During 2006, women were attacked three times as often as men in Florida.

The lesson: you should always take a woman with you into the swamp. muah ha ha.

One year they apparently had a preference for boy scouts, another time it was german shepherds. Oh well…

How do you know the study itself focuses on rats? The only bit in the Guardian article that even pretends to be quoted by the newspapers from the study itself is this sentence:
“Household reports of wasps have risen by 39 per cent, squirrels by 23 per cent, mice by 17 per cent and rats by 12 per cent.”

Rats are included in the study. But I haven’t a clue what animal (if any) is the “focus” of it. Since only MischiefPR knows what was measured, only they can say what the focus really was.

Not that it stops the Express and the Daily Mail from focusing on the rats.

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Anyway. Sloppy figures aren’t limited to science news stories. A couple days ago, I read that a certain American city has seen “double-digit increases in murder, rape, burglary, larceny and shooting rates” so far this year.

I still don’t know what this double digit increase really means. +15/wk? +12 per 3 months? Only when all those crimes are combined? Or in each catagory individually?

If I only read that one story, I’d never know. It would not have even been that difficult to give out useful information. Someone simply chose not to, in service of making a splashy statement.

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So, since we can’t count on the newspapers to tell us anything useful, if we want to know more about murder rates (or rats, or wasps), then we would need access to other sources.

Oh, wait. That’s what the Guardian article was about. Access.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/insurance/household-insurance/article.html?in_article_id=425087&in_page_id=34

Why does it focus on rats?

Er… because they are way more scary than pigeons, squirrels or cockroaches. This isn’t about reality – it’s about getting publicity for an insurance company.

If they could have come up with a story that said man-eating alligators are going to come up from the sewers and eat your left-over pizza, before tucking into your baby for dessert, then I suspect they probably would – just as long as they got a plug for Esure in there.

Right, yeah, the plague. I was being slightly flippant, mainly because the article was illustrated by a very nice picture of a cute rat.

You know you can get plague from squirrels in the USA? (Seriously big warning signs about the dangers of squirrels in Utah/Arizona)

No one ever makes the same fuss about squirrels as they do about rats. I guess my point was why does this “study” focus on rats? (And not cockroaches as someone else pointed out)

Pigeons apparently carry 37 diseases which are communicable to humans. And I seem to see far more pigeons than rats whenever I go into the city centre.

And yes, despite liking rats, I wouldn’t really want to share my house with them.

It’s pretty well known within the industry that if you want to run a ‘puff’ survey, then you don’t go to one of the big players (e.g. YouGov) – since they need to maintain a certain level of quality (although I’m not claiming that their results are always correct, especially regarding voting intentions). They require any press release using the data to be submitted to them and won’t allow spurious claims to be made that the data doesn’t support.

It’s incredibly easy to use something like ‘SurveyMonkey’ or more maleable research firms who will come out with the results you want to achieve, irrespective of what reality might actually look like.

To Luckypeachtree – your point is valid to a certain extent. But there is still sufficient demand for newspapers/web-sites, etc. who provide more than just celeb gossip and a horoscope. Otherwise no-one would be publishing this column in the first place.

Oh, you know. That whole plague thing kind of gave them a bad reputation. Especially in London.

Granted, it is really a bacterium which is responsible. But the rat brings the flea what brings the bacteria, so you can’t exactly ignore that.

They are vectors for other diseases, as well.

*
I suppose they do function (sloppily) as a self-propelling garbage disposal.

Sorry to put too fine a point on it, but a rat will also urinate & defecate after consuming food. “One rat produces 20-50 droppings per day and excretes 14 ml of urine per day.”“One rat produces 20-50 droppings per day and excretes 14 ml of urine per day” (source). So I’m personally not so sure how clean streets will be where a large number of rats dine well.

*
That said, tame rats can make wonderful pets. If you get them young and handle them well, they can be very sweet.

*
All of which is kind of beside the point of the original post (which looks to be more about freedom of information).

But I thought that, if you were serious about not knowing why rat increases get media play? It might help in case you were ever tempted to rent or buy a place with an actual rat problem.

….Plus I couldn’t resist… Forgetting the Plague? Tsk, tsk…

On the plus side, they do eat rubbish and keep the streets relatively clean, for free.

a spellchecker wouldn’t flag up bee as a problem, as it’s a valid word

Presumably the ‘Why?’ is just the newspaper business model – advertising + news = content. If you need to sell X pages of advertising to stay solvent, you want to print a further Y of pages to look like a newspaper and not a mailer from a bad furniture company. Unless you can think up another business model for these guys I guess you have to put up with a certain amount of crap reporting. Agree with SpiderJ, leave these idjits be, find some more persuasive morons on whom to spend your precious time.

I’m interested in this idea of ‘Household reports’. It has never occured to me that there might be an organisation who would be interested in the number of wasps I’ve had to deal with in the kitchen. Should I be keeping some kind of record and how do I submit this data?

The former very rarely claims to be ’scientific’ and is often very clearly used to promote a company, while the latter uses a mantle of respectability to make ’scientific’ claims about some very serious issues.

Personally I read Bad Science for the latter – the former is just too easy to pick apart by science idiots like me. It’s the insiduous nature of pseudo-science that I find much more scary.

However, I always advise clients to make the raw data available, and most of them do, if requested to do so by a journalist.

What is interesting to note – is how very rare it is for journalists to ask to see the raw data.

While certain PR companies (and their clients) may well be trying to pull a fast one by using poor data (or poor analysis of the data), this is only made possible by the extremely lax attitude of the majority of the media.

It has become a vicious circle – journalists see surveys as an easy way to fill column inches with accompanying scary headlines (you never see a survey giving you good news, do you?) and PR people see it as an easy way to get coverage for their clients.

The only real way to stop this is for journalists to become more rigorous in their questioning (or even asking ANY questions). But don’t hold your breath.

Perhaps we should be amazed not that there is so much garbage in these papers, but that there is so little (relatively speaking), since they appear to be laying themselves open to every con-man in the country.

http://www.cipr.co.uk/About/index.htm

be interesting to know if they have relevant best practice guides; whether there’s anything in their training about good practice with surveys, etc.

there’s nothing explicit in the code of conduct
http://www.cipr.co.uk/Membership/conduct/index.htm

but one of their “fundamental principles of good practice” is “Checking the reliability and accuracy of information before dissemination”