Vital Statistics

(c) Matt Pritchett (The Daily Telegraph) 2006

In the high-and-far-off times when satellite television was so new and all, a bunch of people in offices looked at the healthy sales figures for the first few months and decided that the entire UK population would be sitting down to Sky TV within a decade.

Instead, after an initial surge, the take-up rate slowed dramatically, throwing their business strategy into chaos. While the gadget-minded, the sports-obsessed and the 'frequent flyers' immediately installed their heart's desire and settled down to marathon viewing sessions, a fair proportion of the population went about its business largely unmoved by the visual cornucopia on offer and steadfastly refused to buy.

Some, in fact, actively opposed the idea and do to this day; while Sky Arts won over a few die-hard snobs, there are still plenty of people out there who view satellite dishes in much the same way that a 13th century villager might regard the cross painted on his plague-stricken neighbour's door.

The advent of Freeview has rendered the matter essentially academic, but the same false logic now appears to be applied to the obesity 'time-bomb'. Those not-so-clever chaps crunching the numbers forgot to factor in the inevitable weight increase with age, so they have revised their figures amid much media fanfare and emotive language:

"We're now seven years on from the Foresight Report. Not only is the obesity situation in the UK not improving, but the doomsday scenario set out in that report [that half the UK population will be obese by 2050] might underestimate the true scale of the problem."

History and literature show that, except in times of famine, Britain's population has always included some people who are overweight, a few grossly so. Today's abundant grazing opportunities, combined with medical advances that have dramatically reduced child mortality among mothers in poor health, mean that the descendants of those people may well form a large proportion of those now giving cause for concern.

Whatever the reason for their state, whether nature or nurture, it's unlikely that the seriously overweight are distributed evenly throughout the population, however much the statisticians think they ought to be. While some individuals - and families - have piled on the pounds, most of us have for years had the same opportunities to eat ourselves to a standstill and have manifestly not done so.

Today's environment, with unprecedented access to cheap fast food and a sedentary lifestyle, may have contributed to some people gaining excessive weight, but does that really mean that the rest of us are bound to follow?


Update: this news story has been brilliantly satirised by Mark Wadsworth, while Longrider questions the motives of the National Obesity Forum.

The L'Aquila Seven - science in the dock

Another landmark today - the 600th post at the Tavern - but no celebrations this time; instead, a news report that will strike fear into the hearts of geologists and forecasters everywhere.

Six Italian scientists and an ex-government official have been sentenced to six years in prison over the 2009 deadly earthquake in L'Aquila.

The judge also ordered the defendants to pay court costs and damages.

Despite the uncertainty that surrounds the science of earthquake prediction, the prosecution successfully argued that the scientists provided "inexact, incomplete and contradictory" information, failing to warn people that the initial minor tremors could be followed by a major seismic event.

At the heart of the case is a question frequently discussed by bloggers; the conflict between scientific assessment of risk and the popular perception. The scientist is concerned with the relative likelihood of given outcomes; the public wants a simple yes or no answer.

And in this case, the public wants someone to blame. One of those bringing the prosecution, a journalist, lost his father and two teenage children in the earthquake.

On the night of 5 April, several large shocks kept his children awake. They were anxious, but he told them to go back to bed, that there was no need to worry, the scientists had said so.

Other witnesses tell the same story; because the scientists had said that a major event was unlikely to follow the initial tremors - there was, according to the head of the Serious Risks Commission, "no reason to believe that a series of low-level tremors was a precursor to a larger event" - residents did not initially realise the danger they were in when the 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit.

The devastating impact of the 309 deaths that resulted has effectively prevented anyone asking whether the scientists should be blamed because those people who remained in their homes chose to rely on what experts had said before the event rather than exercising their own judgement.

We've seen much the same thing at work with the Met Office, where some inept press releases combined with media simplification contrived to translate long-range forecasts expressed in terms of relative probability into definite predictions which turned out to be spectacularly wrong.

The implications of this verdict are chilling. Seismologists, vulcanologists and meteorologists do not deal in hard facts when it comes to future events and to expect them to do so, with the threat of imprisonment if they are wrong, has been compared to the Church's treatment of Galileo.

The case that set six high-ranking scientists and a government official in opposition to an army of bereaved and grieving relatives (organised into the tellingly-named 309 Martyrs Association), with an estimated 50 million euros of damages at stake*, is likely to cast a very long shadow indeed.


*The start of this trial was the subject of a post here in September 2011. Demetrius made a good point in the comments about local buildings not meeting the required safety standard because of widespread corruption in high places - which might argue that some powerful people were looking for someone else to blame for the casualties caused when those buildings collapsed.

