commonly known as 'coxcombs'.
