‘What the budget numbers tell us, and what they don’t’ an RSS-getstats parliamentary panel event took place on 19 March. Read on for a brief account of discussion. Budgets are ‘political’ and interpretation of the numbers they present will always be ‘pluralist’, the RSS getstats panel audience was told - the event taking place a day before Chancellor George Osborne did his best to prove the point. But recognising political reality did not exonerate government,

The Guardian reports Facebook users are ‘unwittingly revealing intimate secrets – including their sexual orientation, drug use and political beliefs’. What a writer  calls ‘algorithmic detective work’  — the use of common Big Data techniques – could allow Facebook and similar operations to work out that if you like certain films or express certain views you are more likely to have this or that sexual orientation or religious beliefs. The culprit, it turns

Nobody can have missed recent ’England, a nation of secret binge drinkers?’ headlines spawned by new research ‘How is alcohol consumption affected if we account for under-reporting? A hypothetical scenario’.  Everyone, it seems, was shocked that 40-60% of the alcohol we buy is not included in the amount we say we drink. Whilst here it’s the size of the gap between perception and reality which has proven so startling to the media, finding a difference between

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

Since proposed reforms of the welfare system were announced two years ago, we have regularly heard reference to Universal Credit, the new benefit set to replace six of what are currently the main means-tested welfare benefits and tax credits. But without a sense of how levels of existing claims have changed over time, how many people are claiming in each authority, the age profile of claimants etc…without having access to

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 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

How well equipped are members of councils in the age of big and more open data? The House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee is asking for evidence about the backgrounds and capacity of elected members of local authorities in England. The government has talked about ‘armchair auditors’ scrutinising council spending. But councillors themselves are confronted with reams of numbers, about service performance, spending, social and demographic data about the

John Fraser, TACTICIAN.org.uk and Dr Nuran Fraser, Manchester Metropolitan University look at the benefits which data analysis bring to football. There has been a lot of recent work around data analysis in football.  Driven by the increasing amounts of data in the game there is a clear need to harness that resource and understand its implications.  It really is a search for the Holy Grail in some respects as clubs would