Every now and then a use of numbers pops up on the news that mildly irritates me. One of the worst thing the news media often do is to use a percentage without giving absolute figures to put that percentage into context. For example, imagine that we hear that the murder rate in a city has gone up by 100% compared with last year. Shock, horror, sack the police. But if it happens that the murder rate last year was 1 victim, that 100% increase is 1 extra person. Not exactly a massive change and highly unlikely to have any statistical significance. The latest version of this problem has been repeated over and over. We are told that unless the triple lock on pensions is suspended, the state pension in the UK could go up by 8% next year. A vast increase. But again, without the context it's impossible to tell what 8% means. As it happens the UK has an unusually low state pension for a European country. There current maximum is £718.40 (confusingly, this is over four weeks but isn't th...

I had my attention drawn on Facebook to a sad story on the i newspaper's website of a couple who are facing deportation because they misunderstood the over-complex rules for their visa. It is surely essential that a good immigration system has simple and easy to follow rules - this needs sorting. I feel sorry for anyone at the mercy of byzantine immigration rules. However, what also struck me was how carefully phrased the wording of the article was to support a particular viewpoint. Here's the bit in question: With the article's wording, what they did was the apparently harmless 'let the jobs lapse.' But let me rephrase that. The bosses kept on staff for the shortest period necessary to get the visa, then the staff were fired. Two people lost their jobs.  Does that sound as nice and fluffy as 'let the jobs lapse'? It's amazing how the phrasing of the two versions - both arguably factually accurate - can make a lot of differen...

All too often we see a story in the newspaper where numbers are painfully parroted without giving any consideration to what they actually mean - and all too often that means we need recite our favourite mantra, 'correlation is not causality'. Today's paper carried a wonderful example of this, citing 'research' by Lloyds Bank showing that living in the vicinity of a supermarket will have a varying impact on the price of your house 'depending on the status of the shop.' As we all know, it shows nothing of the kind. There may be a correlation between being near the shop and house prices - but it's highly unlikely it's causal. The reason we can be reasonably sure of this is that occupant of the number 4 position, Iceland. Anyone who knows their 'status of the shop' rankings knows that Iceland is the pits - certainly below Asda. I don't doubt the pulling power of Waitrose, but the fact is I'd suggest there are other causal factors at ...

I've often moaned about the poor use of statistics in the news. Today it's more a case of a total absence of stats, which could have put a story into context and would have made it more informative. In the story shown, we learn that 'everyone says it's incredible' that a mother born on Feb 29 should have a child also born on leap year day. But if the journo could have just taken a moment to think, he or she could have put this into useful context. It certainly seems incredible if you misapply statistics and think there's a 1 in 1,461 chance of the mother being born on Feb 29, and similarly for a totally randomly occurring baby, making it a 1 in 2.13 million  chance of the double. But that's just wrong because it's telling us about the chances of a randomly picked baby being in this situation, not the chances of the situation occurring this Feb 29th. About 700,000 babies will be born in the UK this year, so with a 1 in 1,461 chance of the mother b...

I do like something irritating to wake my brain up on a Monday morning, and today the best newspaper in the UK (genuinely), the i , managed to do this with a double whammy. They ran a story in which the only 'news' was that an astronaut's dad had said something stupid, and then had the nerve to label the story 'science'. The entire basis for the story was a comment from the father of British astronaut-to-be, Tim Peake. His father, Nigel, is quoted as saying 'I'm more worried about him driving home on the M27. That's far more dangerous, believe me, than going up there.' So, in what sense is this news or science? The only vaguely scientific thing in the story was the extreme misuse of statistics, which we'll examine in a moment, and though I'd rather we had astronauts in the news than X-Factor winners (I'm pleased to say that I neither know nor care who won), I really have very little interest in Nigel. I'm sorry Nigel, but I d...

If you've read a fair number of my blog posts, you'll be aware that I am always a little suspicious of statistics used in the news, and I think it's worth regularly digging a little deeper to see what lies beneath those numbers, and whether they really tell us what the media say they do. A little over a week ago, there was a fair amount of coverage to say that for the first time, possibly influenced by the Paris attacks a few days before, there was a majority of voters in the UK in favour of leaving the EU. But was that really true? After a bit of digging (none of the newspaper reports I looked at had a link to the data) I found the results from the ORB International survey . (It's on page 8, as this is a summary of a range of surveys.) The survey was of 2067 people and, indeed, 52% were in favour of leaving over 48% against. But there are two issues here. Can we be sure that such a tight margin is representative when we blow that 2067 up to the 45 million or so vot...

Two news stories have really irritated me this weekend, and since one is anti-Labour and one is anti-Tory, we even have a good, BBC-style, political balance. The first was the press outrage that the Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, was not going to attend a rugby match. I'm sorry, it's a game. Get over it. I don't give a stuff. I want my politicians sorting out important political stuff, not acting as celebrities by turning up at some event that has no significance whatsoever. The second is that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, may have done something stupid as a young man involving a dead pig. (If you want to see some magnificent, but sometimes amusing over-reaction, take a look at the hashtag #piggate on Twitter.) This is doubly crass. First, once again, I want a senior politician focussed on the serious problems that the country and the world face, not on a silly story. But also how many of us can honestly say 'I never did something stupid between the...

