Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 29 May 2010
This week a man called Martin Gardner died, aged 95. His popular maths column in Scientific American (and 50 books on the subject) spanned the decades, but in 1952 he published a book about pseudoscience, quacks, and credulous journalists. How much do you think has changed over 60 years?
Uninformed reporter fails to present even the most basic GMC allegations of misrepresenting individual patients findings. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 22 May 2010
So all good citizens this week are poring over the “Programme For Government”, and it’s true to say that there is much to be pleased with. Labour wasn’t all about unbridled credit and fun public sector spending sprees: they kept all your emails, kept records of the websites you visited, used “anti-terrorism” legislation on people who plainly weren’t terrorists, and so on.
But most interesting are the noises now being made about crime and evidence. “We will conduct a full review of sentencing policy” they say: “to ensure that it is effective in deterring crime, protecting the public, punishing offenders and cutting reoffending. In particular, we will ensure that sentencing for drug use helps offenders come off drugs.”
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 15 May 2010
It’s worth paying attention to medicine, because when it goes wrong, people suffer and die. But how do we know when things are going wrong? This week the BMA produced a report on whistleblowers. Of the 384 doctors they surveyed (with a dismal response rate of 12%, we should be clear): 40% said they would be too frightened of repercussions to report concerns about patient safety. Of those who had spoken out on an issue, one in ten were told this could have a negative impact on their careers. But are they being melodramatic? And what if life for whistleblowers was better?
Lots of people have been explaining that a hung parliament would be unable to rein in public spending. Do the figures support this idea? I’m sitting in my kitchen with a political data nerd who’s just pulled this gem out of his back pocket. It’s from this document on this page of the Institute for Government website, and it’d be nice if someone like this could make a less ugly version. The y-axis is how much you borrow, the x-axis is the size of your biggest party, and it seems to show that countries with single powerful parties tend also to have worse government debt. Just a piece of the puzzle, but I give it to you for free. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 8 May 2010
Data matters. We use it to understand what has already happened in the world, and we use it to make decisions about what to do next. But in among the graphics and electoral cock-ups lies a terrible truth: a small army of amateur enthusiasts are doing a better job of collecting and disseminating basic political data than the state has managed. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s the election tomorrow and I want to ask your help to get one MP re-elected for the good of science in the UK. In an era when so many of our elected politicians have acted out of self-interest, dipping their fingers in the till, Evan Harris has stood out by being smart, hard-working and informed, but more than that, by being genuinely brave in taking on causes in science and human rights that many believe in, but few would have the guts to stand up for. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 1 May 2010
Elections are a time for smearing, and the Mail’s desperate story about Nick Clegg and the Nazis is my favourite so far. Generally the truth comes out, in time. But how much damage can smears do?
A new experiment published this month in the journal “Political Behaviour” sets out to examine the impact of corrections, and what they found was far more disturbing than they expected: far from changing peoples’ minds, if you are deeply entrenched in your views, a correction will only reinforce them.