'Underclass arithmetic'

Without wishing to comment on current news stories - except to say that it seems to me the height of folly for online newspapers to give copious amounts of detail about the family of a missing person and then allow speculative comments from readers - I have a genuine question.

The inclusion of the ages of the people involved in legal cases, a standard feature of local papers and the grubbier end of the national press, allows the reader to spot some noticeably recurring patterns which give considerable food for thought.

The vast majority of recent criminal cases involving the lowest socio-economic groups (a difficult one to phrase, that - I can see the Urchin hovering, ready to blow his 'elitist whistle'; good job he hasn't seen the title yet), can be seen, with the use of some simple arithmetic, to involve at least one of the following:

• a mother whose first child was conceived before she reached the age of 18 (or, in some cases, 16)
• a man who, in his late thirties or forties, fathered a child with a woman under 20
• a woman in her late thirties or forties living with a man at least ten years younger than she is

Now, what I should like to know is whether this is an accurate reflection of society as a whole, and if not, what causal factors are at work.

The mean age for first-time mothers in the UK is currently 29, yet the majority of criminal cases feature, directly or tangentially, a woman less than nineteen years older than her eldest child; does this mean that the chances of a teenage mother or her children being involved in a crime at some stage - as either perpetrator or victim -  are significantly higher than for the rest of the population?

And while we're familiar with the stereotype of a teenage pregnancy where both parents are barely out of childhood themselves, what attracts teenage girls to much older men? For a recent example, take the offensive tweets to Tom Daley; their author was the product of a liaison between a girl in her mid teens and a man in his forties.

That's an extreme example, admittedly, but there are plenty of cases where a quick calculation implies a woman under 20 moving in with a man over twice her age - or two women, in the case of the house fire in Derby. Why do these girls move on from relationships with their peers to live with men as old as their fathers?

It's not easy to imagine a social context in which a full-time mother barely past school age could build an equitable and stable relationship with a man so much older, though another feature of many criminal cases - and late-night road accidents - involving young mothers is the freedom given by relatives taking care of the child for extended periods.

Given that some of the youngest child-mothers, at least as portrayed in the press, display a startlingly casual attitude to cigarettes, alcohol and drugs, could these relationships be initially founded on the supply of one or more of these commodities? (In the context of court cases, it's worth considering here that maternal drug and alcohol abuse have been repeatedly linked with behavioural disorders in young people.)

Or is it a case of access to housing? In such cases, where the detail is given, it is almost always the man who is the householder, while the opposite seems to be true in the cases where an older woman is living with a younger man.

I appreciate that all this only seems odd through 21st-century Western eyes - up until the beginning of the last century, none of these situations would have seemed particularly unusual. However, with the changing role of women in society, freely available birth control and the higher expectations of compatibility and equality within a relationship, it seems odd that they persist.

Since much of our society now regards as normal a married or cohabiting couple of similar ages with interests in common, I wonder whether the controlling factor here is the benefits system, which allocates housing and financial support in ways that may well encourage certain types of behaviour.

There seems to be a life-cycle emerging from the statistics; a teenage girl goes out with boys her own age until she gets pregnant. Then as a single mother, she hooks up with a string of older men until, often because she now has a large number of children, she gets her own house and finds a younger partner to move in with her.

Meanwhile, her eldest daughters are already beginning the whole cycle again and her adult sons - well, they seem to be left out of the picture completely, liable for child support if they work, doomed to a life of benefits if they don't and, in any case, unable to provide suitable homes for potential partners so they can't settle down. 

So they hang around, battening onto a succession of single mothers on benefits or minimum wage in state housing until they, in their turn, get places of their own and become dominant males - it's pure Desmond Morris. It's not a situation that is going to bring out the best in anyone, let alone a young man with too much time and testosterone on his hands.

Perhaps, thinking about it, that's the answer to why families like this, however unrepresentative of the population as a whole, seem to make up the bulk of cases in Britain's criminal courts.

Margin for error

A member of Clan Macheath had a blood test last week as part of a routine check-up. Returning to the surgery for the results, she was told she had 'a risk factor of 15%'.

The nurse seemed surprised to be asked for an explanation; "Look, it's here on the chart: your cholesterol gives you a risk of 15%, see?"

"Yes, but a risk of what, exactly?"

