These Guardian / Independent stories are dodgy. Traps in data journalism.

December 30th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in guardian, numerical context, statistics | 7 Comments »

Here’s an interesting problem with data analysis in general, and so, by extension, data journalism: you have to be careful about assuming that the numbers you’ve got access to… really do reflect the underlying phenomena you’re trying to investigate.

Today’s Guardian has a story, “Antidepressant use in England soars“. It’s much more overstated in the Independent. They identify that the number of individual prescriptions written for antidepressant drugs has risen, and then assumes this means that more people are depressed. But while that’s a tempting assumption, it’s not a safe one. Read the rest of this entry »

“Bad Science” is £2.49 on Kindle for the next week

November 4th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in bad science | 11 Comments »

Briefly: I thought this was a pricing error, but it turns out it’s deliberate, so… My book is £2.49 on Kindle for the next week or so. Read the rest of this entry »

Why won’t Professor Susan Greenfield publish this theory in a scientific journal?

November 3rd, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in academic pr, dodgy academic press releases, susan greenfield | 17 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 22 October 2011

This week Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of pharmacology at Oxford, apparently announced that computer games are causing dementia in children. This would be very concerning scientific information: but it comes to us from the opening of a new wing at an expensive boarding school, not an academic conference. Then a spokesperson told a gaming site that’s not really what she meant. But they couldn’t say what she does mean. Read the rest of this entry »

Great piece in .net magazine about nerdydaytrips.com

October 28th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in onanism | 3 Comments »

Hi, just to say, there’s a great piece in this month’s .net magazine about www.nerdydaytrips.com, the crowd-sourced dorky-days-out Why-Don’t-You project I built with Applecado, Aaron Rudd, and Jo Brodie. Read the rest of this entry »

New edition of “Testing Treatments”, best pop science book on Evidence Based Medicine ever.

October 18th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in great popularisers of science, methods | 4 Comments »

People often ask if there’s one good book that is accessible to all, about how evidence based medicine works. The answer is undoubtedly “Testing Treatments“. I name-check it to death in Bad Science, I learnt a huge amount from it, and it’s just come out in a new edition. You can (generously!) download the full text as a PDF for free here, and there are translations in various languages for free on that page too. I recommend getting a paper copy (they’re lovely and it’s very readable) here, there’s a proper Kindle edition here, and the publisher page is here. Meanwhile a website version with extra resources is coming shortly.

I genuinely, truly, cannot recommend this awesome book highly enough for its clarity, depth, and humanity.  My foreword for the new edition is pasted below. Read the rest of this entry »

What if academics were as dumb as quacks with statistics?

October 3rd, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in methods, neurostuff, statistics | 35 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 10th September 2011

We all like to laugh at quacks when they misuse basic statistics. But what if academics, en masse, deploy errors that are equally foolish? This week Sander Nieuwenhuis and colleagues publish a mighty torpedo in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

They’ve identified one direct, stark statistical error that is so widespread it appears in about half of all the published papers surveyed from the academic neuroscience research literature. Read the rest of this entry »

You might also enjoy my second blog…

September 29th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in bad science | No Comments »

As well as being here I’m also there: here’s a quick round-up of recent posts from my other blog where I post scatty, brief scribbles in between bouts of real work, they’re in the sidebar on the right too. Read the rest of this entry »

Cherry picking is bad. At least warn us when you do it.

September 29th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in academic pr, academic publishing, aric sigman, schools, systematic reviews | 6 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 24 September 2011

Last week the Daily Mail and the Today programme took some bait from Aric Sigman, an author of popular sciencey books about the merits of traditional values. “Sending babies and toddlers to daycare could do untold damage to the development of their brains and their future health,” explained the Mail.

These news stories were based on a scientific paper by Sigman in The Biologist. It misrepresents individual studies, as Professor Dorothy Bishop demonstrated almost immediately, and it cherry-picks the scientific literature, selectively referencing only the studies that support Sigman’s view. Normally this charge of cherry-picking would take a column of effort to prove, but this time Sigman himself admits it, frankly, in a PDF posted on his own website. Read the rest of this entry »

Benford’s Law: using stats to bust an entire nation for naughtiness.

September 23rd, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in crime, economics, statistics, structured data | 8 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 17 September 2011

This week we might bust an entire nation for handing over dodgy economic statistics. But first: why would they bother? Well, it turns out that whole countries have an interest in distorting their accounts, just like companies and individuals. If you’re an Euro member like Greece, for example, you have to comply with various economic criteria, and there’s the risk of sanctions if you miss them. Read the rest of this entry »

Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here’s some direct action.

September 16th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in academic publishing, bullying | 47 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 3 September 2011

This week George Monbiot won the internet with a long Guardian piece on academic publishers. For those who didn’t know: academics, funded mostly by the public purse, pay for the production and dissemination of academic papers; but for historical reasons, these are published by private organisations who charge around $30 per academic paper, keeping out any reader who doesn’t have access through their institution. Read the rest of this entry »

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