If scientists had mantras two would stand out: The plural of anecdote is not data Correlation is not causality I'm sorry they're both negative - I'm sure it's not spiritually sound or something, but it does make them very valuable reminders of two key errors that crop up again and again in everyday life, and they are errors that even scientists can be prone to outside their field. I point this out because I've been semi-swamped on Facebook and Twitter by people, often scientists or with a science background, sending me stories about the way a particular doctor had worked at the weekend, so the government is entirely wrong. (For non-UK readers, there is a spat between the government, who want hospitals to operate the same at weekends as on weekdays, and the medical profession who say things don't need to change.) Spot the error from above? I'll come back to the weekends business in a moment, but let me illustrate why this is a terrible way of...

I am getting decidedly fed up of the reporting of the immensely sad case of the three women and nine children from Bradford who disappeared into Turkey, and probably Syria on their way back from a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. (I ought to emphasise that we should be doing all we can to get these children returned home.) I keep seeing press and politicians saying ‘The police didn't do enough to prevent them,’ or ‘The government isn’t doing enough to prevent radicalisation.’ Last night on the news a reporter's main question to someone in Bradford was 'Are you angry with the police?' And a couple of days ago, Baroness Warsi was quoted as saying that the Government was failing to offer sufficient collaboration with Muslim communities in Britain to ensure it could combat the threat of radicalisation. However, by the time the police need to act it’s too late - the mindset is in place. And should the government need to be thought police? Surely it’s time that a culture that ...

For me, the only TV news worth watching in the UK is Channel 4 News, with its real depth of analysis, general lack of dumbing down and occasional playfulness. However, if they have one fault it is that they still think that Britain runs an Empire and, as a result, responsible for all the world's ills. This struck me on their recent exposé of the way that migrant agricultural workers in Spain were struggling in terrible conditions, poorly paid, with dangerous exposure to pesticide. It was an important piece of reporting for me, but what seemed crazy was the way that the vast majority of the emphasis was on the responsibility of the British supermarkets who were among the (many) EU buyers of the salads from this region. Spain is part of the EU and subject to all the European legislation on working conditions. The obvious culprits here were the Spanish companies producing the salads and the Spanish politicians who don't crack down on this. But, no, over and over again the bl...

Halfway through the poppy field - it was rather impressive On Monday I had the pleasure of taking on another stretch of the Ridgeway (just two or three more to reach Ivinghoe Beacon!). As usual the walk was a mix of tracks and paths through farmers' fields, and at one point I felt I had been transported to Afghanistan. Because we were walking through a huge field of poppies. It is striking how much the media influences our thinking, because the only association I could come up with immediately was that these must be opium poppies. Despite being on one of the best-known long-distance footpaths in the country, I nervously joked with my walking companion that any moment we were going to come across the farmer toting a machine gun and shooting anyone who discovered his crop. Even beyond the joke, the first assumption was that these poppies were being grown for opium, though admittedly for a more benign application in the production of morphine for medicine. And perhaps they we...

Whatever your politics, it's hard not to feel sympathy for Ed Milliband when the Daily Mail makes such a scathing attack on his late father, and if the Mail intended this to turn people off Labour, I suspect it has backfired in quite a big way. Part of the problem with any such headline-based spat is that we get immediate knee-jerk reactions to 'the man who hated Britain' and yet actually the picture is much more nuanced, something that has struck me while reading a book by one of my favourite authors, Margery Allingham. Let's be clear - I do not agree in any way with the late Ralph Milliband's politics. I think Marxism is a dire system that more than throws the baby away with the bathwater. It is ill thought out and destructive. But popular British books from Milliband senior's formative period really do demonstrate that there were things to hate about Britain back then. I've commented before on the casual racism in Dennis Wheatley's books. We may...

There's nothing easier than attacking the media for misusing statistics - but I am puzzled at the moment by a major story in which the news media are avoiding statistics altogether. This may be an even worse reality, because the misuse of statistics is usually accidental, where this suppression may be deliberate. Yesterday's news was full of the outcome of the Oxford trial where seven men were found guilty of grooming and abusing young girls in a terrible fashion. It is notable that the BBC report says nothing about whether the culture of the seven might have influenced this behaviour, not even in a piece headlined ' Who were the abusers ?' Last night, though, Channel 4 News bit the bullet that most are dancing around and asked if race, religion or culture could have had an influence. Here Jon Snow asks the Deputy Children's Commissioner the straight question (and this is why I love Channel 4 News ) 'Is it race?' Here's the interview: She responds...

Public Relations is a dark art, and the practioners of PR have many tricks up their sleeves. Unfortunately they do have a tendency to use the same tricks over and over, to the extent that some of them have become close to a cliché - and probably the most obvious of these is news-based PR. It works like this. You keep an eye on the news for attention-grabbing stories, then put out a press release that uses that story as a 'hook'. So, for instance, last week, those of us who are priveleged to received our fair share of press releases were inundated with royal wedding releases, mostly totally unrelated to the event. You know the kind of thing - 'Wills and Kate have the ultimate drive home in classic car!' followed by a release by a classic car hire company. But it wasn't the royal wedding that sparked this post. It was darker news - the killing of Osama Bin Laden. I received a press release from a company called Imperva that has an 'Application Defence Centre...

One of the best bits in the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the moment when then starship Heart of Gold, powered by the infinite improbability guide, arrives at a planet. Because of the residual improbability, a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias are created hanging in space to plummet to the surface below. The sperm whale excitedly and optimistically names the phenomena it is experiencing until it goes splat. But the bowl of petunias simply thinks 'Oh no, not again.' That is sheer genius, and a comfort when I think 'Oh no, not again,' as I did when I saw a headline from the online BBC News that read Physics threat to religion . Here we go a Dawkins-ing, I thought. But what a strange headline. Physics threat to religion. Is a fundamental force going to break religion apart? Is the sheer existence of quantum theory too mind boggling for God, who has given up and gone home? When I read the article I was more than a bit disappointed. I was hoping for a good Da...

When people ask me about statistics they hear on the news, I suggest two questions they ought to bear in mind, and as a result of which they should employ appropriate scepticism. Those questions are: What does that mean? How do they know that? Let me demonstrate. You hear there has been a 100% increase in a particularly nasty crime over the previous year. That's horrendous. The world is unsafe. We'd better legislate. But hang on. What does that mean? 100% of what? It turns out the previous year there was one instance. This year there were two instances. Stand down the national guard. Another example to deploy question 2. I heard recently on the news that exports were up by so many percent over the previous year. How do they know that? I have several activities that count as exports. For instance, one of my main publishers is St Martin's Press in New York. As a result of selling them my books, money flows into the UK. This is an export, even if a physical object doesn...

Adrian Edmondson was slagging off the new, younger comedians the other day. So many of them, he suggests, perform basically the same act, interspersed with appearances on panel shows. You could interchange them and no one would notice the difference. He has a point, but some of the bright young-ish things have a certain something (in fact Ade did acknowledge this), and among those bright stars I would include Dara O Briain . I've recently read our Dara's book Tickling the English (subtitled a funny man's notes on a country and his people ), in which he tries that popular sport, analyzing what makes the English, erm, English, in this case through observation on a tour of comedy venues. Leaving aside the somewhat biassed sample that is represented by a comedy audience, it is quite interesting, though doesn't have the insight as an observational travel book of Stuart Maconie's cracking pair of titles Pies and Prejudice and Adventures on the High Teas . There was...

My parents always took a newspaper. When I was young it was the Manchester Guardian, for instance, though their reading matter drifted more right wing with old age. It was absolutely assumed when I was at school that one would take a paper - there was even discussion about the merits of different rags as a part of setting us up for life. But I never have. Don't get me wrong, I buy newspapers, but on an ad-hoc basis. If I've got a bit of time to spare, as a treat. Actual news I get from the TV and the interweb. In fact I think it's time we examined just what news is , and how best to get it. Just as it's being suggested that banks are split into two parts - the high street, basic banking functions and the speculative, risky actions, perhaps it's time we more explicitly divided our consumption of news. Part of it is reporting on what's happened (or in the case of Radio 4's Today Programme , speculating about what will happen later today). Part is opinion. ...

For obvious reasons I'm interested in books, and the future of books. As I mentioned recently I've reviewed ebook readers for Good Housekeeping , which involved a considerable amount of trying out different readers. So I am, I think, able to make a sensible comparison between the experience of reading in the traditional and new formats. For what it's worth, I currently far prefer the traditional version. It's not the 'smell and touch' argument. I really don't care what a book smells like. Actually, that's not true. I'd rather my books didn't smell at all. But the heft of a book in the hand is much more practical than an ebook reader, I prefer having two pages available at a time. I like being able to be careless with it. Turning pages is frankly a bit of a faff on the electronic version. And the page is rarely as well laid out, or as readable as the printed version. However, I do use an ebook reader, specifically Stanza on the iPhone. If I...

I appeared last night as a guest on the Litopia after Dark podcast, a weekly chat show on writing and writers hosted by (my) literary agent, Peter Cox of the Redhammer agency. Featuring Peter, regulars Donna Ballman and Dave Bartram, and with children's writer Amanda Lees and myself as guests on this particular show, it's a mix of serious discussion and fun book-based games. Apparently it's listened to by 12,000 to 15,000 people (numbers doubling every quarter). We had a great time - there were some technical glitches (I particularly liked when Peter had to re-record an intro along the lines of 'it may all go disastrously wrong but it hasn't yet') and at least two of us were well medicated for heavy colds, but we all had fun. It's difficult to be clear about numbers listening - they're based on downloads/streaming numbers, but of course plenty of copies could be downloaded without ever being listened to. Even so, it suggests there are a fair number of p...