So bad that comments are unnecessary … A Daily Telegraph headline: Essex teenager has higher IQ than Einstein The story in brief: a 16-year-old girl has scored 161 on the Mensa IQ test. Einstein never took an IQ test as none of the modern intelligence tests existed during the course of his life, but experts believe he had an IQ of around 160. And a ‘helpful’ gloss: the IQ test is designed to test
Statisticians often make quite a fuss about the various ways of measuring the average – and that’s because averages used wrongly can give a very misleading impression. The following story, based on a survey of 2000 drivers, appeared in the Metro newspaper. And it raises quite a lot of questions. A typical driver will jump 87 red lights, spend 99 days stationary on gridlocked roads and share 680 kisses during a lifetime
According to an item on the BBC website “Astronomers currently estimate that every star in the night sky hosts, on average, 1.6 planets” Is that poor statistics or poor use of English? If every star “hosts, on average, 1.6 planets”, then our near neighbour Proxima Centauri, for example, hosts on average 1.6 planets – and so, for that matter, does the Sun. What could that possibly mean? Perhaps the number
According to a poll conducted by the World Cancer Research Fund and reported by BBC News, just one in five Britons eats the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. If we are to take this seriously, it would be useful to know whether we are missing the target by a little or a lot: if the average number of portions consumed is 4.5 then that is a
The Daily Mail doesn’t pull its punches: Rise of poisonous caterpillar is unstoppable, say experts. The caterpillar is the larva of the oak processionary moth, and the story continues with the information that “Each caterpillar is covered in 63,000 hairs which can trigger potentially lethal asthma attacks” – and a warning that the London Olympics might be under threat. Of course, from a statistical point of view it is the
A prominent Daily Telegraph food scare story Red meat is blamed for 1 in 10 deaths is so flawed statistically that it is difficult to take it seriously. The opening paragraph sets the tone. Small quantities of processed meat such as bacon, sausages or salami can increase the likelihood of dying by a fifth, researchers from Harvard School of Medicine found. Eating steak increases the risk of dying by 12%.
A group of 537 businessmen wrote a letter to The Daily Telegraph recently calling for the abolition of the 50p income tax rate in the UK, arguing as follows. “Given the current state of the UK economy, we urge the Chancellor to urgently consider scrapping the top rate of tax in his forthcoming budget. The tax, which is in effect a 58p tax after national insurance is taken into account,
It’s official: women are actually better parkers than men – that’s according to a parking-survey published by NCP the car parks operator. Despite the impressive-sounding technical detail – “women have an average parking coefficient of 13.4, while the average male score was just 12.3” – this survey is really just a bit of fun. It does, however, raise an interesting statistical question. What do we mean when we say one
An article on the CNN website about Greece and the euro included information (see table below) on recent currency devaluations. Now if the Argentinian peso had really been reduced in value by 280% it would literally be worth less than nothing; it would be a currency with negative value. Think about a sale in which an item originally costing £10 is reduced in price. If the reduction is 50% the new price
The pressure group Migration Watch UK has just published a paper suggesting there is a link between youth unemployment and immigration from the eight former Soviet Bloc countries (the EUA8) that joined the EU from 2004. At the same time the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has published a paper claiming that there is no such link. The Migration Watch paper contains the following graph, showing the numbers