Turns out it's a risk of dying of a heart attack in the next ten years. Now it's not the easiest thing to express without giving the lady's age, but generally speaking this looked like not unreasonable odds of survival (her words, not mine); in any case, like most well-educated people, she knows that medical statistics - like boiled eggs - are best taken with a substantial pinch of salt.

But the nurse had not yet finished; under the circumstances, she said, she would recommend a course of statins. Not a good move; the patient is firmly opposed to blanket prescription and has a particular aversion to the idea of statins - and she's not the only one (see my post Statins for all and a death sentence).

The nurse was clearly disappointed; "Then we'll just have to try and manage it through diet". Manage what? The cholesterol reading was well within normal parameters; either the word 'risk' seems to have triggered a knee-jerk response or the 'statins-for-all' movement is alive and thriving in the hands of blinkered zealots.

One thing that interests me here is that our relative was not told whether to fast before the test. This is presumably because a study in 2009 found that 'cholesterol measurements are at least as good - and probably somewhat better - when made without fasting'.

But if that is so, why does the NHS website - reviewed in 2011 - still clearly advise 'Do not eat anything and only drink water for 10-12 hours before having blood cholesterol tests'? Are doctors, in fact, actively seeking raised readings by ignoring this advice?

This suggests at least some difference of opinion - and implies that the cholesterol test is rather more of a blunt instrument that those acting on its results would like us to believe. Given the very real possibility that statin side-effects will mask the symptoms of serious illness, I would question the ethics of prescribing on these terms.

The complexity of the human body means that diagnosis is not a exact science; to reduce it to box-ticking and percentages on a chart is to act under false pretences and with a dangerous complacency.

Slipping through the diagnostic net

Deaths from uterine cancer have increased by a fifth in the last ten years, data from Cancer Research UK has found. It means almost 2,000 women now die annually from the condition. (Telegraph)

Since they report that the number of annual diagnoses has risen by almost half since the mid 90's, this does mean that survival rates are improving. According to Professor Jonathan Ledermann, gynaecological cancer expert at Cancer Research UK,

"the chances of surviving the disease are still better than ever. It’s clear we’re making great progress, but we don’t yet fully understand what’s driving up cases of womb cancer, so there’s still lots more to do.”

Until they solve the mystery (and I hope they are looking very carefully at HRT and synthetic hormones, which the article doesn't mention at all), researchers are falling back on that old staple of weight loss and plenty of fruit & veg, reminding us that being obese 'more than doubles' the risk of uterine cancer.

This gives us some juicy headline statistics, conveniently forgetting that, obesity increases the risk rather than creating it and that lifestyle is far from the only causal factor at work. Yes, folks, it's that old false syllogism again:

Unhealthy lifestyles cause cancer
You have cancer
ergo You have an unhealthy lifestyle

If Professor Ledermann and his team want to reduce the number of deaths, they would do well to consider the inversion of this argument, the application of which nearly cost a relative her life. As applied by her GP in the face of worsening symptoms for nearly two years, it goes roughly thus:

Obese women have uterine cancer
You are not obese
ergo You do not have uterine cancer

With a healthy diet and plenty of exercise, there was, the GP said, no need to bother with an examination. In fact, when the patient complained that she was rapidly losing weight for no obvious reason, the doctor told her she was lucky; "But that's a good thing; I wish I could lose weight like that!"

The diagnosis was finally made by a second doctor at a point urgent enough for the patient to be rushed into hospital within hours for drastic surgery, but the original GP was unrepentant to the point of defensiveness; how could she be expected to diagnose the condition, she demanded, when my 7st relative didn't fit the profile?

Survival rates decline sharply as the cancer develops; the later the diagnosis, the less your chances of recovery. Professor Ledermann doesn't say what proportion of the fatalities are not overweight; it might be well worth his while to find out.

An unholy alliance

Even by the Mail's standards, this is a good one:

The world’s obese people could help stop global warming by going on a diet, scientists claimed today.

Help stop global warming, no less; lose weight and save the planet! I can see it has the makings of a best-selling book. But wait, there's more...

Obese and overweight people were said to be contributing to climate change just by breathing.

We've got used to being lectured about our air miles and car use, but that's going to be a hard one to cut down on. In any case, who's to decide what constitutes overweight? The parameters are, to say the least, somewhat blurred.

The Mail has the scientific 'facts' to back this up; according to a study published in the International Journal of Obesity, scientists at Aberdeen's Robert Gordon University:

if all the world’s heavyweights dropped 10kg, C02 emissions would fall by 49.560 metric tonnes a year. That’s the equivalent of 0.2% of the CO2 emitted globally in 2007.

