If you’re really bad at predicting when you’ve done well, then “good scores seem to be random,” or at least outside my control, would eventually seem like a reasonable interpretation of your data.

If we measured IQ for the people I’m around regularly, most of my friends — my default “peer group” — would probably score more than one standard deviation above the national median. So when I told myself in school that I was perfectly normal, I meant that I was “perfectly normal, compared to the top 3% of students in the nation,” not “perfectly normal compared to the average student in the entire country.”

In the absence of substantial information about the other people in a study, I would likely tend to underestimate my performance: I happen to do well with logic puzzles and grammar, but surely there will be several people in the room who will do better, because I’m “perfectly normal.”

I assume that the same logic works for the bottom quartile: they are “perfectly normal” — compared to their internalized peer group, which is almost certainly other people who get lousy marks.

They only give two example questions – is that acceptable in this sort of paper? I’m a physics student and I don’t know much of anything about practices in psychology, but when we are writing a paper like this we are expected to give sufficient information such that another physicist could duplicate the experiment. I would think that that would require making the actual questions that were asked available somewhere.

In last years drug strategy consultation document they claimed: “Drug-related deaths have fallen from 1,538 in 1999 to 1506 in 2005″ [1].

well….

- The Government claims drug-related deaths have fallen very slightly, the consultation document describes a fall of 2% between 1999 and 2005, a statistically insignificant fall of 32.

- The source for this claim is unclear, however, as the reference given is for a report which looks at drug deaths between 2000 and 2004 [2].

- It is also noteworthy that the Government has chosen to quote the level of drug-related deaths in 1999 as a benchmark rather than 1998 which has a higher figure but is the benchmark year used for other statistics in the document. The annual drug death figures are very volatile from year to year (indicating problems with the measures, and with using them as a measure of success), allowing them to be easily cherry picked to show success where none is evident.

- According to the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures [3], drug-related deaths have actually risen by just over 10% from 1,457 in 1998 to 1,608 in 2005.

N:B the true level of drug-related deaths is likely to be higher than ONS suggests as its figures only include deaths which are directly linked to drug use and occur shortly after use (and which are recorded on death certificates). Its figures do not include deaths caused by longer term use such as respiratory diseases, nor does it include deaths from indirect causes such as infectious diseases, car accidents and violence. [4]

The United Kingdom has the 2nd highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe [5].

1. Drug Strategy consultation document : “Our communities : your say”, 25 th July 2007, Key Facts (Annex A)

2. Health Statistics Quarterly Spring 2006, Office for National Statistics

3. Health Statistics Quarterly Spring 2007, Table 3, page 86, Office for National Statistics

4. For more discussion and data see the Transform Fact research Guide to drug deaths here: http://www.tdpf.org.uk/MediaNews_FactResearchGuide.htm

5. European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2006 Annual Report.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

(nb: beloved of the membership exam of the Royal college of psychiatrists)

Basically we’ve all a tendency to think that our shortcomings are to do with bad luck (i.e. situational), but everyone else had theirs coming to them (i.e. dispositional).

That probably explains why the most clueless managers always seem to get promoted at my workplace!