March 17th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre
in bad science, cash-for-"stories", statistics | 29 Comments »
Just looked this up myself and saw that for some reason it never got posted on the blog, so here it is.
Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday 10th October 2008
What I like about Bad Science is that it’s a game the whole family can play. This month “Lloydspharmacy”, as Lloyds Pharmacy insist on being called, is trying to flog carbon monoxide detectors (for only £12.99). It is a noble calling, so it decided to follow industry protocol for getting its product and brand into the media: it produced a misleading set of superficially plausible survey figures to massage our prejudices, which journalists obediently copied and pasted out of the Lloyds press release email and into their word processors, to make a “news” article. Read the rest of this entry »
February 28th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre
in bad science, statistics, surveillance | 78 Comments »
The Guardian
Saturday February 28 2009
Ben Goldacre
This week Sir David Omand, the former Whitehall security and intelligence co-ordinator, described how the state should analyse data about individuals in order to find terrorist suspects: travel information, tax, phone records, emails, and so on. “Finding out other people’s secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules” he said, because we’ll need to screen everyone to find the small number of suspects.
There is one very significant issue that will always make data mining unworkable when used to search for terrorist suspects in a general population, and that is what we might call Read the rest of this entry »
February 21st, 2009 by Ben Goldacre
in bad science, drurrrgs, statistics, telegraph | 65 Comments »
Ben Goldacre
Saturday February 21 2009
The Guardian
In a week where our dear Daily Mail ran with the headline “How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer”, I will exercise some self control, and write about drugs instead.
“Seven hundred British troops seized four Taliban narcotics factories containing £50m of drugs” said the Guardian on Wednesday. “Troops recovered more than 400kg of raw opium in one drug factory and nearly 800kg of heroin in another.” Lordy that is good. In the Telegraph, British forces had seized “£50 million of heroin and killed at least 20 Taliban fighters in a daring raid that dealt a significant blow to the insurgents in Afghanistan.” Everyone carried the good news. Read the rest of this entry »
January 17th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre
in bad science, badscience, dodgy academic press releases, express, presenting numbers, statistics | 65 Comments »
The Guardian,
Saturday January 17 2009
Ben Goldacre
“Danger from just 7 cups of coffee a day” said the Express on Wednesday. “Too much coffee can make you hallucinate and sense dead people say sleep experts. The equivalent of just seven cups of instant coffee a day is enough to trigger the weird responses.” The story appeared in almost every national newspaper. Read the rest of this entry »
December 20th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre
in bad science, death, statistics, times | 12 Comments »
I was delighted to discover this week that the Times have started an innovative new column entitled “Bad Statistics”. It seems to me to be somewhat lacking in thoroughness. I should like to submit for their consideration an article from the Sunday Times on the 14th of December.
The opening sentence is: “Public opinion has moved sharply in favour of assisted suicide, according to a poll for The Sunday Times.” This opening sentence is, I believe, incorrect. Read the rest of this entry »
November 15th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre
in adverts, bad science, presenting numbers, statistics | 33 Comments »
We’re all suckers for a big number, and you’ll be delighted to hear that the Journal of Consumer Research has huge teams of scientists all eagerly writing up their sinister research on how to exploit us.
One excellent study this month looked at how people choose a digital camera. This will become relevant in three paragraphs’ time. The researchers took a single image, then processed it in Photoshop to make two copies: one where the colours were more vivid, and one where the image was sharper. They told participants that each image came from a different camera, and asked which they wanted to buy. About a quarter chose the one with the more colourful sharper image. Read the rest of this entry »
September 6th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre
in bbc, statistics, times | 23 Comments »
Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday September 6 2008
Britain’s happiest places have been mapped by scientists, according to the BBC: Read the rest of this entry »
July 5th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre
in bad science, pr guff, scare stories, secret data, statistics, survey data | 39 Comments »
Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday July 5 2008
Anyone would think the cold war was still on, with all this top secret scientific data that journalists constantly seem to be writing about. In last week’s column, as you will remember, we saw the Sunday Express front page claiming that a scientist and government adviser called Dr Coghill had performed scientific research, and found that the Bridgend suicide cases all lived closer to a mobile phone mast than average: this was an issue of great public health significance, but when I contacted the researcher, he wasn’t a doctor, he wasn’t really a government adviser, he couldn’t tell me what he meant by “average”, and he had, in a twist of almost incomprehensible ridiculousness, “lost” the data.
This week we have the same thing, from the insurance company Esure, and their agents Mischief PR. Read the rest of this entry »
June 28th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre
in PhDs, doctors, and qualifications, bad science, competing interests, electrosensitivity, express, herbal remedies, magnets, roger coghill, statistics | 94 Comments »
Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday June 28, 2008
It’s the big stories I enjoy the most. “Suicides linked to phone masts” roared the Sunday Express front-page headline this week. “The spate of deaths among young people in Britain’s suicide capital could be linked to radio waves from dozens of mobile phone transmitter masts near the victims’ homes.”
Read the rest of this entry »
June 7th, 2008 by Ben Goldacre
in bad science, references, statistics | 27 Comments »
Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday June 7 2008
It is with deep regret that I must alert you to a frightening decline in the quality of maths in reports complaining about the frightening decline in the quality of maths in Britain. “The value of mathematics”, by thinktank Reform, has received a huge amount of flattering media coverage this week in the Times, the Telegraph, and even scored a second puff in the Guardian from Professor Marcus du Sautoy himself. There is less maths around. We suffer economically. People think it’s cool to be bad at sums. These are bad things.
Read the rest of this entry »