Now I don't claim to be much good at statistics, but that seems to me an unfeasibly large figure, particularly as there's a whole other issue, so to speak, that the researchers didn't take into consideration:

They did not include methane gas emissions from flatulent large people, despite evidence about cows contributing to greenhouse gases, which is a shame, because it opens up a whole new set of interesting possible campaign slogans*.

So where is all this going? Will a fat tax be combined with a climate change levy on foodstuffs? Will the Nanny State use the findings as an excuse to impose draconian diets and exercise regimes under the terms of the Kyoto protocol? It's a frightening thought, given the energy and single-mindedness with which the PTB pursue the green agenda.

We've already seen measures in place to round up overweight 'clients' for government-sponsored 'healthy eating' programmes and attempts to instil guilt over CO2 generation, now imagine the two combined - it would certainly be the end for drive-thru burger joints (which is, admittedly, something I personally would welcome on linguistic grounds).

It's a perfect storm of righteousness waiting to happen; we just have to hope, for the good of humanity, that no-one in power suddenly decides to take the Daily Mail seriously because it happens to suit their agenda.


*Some years ago, the strong regional accent of a BBC reporter discussing the appointment of a 'Fat Czar' to tackle obesity led to the Spouse mishearing the title as 'Fart Czar', a designation the Tavern gleefully adopted henceforth for any government-appointed interfering busybody.

Cancer statistics and the blame game

There's been a distinctly statistical flavour to this week, what with the question of lessons in gambling and The Moose's musings on child poverty.

I'll be the first to admit that, while I can more or less follow the reasoning of such Titans in the field as Mark Wadsworth (at least as long as he keeps explaining things so clearly), my grasp of the finer points is a little shakier than I'd like - I don't gamble, but if I did, I'd be the one standing in the bookies muttering "Each way? Er, is that r factorial divided by n minus r?"

Even I, however, have no difficulty working out from today's headlines that if just over 40% of cancers could be prevented by lifestyle change, then nearly 60% are determined by factors beyond the patient's control.

Unfortunately, this reasoning still seems to be beyond the grasp of some of those who work in the field. I make no apology, therefore, for recycling part of this post on the subject from last May, when similar statistics were published for breast cancer.

*******

The other 58% of cases may be linked to environmental or genetic factors or other causes not yet established. Information like this, however, proves a logical step too far for many NHS staff, for whom the mantra runs thus:

Cancer is caused by unhealthy lifestyles.
You have cancer.
ergo You have an unhealthy lifestyle.

In the past few years, several of my friends and family have been diagnosed with so-called ‘lifestyle cancers’, and, to a man (and woman) subjected to lengthy instruction by medical staff about their supposedly unhealthy habits despite a clear family history of the disease in each case.

Thus a friend who walks her dog several miles every day was advised to take more exercise; a lifelong non-drinker was repeatedly told to cut down on his alcohol consumption and, most bizarrely of all, a woman who has the healthiest diet I know of was constantly lectured on cutting down on fat and sugar and avoiding junk food – she weighs less than eight stone.

And each of these reported, with varying degrees of fury, a clear and consistent implication by hospital staff that they must have brought the cancer on themselves by their own failure to lead a healthy lifestyle. Their remonstrations were brushed aside - the cancer was proof enough.

It is no secret that doctors receive a ridiculously small amount of training in the interpretation of statistics, given the relevance of probabilities and incidence – I have mentioned before the GP who excused his diagnostic failure with the words, ‘97% of people with this cancer are obese; you aren’t even overweight, so there was only a 3% chance of you having it.’

That being so, how likely is it that the lower echelons of the medical hierarchy can correctly interpret statistical information, given the standard of maths in today's schools? It is a matter of record that numeracy skills are at a frighteningly low level across the population, and I doubt that hospital staff are any exception.

Tell them that cancer is linked to poor diet and lack of exercise and, unless it is clearly explained, some, at least, are going to go on with complete self-assurance to tell cancer patients that it is all their own fault.


Update: via Longrider, this BBC article includes an interesting show-trial interview with a woman brought out to make a public confession that her cancer was lifestyle-related.
Watch out for the interviewer posing the loaded question:
"Why was it you? What was it in your lifestyle that was wrong?"

Statistical idiocy in the NHS

All cats have whiskers.
This animal has whiskers.
ergo This animal is a cat.
Discuss

A classic false syllogism? Obviously untrue? Flawed logic? Well not, it seems, for some health professionals in Britain, if the experience of some of my friends and family is anything to go by.

