Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 21 August 2010
Pass rates are at 98%. A quarter of grades are higher than an A. This week every newspaper in the country was filled with people asserting that exams are definitely getting easier, and then other people asserting that exams are definitely not getting easier. The question for me is always simple: how do you know?
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 7 August 2010
According to the Home Office this week, Sarah’s law – where any parent can find out if any adult in contact with their child has a record of violent or sexual crimes – has “already protected more than 60 children from abuse during its pilot“. This fact was widely reported and was the headline finding. As the Sun said: “More than 60 sickening offences were halted by Sarah’s Law during its trial”. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 31 July 2010
It’s the near misses that really make you want to shoot your own face off. This week the Centre for Policy Studies has published a pamphlet on education which has been covered by the Mirror, the Mail, the BBC, the Telegraph, the Express, the Guardian, and more. Boris Johnson endorses it.
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 22 May 2010
So all good citizens this week are poring over the “Programme For Governmentâ€, 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.â€
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.
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 24 April 2010
What can science and evidence bring to an election? First there are the micro-issues: we can assess the validity of claims made by politicians by seeking out the evidence. David Cameron, for example, claimed that UK cancer services were bad because fewer people die of cancer in Bulgaria than in the UK, which many have already debunked: he used death data from a country with inferior monitoring standards, and a far lower life expectancy, but more than that, he used death data, which is driven not just by treatment success, but also by the number of new cases to start with, which can vary widely for all kinds of reasons. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 8 January 2009
“Public sector pay races ahead in a recession” shouted the front page of this week’s Sunday Times. “Public sector workers earn 7% more on average than their peers in the private sector — a pay gulf that has more than doubled since the recession began.” The Telegraph followed up with a copycat story a few hours later.
In reality, this is one of those interesting areas where anybody who makes a firm statement is wrong, because there is not sufficient evidence to make a confident assertion in either direction.
