Ben Goldacre's Blog, page 11

Sampling error, the unspoken issue behind small number changes in the news

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 explained the problem in their own words: "The number of people out of work rose by 38,000 to 2.49 million in the three months to June, official figures [...]

I made a documentary about cohort studies in epidemiology, on BBC Radio 4

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 really good. Instead of reading about it, listen here: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b012wg2... Or listen live when it's repeated tonight on Radio 4 at 9pm. Hurrah!   Previously [...]

I'm talking at Glastonbury, Saturday 1:30pm Free University in The Park! (Also SGP, Latitude…)

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 Sweet Charity, which sounds like it's probably a big silly boat. www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/news/t... I'm also talking at Secret Garden Party (speakers tent, no [...]

There's something magical about watching patterns emerge from data

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 new knowledge. This might sound obvious, but following it through – watching patterns emerge from the noise – still gives me [...]

Nerds at the parliamentary committee on the Draft Defamation Bill

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 thing, our session starts at 17:30 and I do a bit more shouting in the second half of it. www.libelreform.org/ Now, off topic, but [...]

Kids who spot bullshit, and the adults who get upset about it

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 been writing on since 2003. It's a series of elaborate physical movements with silly pseudoscientific justifications: you wiggle your head [...]

Existential angst about the bigger picture

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 various personality features. One major review in 2003 looked at 38 different studies, containing data on 20,000 participants, and found that overall, [...]

We should so blatantly do more randomised trials on policy

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 are tight, and people know that good intentions aren't enough: in fact, good intentions can sometimes do harm. We need to know what works. In [...]

Asking the wrong question: how crap research gets drugs to market

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: they're protected from public scrutiny by a wall of tediousness. Here is one problem that affects millions of people. What if we had rubbish evidence [...]

I foresee that nobody will do anything about this problem

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 precognition. Instead of designing new studies to see whether people could consciously tell you about the future, he ran some classic psychology experiments backwards. For [...]