I forgot to post this column up last year. It’s a fun one: the Department for Communities and Local Government have produced a truly farcical piece of evidence, and promoted it very hard, claim...
James Ball sent me the data for the Russian election vote counts this morning and asked me to test whether it deviates from Benford’s law, a test that can give a hint at whether numbers are the...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 9 July 2011 Since I was a teenager, whenever I have a pivotal life event coming – an exam, or an interview – I perform a ritual. I sit cross-legged on the floor, ...
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… real...
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. When it’s this cheap you might as well use it ...
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 childre...
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, Aaro...
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 deat...
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? Thi...
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 s...
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 tradit...
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 w...
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 ...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 13 August 2011 While the authorities are distracted by mass disorder, we can do some statistics. You’ll have seen plenty of news stories telling you that one part...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 20 August 2011 What do all these numbers mean? “‘Worrying’ jobless rise needs urgent action – Labour” was the BBC headline. They exp...
I made a documentary about prospective cohort studies in epidemiology, they’re the tool we use to find out if one thing is associated with another, where trials are impossible. It’s reall...
Hi all, just to say, I’m doing a talk in the Free University of Glastonbury, 1:30pm (or thereabouts) on Saturday. Free University is the literarature tent in The Park field, based inside HMS Sw...
Ben Goldacre The Guardian Saturday 11 June 2011 We all know one atom of experience isn’t enough to spot a pattern: but when you put lots of experiences together and process that data, you get n...
Here’s me, Simon Singh, Phil Campbell from Nature, and Fiona Godlee from the BMJ giving evidence on libel reform in parliament yesterday. It’s all interesting, if you like that kind of th...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 28 May 2011 If you can tear yourself away from Ryan Giggs’ penis for just one moment, I have a different censorship story. Brain Gym is a schools program I’ve bee...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 21 May 2011 Here’s no surprise: beliefs which we imagine to be rational are bound up in all kinds of other stuff. Political stances, for example, correlate with v...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 14 May 2011 Politicians are ignorant about trials, and they’re weird about evidence. It doesn’t need to be this way. In international development work, resources ...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 7 May 2011 Some of the biggest problems in medicine don’t get written about, because they’re not about eyecatching things like one patient’s valiant struggle: the...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 23 April 2011 Last year a mainstream psychology researcher called Daryl Bem published a competent academic paper, in a well respected journal, showing evidence of...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, 15 April 2011 HM Government have issued a new leaflet to justify their NHS reforms: Working Together For A Stronger NHS. It was produced by Number 10, appears on the Depar...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 9 April 2011 This week some journalists found a pattern in some data, and ascribed a cause to it. “Recession linked to huge rise in antidepressants” said the Tele...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 2 April 2011 Here are two fun ways that numbers can be distorted for political purposes. Stop me if I’m boring you, but each of them feels oddly poetic, in its ab...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 26 March 2011 Every now and then, very occasionally, a government will do something awesomely good. The budget contains plans for a new unified Health Research Re...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 19 March 2011 Why don’t journalists link to primary sources? Whether it’s a press release, an academic journal article, a formal report, or perhaps (if everyone’s...
Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 12 March 2011 This week our government committed itself to the removal, albeit slowly, of cigarette displays in shops. But plain packaging on cigarettes has been ...
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