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Some great quotes in this piece! The language of politics warps our democracy again and again, as in this tax calculation. The media must unpack statistics Last week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Health Foundation published a report on funding for health and social care. One figure from the report was repeated across the headlines. For the NHS to stay afloat, it would require "£2,000 in tax from every household". Shocking stuff!If you're sitting at a bar with a group of friends and Bill Gates walks in, the average wealth of everyone in the room makes you all millionaires. But if you try to buy the most expensive bottle of champagne in the place, your debit card will still be declined. The issue to be addressed, and one to which there is no fully correct answer, is how we can put numbers into a context that enables people to make informed choices. Big numbers are hard to conceptualise - most of us have no intuitive understanding of what £56bn even looks like.

McDonald's Monopoly competition is back this month offering a chance to win expensive prizes, all for the price of a Big Mac. Given you could become tens of thousands of dollars richer by simply going on a Macca's run, McDonald's Monopoly games have in the past been subject to cheating and a multimillion-dollar scandal. But for those who prefer to play fair, what are your chances of actually snaring a prize?

On the importance of having data, in order to understand and tackle an issue... The most recent U.S. estimate...concluded approximately 513,000 women and girls at risk of genital mutilation...But that number should be taken with a big grain of salt...the data doesn't account for immigrants from countries where female genital cutting isn't studied or widely practiced...."You also can't assume that people who come to the U.S. are a representative sample of their country of origin," Clark said. That's especially problematic for estimating rates of female genital cutting, since it's not practiced uniformly within countries. It's also possible, he said, that some immigrants abandon the procedure as they assimilate....some advocates point out that although the estimates focus on immigrants, ...female genital cutting isn't new to the U.S. Female circumcision was performed as a treatment for masturbation by American physicians as recently as the mid-20th century...

The conceptual, practical, and ethical issues surrounding "big data" and data in general begin at the very moment of data collection. Particularly when the data concern people, not enough attention is paid to the realities entangled within that significant moment and spreading out from it.1. Data sets are the results of their means of collection. It's easy to forget that the people collecting a data set, and how they choose to do it, directly determines the data set. An illustrative example can be found in the statistics for how many hate crimes were committed in the United States in 2012. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), the number was 5,796. However, the Department of Justice's Bureau of Statistics reported 293,800 hate crimes.

Australian farms generate huge volumes of agricultural data. Examples include the types of crops being grown, crop yields, livestock numbers and locations, types of fertilisers and pesticides being used, soil types, rainfall and more. This data is typically collected through the use of digital farming machinery and buildings featuring robotics and digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and devices connected to the internet ("internet of things", or IoT). But a recent review from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics highlights the patchy and fragmented nature of existing government and industry approaches to agricultural data. What that means is Australian farmers are currently not adequately protected from their farm data being collected and used without their knowledge or consent.