Dr Ben Goldacre reports that the Times has launched a new feature called… ‘Bad Statistics’. It asks readers: ‘Send your bad statistics to badstats@thetimes.co.uk’.
Déjà vu?
‘Rip off’ one commenter writes below the first piece. Ben Goldacre of the Guardian’s ‘Bad Science’ column, despite heading his blog post ‘Rather brilliantly I have been plagiarised by the Times’, seems philosophical:
Tags: bad science, bad statistics, badstats@thetimes.co.uk, Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, The Times, The Times Global Broadcasting Co Ltd“Good for the cause though. And the bloke who writes it used to comment here. I hope it, er, gets better.”
Ben Goldacre highlighted another case of statistics used badly in the Guardian on Saturday: the claim that Britain’s happiest places have been mapped by scientists, according to the BBC and many newspapers.
Erm, says Ben Goldacre, there’s a slight problem with that. He shows how sampling has yet again been misused by journalists. “This entire news story was based on nothing more than random variation,” he reports.
“This is called sampling error, and it quietly undermines almost every piece of survey data ever covered in any newspaper.”
When Goldacre talked to the scientist behind the research, Dr Dimitris Ballas, he said: “I tried to explain issues of significance to the journalists who interviewed me. Most did not want to know.”
‘Ithika’, originally flagged this up, posting in the Bad Science forum and has written about it at dougalstanton.net. APGaylard and Gimpy have also blogged about it on their sites.
Tags: BBC, Ben Goldacre, Britain, Dimitris Ballas, The Guardian
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