And it can only get worse, to judge from this report concerning breast cancer:

A new report says that as many as 20,000 British women could avoid developing the potentially fatal disease each year, if they took more exercise, drank less and ate better.

So far I have no problem with this per se; I am prepared to agree that they have established links between breast cancer and obesity or lack of exercise and that somewhere between 0 and 20,000 women could avoid developing the disease by a change of lifestyle.

However, that’s not the end of the story: according to the Deputy Head of Science at the World Cancer Research Fund,

“It is very worrying that in the UK there are still tens of thousands of cases of breast cancer which could be prevented every year. Breast cancer can be prevented by cutting down on drinking, being more physically active and carrying less body fat.”

What she means is that breast cancer in cases where it is related to lifestyle can be prevented by a change of habits and losing weight – that is, by the WCRF’s own estimation, about 42% of cases overall.

The other 58% of cases may be linked to environmental or genetic factors or other causes not yet established. Information like this, however, proves a logical step too far for many NHS staff, for whom the mantra runs thus:

Cancer is caused by unhealthy lifestyles.
You have cancer.
ergo You have an unhealthy lifestyle.

In the past few years, several of my friends and family have been diagnosed with so-called ‘lifestyle cancers’, and, to a man (and woman) subjected to lengthy instruction by medical staff about their supposedly unhealthy habits despite a clear family history of the disease in each case.

Thus a friend who walks several miles every day was advised to take more exercise; a non-drinker was repeatedly told to cut down on his alcohol consumption and, most bizarrely of all, a woman who has the healthiest diet I know of was constantly lectured on cutting down on fat and sugar and avoiding junk food – she weighs less than eight stone.

And each of these reported, with varying degrees of fury, a clear and consistent implication by hospital staff that they must have brought the cancer on themselves by their own failure to lead a healthy lifestyle. Their remonstrations were brushed aside - the cancer was proof enough.

It is no secret that doctors receive a ridiculously small amount of training in the interpretation of statistics, given the relevance of probabilities and incidence – I have mentioned before the GP who excused his diagnostic failure with the words, ‘97% of people with this cancer are obese; you aren’t even overweight, so there was only a 3% chance of you having it.’

That being so, how likely is it that the lower echelons of the medical hierarchy can correctly interpret statistical information, given the standard of maths in today's schools? It is a matter of record that numeracy skills are at a frighteningly low level across the population, and I doubt that hospital staff are any exception.

Tell them that cancer is linked to poor diet and lack of exercise and, unless it is clearly explained, some, at least, are going to go on with complete self-assurance to tell cancer patients that it is all their own fault.

A girl's best friend

The Daily Mail surpasses itself this week with an article that proclaims 'Third of British women would say no to proposal if they didn't like the diamond'.

And they say romance is dead! Actually, as usual, the headline over-eggs the pudding; the ungrateful baggages in question merely said that they would have second thoughts - though that's still pretty rough on the poor enamoured suitor.

But the article ploughs merrily on, coyly flourishing terms like 'new research' and 'statistics that emerged today'. It appears that 'women are now so desperate to get it just right, 41 per cent would rather choose the ring themselves'.

It even signs up a 'relationship expert' to explain the significance of these findings. Only half-way through does it drop the peekaboo act and reveal the source of the information: a survey by shopping channel QVC.

Now, funnily enough, QVC happen to be in the business of selling jewellery - including engagement rings - and what a lucrative business it turns out to be:

'The average groom-to-be is now having to spend around 930 pounds, with 40 per cent admitting they were forced to spend ‘more than they could afford'.

Consider for a moment the implications of that one little word - 'forced'.

'A further 45 per cent found the process extremely stressful, with 52 per cent saying they’d be happier if there was a more convenient and direct way of shopping for the right ring.’.

You don't say! Teleshopping, perhaps? Combining a blatant piece of advertising with the implication that your readers are grasping, avaricious harpies; even by the Mail’s dubious standards, this is an outstanding piece of journalistic prostitution.

Tell me a scary story

'Children 'more likely to own a mobile phone than a book'

Children as young as seven are more likely to own a mobile phone than a book, figures show, fuelling fears over a decline in reading.'

Thus the Telegraph in Cassandra mode earlier this week. It seems we are raising a nation of illiterates, at least according to the National Literacy Trust, whose latest study stridently proclaims that, 'Among children in Key Stage 2 – aged seven to 11 – 79.1 per cent had a mobile compared with 72.7 per cent who had access to books'.

Overall, in a survey of 17,000 children aged seven to sixteen, '85.5 per cent of pupils had their own mobile phone, compared with 72.6 per cent who had their own books'.

Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted the anomalous phrasing; somewhere along the line, 'access to books' has been replaced with 'their own books'; a significant difference, given the existence of public libraries.

The NLT's website announces that '80% of children who read above the expected level for their age have books of their own; while only 58% who read below their expected level have books of their own'.

Which rather begs the question how did the other 20% manage to get above their expected level with no books? Further information will have to wait until the research is published next Wednesday, but we at the Tavern are wondering whether the data-gathering exercise featured that staple of pressure groups, the loaded question.

If so, it would be opportune for the National Literacy Trust who are - quelle surprise! - launching their 'Tell me a Story' campaign next week; perhaps we'll all be scared enough to click on the big red button on their website marked 'Donations'.

Barbecue Summer? Fat chance!

A laughing young couple in shorts feature on the cover of today's Sunday Times, above the caption ' all set for a barbecue summer'.

Will jounalists never learn? A few sunny days at the end of April and suddenly they're back in the prediction business, by implication at least. We've been through all this - we live in Britain. It rains here. Quite a bit, in fact. And no amount of newspaper hysteria is going to change the fact.

The Sunday Times in question arrived decidedly damp, the picture ironically spattered with raindrops as the paper-boy picked his way between the puddles. Still, if you're a glass half-full kind of person, you can celebrate the fact that today sees the 102nd anniversary of the invention of the windscreen wiper*, unsurprisingly dreamt up by by a Briton to whom we should all be ceaselessly grateful.

(The wipers of the Tavern's previous horseless carriage, since gone to the great car park in the sky, had a delightfully syncopated beat that was the perfect accompaniment when singing Louis Armstrong's version of 'Mac the Knife' - the radio hadn't worked since 2001 so we had to make our own in-car entertainment - or Lotte Lenya's on intermittent.)

The Barbecue Summer debacle was the result of too much over-simplification and rounding-off; a set of probabilities expressed, through a sort of Chinese whispers (can we call it that any more, or will the EHRC be round?), as a soundbite of certainty. The fuss over the 'unexpected' cold winter shows that the public and media still hadn't learnt their lesson, and it looks like it could happen all over again.

In British weather, the only thing you can be certain of is uncertainty itself.

*This gem comes from 'The Wrong Kind of Snow - How the Weather Made Britain', which carries the best back cover review ever: 'Should be in every loo in the land' - John Julius Norwich.

How middle class is that!

No school place? Blame Billy Bunter

'Private School Pupils Blamed for Lack of Secondary Places' ran the headline above an article announcing that 'council leaders say that they will struggle to accommodate hundreds of children who would previously have gone to private schools'. The article went on to say that 'some children [...] were left without a place at any school in their area.' Pretty damning stuff, and, judging by the headline, all because of posh kids whose parents can't afford school fees any more

But this salvo in the pre-election class war turned out to be a damp squib. Two days later, the headline had been amended to the less contentious 'Schools struggle to place pupils who used to go private'. Perhaps someone helpfully pointed out that these ex-private pupils had previously saved the state the cost of the education to which they were entitled.

Or perhaps a more conscientious journalist actually did some research. It turns out the worst affected areas include Birmingham, Barnet and Hackney - not exactly the main recruiting-ground for the playing fields of Eton - and in any case, the private sector reports no significant decline in pupil numbers.

A more convincing - but politically explosive - theory surfaced in the School Gate column, where Edward Upton, founder of a teaching resource site, writes,

'There are actually 793,000 spare school places across the English state school system. The shortages are only in city areas such as London, due to a higher than expected number of young, immigrant families raising higher-than-average numbers of children.'

And he's got evidence to back it up from the Office of National Statistics. Oops! It looks like a very large elephant has just walked into the classroom.

Better stick to expressing sympathy for the plight of the schools, or alternatively indulging in righteous indignation at the toffs and class traitors who, now the money's getting tight, are ruthlessly elbowing their prep-school-educated offspring into the local comp.

History is so last year, innit

Optimism is a wonderful thing. Oh to share the sunny outlook of David Dimbleby, who claimed this week that 'History programmes on television are filling in the gaps in children's knowledge of the subject'!

I'm sure they are, in homes where enlightened parents discuss homework with their children and frequent the local library to research projects. But in an age where, according to much-promulgated statistics, most children have televisions in their bedrooms, David Starkey is wrestling with Christina Aguilera and coming off worse.

We are, after all, talking about generation X-box, the spawn of the electronic age. Last month? That was, like, so ages ago; last year? Practically the stone age, dude. All that matters is the here and now: as far as they are concerned, 'history programmes' means the first series of 'Skins'.

