Here’s a great test for eagle-eyed journalists, tweeted by Guardian’s James Ball. It’s a tale of two charts that claim to show the impact of a change in the income tax threshold to £10,000. Here’s the first: And here’s the second: So: same change, very different stories. In one story (Institute for Fiscal Studies) it is the the wealthiest that
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The latest Ben Goldacre Bad Science column provides a particularly useful exercise for anyone interested in avoiding an easy mistake in data journalism: mistaking random variation for a story (in this case about some health services being worse than others for treating a particular condition): “The Public Health Observatories provide several neat tools for analysing data, and one will draw a funnel plot
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A year and a day ago (which is slightly eerie) I wrote about how one Mexican blogger had used Benford’s Law to spot some unreliable data on drug-related murders being used by the UN and Mexican police. On Sunday Jialan Wang used the same technique to look at US accounting data on over 20,000 firms – and found that over
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It’s become a modern catchphrase. When planes are grounded, when cars crash, when computers are hacked, and when the earth shakes. There is, it seems, always a “cost to the economy”. Today, with a mass strike over pensions in the UK, the cliche is brought forth again: “The Treasury could save £30m from the pay forfeited by the striking teachers today but
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Few things illustrate the challenges facing journalism in the age of ‘Big Data’ better than Cable Gate – and specifically, how you engage people with stories that involve large sets of data. The Cable Gate leaks have been of a different order to the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs. Not in number (there were 90,000 documents in the Afghanistan war
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News organisations across the country will today be running stories based on a report by Big Brother Watch into the amount spent on CCTV surveillance by local authorities (PDF). The treatment of this report is a lesson in how journalists approach figures, and why context is more important than raw figures. BBC Radio WM, for example, led this morning on
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When you start to base journalism around data it’s easy to overlook basic weaknesses in that data – from the type of average that is being used, to distribution, sample size and statistical significance. Last week I wrote about inflation and average wages. A similar factor to consider when looking at any figures is seasonal adjustment. Kaiser Fung recently wrote
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One of the forms of data that journalists frequently have to deal with is prices. And while it’s one thing to say that things are getting more expensive, making a meaningful comparison between what things cost now and what things cost then is a different kettle of fish altogether. Factoring in inflation can make all the difference between arbitrary comparisons
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UPDATE: The Office for National Statistics has also released some data on internet access which paints a more positive picture. Their data puts the numbers who haven’t been online at 18%. And 45% had accessed the web on the move . I’ve just been scanning through the internet section of Ofcom’s latest report on The Communications Market 2010. As always, it’s
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