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Bald-faced lies are, thankfully, fairly rare in Australian politics. Being caught in an outright fib or blooper is still seen as shameful. The problem in Australia is that facts and statistics are frequently twisted to paint a misleading picture. Weasel-words, cherry-picking and overstatements are common. Our politicians and lobby groups are masterful at disguising opinion and ideology as fact, and making statements that, ultimately, aren't checkable. These tactics are harder to spot, but equally dangerous. FactCheck: Is 30% of Northern Territory farmland and 22% of Tasmanian farmland foreign-owned? Election FactCheck: are many refugees illiterate and innumerate? Election FactCheck Q&A: has the NBN been delayed? Election FactCheck Q&A: is it true Australia's unemployment payment level hasn't increased in over 20 years? And more...

Different ways to use visualisation to gain insight onto the same issue (the US midterm elections)

Data aren't dead, contrary to what some pundits stated post-election [2], rather the limitations of data are not always well reported. While pollsters will be reworking their models following the election, what can media journalists do to improve their overall coverage of statistical issues in the future? First, discuss possible statistical biases, such as errors in sampling and polling, and what impact these might have on the results. Second, always provide measures of uncertainty, and root these uncertainties in real-world examples.

Nice discussion of the data around contraception choices. Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president I started noticing an interesting trend on my social media newsfeeds. And no, I'm not talking about the near-constant bickering of people with differing political opinions. I started seeing post after post from friends publicly asking one another about their experiences with different forms of birth control. The motivation for these kinds of conversations centered around the pending rollback of copay-free contraception, but have since been re-kindled every time reproductive rights come up in the political arena. And it's not just talk. Many of these conversations centered around the use of long-term contraceptives like intra-uterine devices or IUDs which can protect against pregnancy for 3 - 12 years. In the months immediately following the 2016 election, AthenaHealth reported a 19% increase in IUD-related doctor's visits and Planned Parenthood reported a 900% increase in patients seeking IUDs. Cait, 27, recently switched to a copper IUD, and said that she made the switch due to convenience and "because now in light of our current administration I'd like to have something that will continue to work and be affordable even if I end up without health insurance."

A list of non-academic readings related to different aspects of the "fake news" debate, covering the impact of advertising, its role in the US election, the growing awareness of disinformation campaigns aimed at upcoming European elections, and some of the psychological theories that help explain why our brains can be so easily fooled.

Say you have a 3,000-person presidential election survey from a state where 3 percent of the population is black. If your survey is exactly representative of reality, you'd end up with 90 black people out of that 3,000. Then you ask them who they plan to vote for (for our purposes, we're assuming they're all voting). History suggests the vast majority will go with the Democrat. Over the last five presidential elections, Republicans have earned an average of only 7 percent of the black vote nationwide. However, your survey comes back with 19.5 percent of black voters leaning Republican. Now, that's the sort of unexpected result that's likely to draw the attention of a social scientist (or a curious journalist). But it should also make them suspicious. That's because when you're focusing on a tiny population like the black voters of a state with few black citizens, even a measurement error rate of 1 percent can produce an outcome that's wildly different from reality. That error could come from white voters who clicked the wrong box and misidentified their race. It could come from black voters who meant to say they were voting Democratic. In any event, the combination of an imbalanced sample ratio and measurement error can be deadly to attempts at deriving meaning from numbers - a grand piano dangling from a rope above a crenulated, four-tiered wedding cake. Just a handful of miscategorized people and - crash! - your beautiful, fascinating insight collapses into a messy disaster.

This is a great list of evidence based stories by FiveThirtyEight (FiveThirtyEight uses statistical analysis - hard numbers - to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, sports, science, economics) They also produced a list of some great stories from other venues: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/damn-we-wish-wed-written-these-11-stories/

Interesting discussion of data on vote recounts and using electronic or hand counting methods (in America where they use electronic voting machines quite commonly). These numbers represent three main kinds of disputes, Foley told me. First, candidates (and their lawyers) argue over what ballots should be counted and which should be thrown out as ineligible. