A new and interesting form of wrong

November 27th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, numerical context, statistics, survey data | 32 Comments »

Ben Goldacre. The Guardian, Saturday 27 November 2010

Wrong isn’t enough: we need interestingly wrong, and this week that came in some research from Stonewall, an organisation for whom I generally have great respect, which was reported in the Guardian. Stonewall have conducted a survey, and their press release says it shows “the average coming out age has fallen by over 20 years”.

People may well be coming out earlier than before – intuitively that seems plausible – but Stonewall’s survey is flawed by design, and contains some interesting statistical traps. Read the rest of this entry »

“Hello madam, would you like your children to be unemployed?”

November 20th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, churnalism, survey data | 27 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 20 November 2010

image Obviously I like nerdy days out: like Kelvedon Hatch secret nuclear bunker, maybe, with its sign on the A128 saying “secret nuclear bunker this way”. Last month eight of us commissioned a boat to get onto a rotting man-made WW2 sea-fort in the middle of the ocean through Project Redsand (we genuinely thought we might die climbing the ladders), and a couple of weeks earlier, myself and Mrs Bad Science travelled to Dungeness, where a toytown narrow gauge railway takes you through amusement parks and back gardens, past Derek Jarman’s house, then into barren wasteland, before depositing you incongruously at the base of a magnificent, enormous, and terrifying nuclear power station.

Read the rest of this entry »

Science is about embracing your knockers – updated as Rodial begin to play games

November 12th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, churnalism, legal chill, libel | 42 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 13 November 2010

If science has any credibility, it derives from transparency: when you make a claim about how something works, you provide references to experiments, which describe openly and in full what was done, in enough detail for the experiment to be replicated, detailing what was measured, and how. Then people discuss what they think this all means in the real world.

Maria Hatzistefanis is a star of lifestyle pages and the owner of Rodial, the cosmetics company who sell a product called “Boob Job” which they claim will give you a “fuller bust” “increase the bust size” and “plump up the décolleté area” with “an instant lifting and firming effect”, and an increase of half a cup size in 56 days. Or rather an increase of “8.4%”. It’s all very precise. Read the rest of this entry »

The glorious mess of real scientific results

November 6th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, irrationality research | 23 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 6 November 2010

Popular science is often triumphalist, presenting research as a set of completed answers, when in reality much of what gets published makes a glorious, necessary mess.

Here is an example. Read the rest of this entry »