They might pick up a bit of historical knowledge from 'Lark Rise to Candleford' - rural soap with bonnets - or 'The Tudors' and 'Rome' - raunch and ananchronism in equal measures - but, when it comes to the crunch, the lure of 'Strictly X-factor Find Me A Talented Nancy Boy On Ice' is apparently irresistible.

Sorry , Mr Dimbleby, but I think you're preaching to the converted. The huge surge in demand for history books and television programmes is actually fuelled by those of us who remember first-hand the primitive, far-off times before the internet and mobile phones; the young have far more important things on their minds.

A question of probability

‘I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all of God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation, which makes it funny how so many versions of the same affair get about.’
(John Wyndham: The Kraken Wakes)

Seems the Met Office got it all wrong – forecast a mild winter and then watched us all freeze for weeks. And it’s not the first time – remember the barbecue summer predictions?

Well, yes I do. As it happens, I consulted the seasonal forecast pages for both summer and winter 2009, and I recall something a little bit different. The predictions in each case were clearly expressed in terms of probability and illustrated with helpful graphs – as far as I remember, 60% chance of this winter being milder than average and 40% chance of average or colder.

But hey, who wants to hear about percentages? What the public want is a good story, so the news media reported that it would be a mild winter, tout court. What a pity there wasn’t a handily-coined pithy phrase to match the ‘barbecue summer’ a Met Office spokesman unwisely mentioned earlier in the year.

So the Met office helpfully rounded things off for the media, and the media helpfully simplified it for the public - after all, this is a nation where millions of people believe they have a good chance of winning the national lottery. It's worth bearing all this in mind when the papers produce yet another figures-based story.

And all the while the probability graphs were there for all to see - 60% chance of a warmer than average winter. How much would you bet at those odds?

Lies, Damn Lies and Unemployment Figures...

...in Michael Blastland's BBC magazine article 'How one woman can cause economic boom or bust'.

Blastland describes a hypothetical worker whose redundancy leads to a 0.1% rise in unemployment figures. The media, ignoring such boring matters as standard deviation and margins of error, jump on the figures and produce headlines that trigger financial panic and crisis.

Blastland argues that even increasing the raw data by a small fraction may lead, via rounding off, scaling up or standardisation, to a significant difference in the end result - something the more responsible climate change scientists have been trying to convey to the media for years. Like food, if data is processed, it usually needs seasoning with a pinch of salt*.

His final caveat - 'Economic data is never a set of facts; it is a set of clues, some of which are the red herrings of unavoidable measurement error' - is a salutary reminder that in the run-up to the election we will be bombarded with facts and figures, all purporting to tell a story.

One wonders how many of the electorate will know or care that the story in question may well be total fiction?

* Although Consensus Action on Salt and Health (H/T Ambush Predator) might have something to say about that.

10 Ways the NHS is Killing People

Over the past few years, three close relatives of mine have been seriously ill. In each case, their chances of survival were seriously impaired by a catalogue of mismanagement and inefficiency. In particular, the delays in diagnosis and treatment, if other patients have had the same experiences, could be significant in the UK’s shameful cancer survival statistics.

'No shows' at consultant appointments cost the NHS many thousands every year. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever fully researched why patients miss appointments; they could start by asking members of my family, who, despite their assiduous efforts to attend every appointment, have experienced the following:

1. A consultant’s appointment letter sent to an empty house – the ‘client’ being a long-term in-patient in another department of the consultant's own hospital at the time. 

2. Several urgent appointment notifications received some days after the appointment date because ‘the hospital post-room only operates one day a week to save money’.

3. A vital letter which the consultant never saw – according to subsequent enquiries, it was opened by a secretary who decided it was not urgent and put it straight into the filing cabinet.

4. An urgent letter from a consultant which did not reach the patient in time because his secretary took two weeks to type it up. 

5. The receptionist who failed to mark the patient as having arrived for an appointment – so the consultant went home without seeing her. 

6. The receptionist who gave a cancer patient an appointment (requiring an 80-mile round-trip by taxi) on the consultant’s day off.

Of course, you have to get a referral to the consultant in the first place, which is not easy when you are faced with:

7. The GP who missed a cancer for 2 years, despite textbook symptoms, because the non-smoking, non-drinking 7-stone patient ‘didn’t fit the profile’. 

8. The GP who dismissed advanced cancer symptoms as side-effects of HRT, saying ‘if people bothered about side-effects, nobody would ever take anything’. 

9. The GP who refused for 5 months to carry out a PSA test (an indicator of prostate cancer) because, he said, the patient was merely experiencing 'normal side effects from statins'– when the test was finally done, the cancer was too far advanced for treatment.

And then again, there’s the careless lack of attention to detail:

10. The consultant who, we can only assume, gave a diagnosis of cancer to the wrong patient. On checking in late (after traffic delays), my relative was told by a puzzled receptionist, 'You've already had your test results; your name was ticked off the list when you went in twenty minutes ago'.

All of the events described here have happened to members of my family in recent years and have contributed to at least one premature death. I’m not going to say any more on the personal side here, but I have promised them that I will use any means in my power to publicise what has gone wrong while safeguarding their anonymity.

Addicted to Statistics

What is it with football and statistics?

The sports pages of the newspaper are not my usual stamping ground but, contemplating a follow-up piece to a post on Kaka, I have been reading up on the details of the £80m price-tag attached to Cristiano Ronaldo.

In fact, it’s all so ridiculous that I can find little to say on the matter, but I was amazed at the way readers are bombarded with pointless figures. Why on earth, for example, should I want to know that Manchester United’s football pitch measures 116x76 yards, or how many Wayne Rooneys you could sign up for £80m? And as for ‘how many Ronaldo minutes per successful dribble’, whatever that may mean! (It’s 36, if you must know.)

Amidst all the doom-mongering that surrounds GCSEs and the dumbing-down of the nation, there exists this small anomaly; that people who applied themselves in the most rudimentary manner to the acquisition of knowledge at school can effortlessly reel off arcane statistics ad nauseam when discussing football.

These statistics have become a liturgy; the secret knowledge that binds a club’s supporters together in a tribal group. As such they must surely play a part in the emotional blackmail that keeps fans paying out as ticket prices and subscriptions rise inexorably to feed the ravenous maw of professional football.

Interplanetary Billiards

Wow! Look at the headline! Mars or Venus could collide with Earth! Total global annihilation!
Well, no, actually. Typical scientists – get your hopes up and then tell you it won’t happen for a billion years if at all.

Is ‘Tiny Chance of Planet Collision’ really front-page news? Or worthy of a spot on the Today programme? Or does the BBC’s science correspondent have a quota? – “Come on, Pallab; 500 words NOW or no pay-cheque this month!”

Maybe he just got bored, sitting alone in his little cubby-hole in Broadcasting House waiting for someone somewhere to announce a momentous scientific discovery.

It’s one of those questions of proportion; the chances of it happening are infinitesimally small, but should it ever actually happen, it would be the biggest news story ever. I suspect there is a formula the BBC applies in such circumstances.

The mathematics of this are beyond me (I could never get the hang of statistics) but assuming minute odds of occurrence multiplied by almost infinite newsworthiness, one presumably arrives at the conclusion that it is as significant a news event as, say, an MP putting a floating Duck house on expenses.

Duck Houses and Red Herrings

A look at my recent visitor statistics shows a surprising number of hits from one particular search term. 'Expenses', perhaps, or 'Kirkbride'? No, the term of the week is 'floating duck house'.

Sadly it appears that many of the searchers, being practically minded Nova Scotians or Queenslanders, are actually seeking plans and instructions for building such a thing and are hardly likely to be impressed by UK political commentary, let alone a specialist firm who'll charge you £1,645 plus shipping for a 'bird pavilion' - I bet the Queenslanders have a choice phrase for that sort of thing.

Like the rest of us, they have been lured by Viggers' folly away from the real matter in hand. While Britain gets hot under the collar about the Petit Trianon antics of a few Tory squires, the property scandal has been going on largely unheeded by the general population.

In fact, part of the problem here is the scale on which 'flipping' was used; it's easy to report in detail on a single duck house or chandelier, but when there may be hundreds of MPs involved in these complicated procedures, how do you make a headline-grabbing story?

The thing that's puzzling me here is how they all seemed to play a complex system so expertly. I gather there's a sort of Freshers Tea after every election where new MPs are shown the ropes, but from my experience of such occasions you are so overwhelmed you can barely remember afterwards where the lavatories are, let alone the mechanism for maximising your ACA while balancing your CGT liability.

I suspect that, once the Telegraph has drip-fed us the last of its already tediously spun-out titbits, we will finally see the emergence of an eminence grise from the Westminster shadows - a sinister controlling intelligence whose sole purpose is to enrich MPs at our expense.

Sincere apologies to all you Australians, Canadians etc who've been led here again by mistake.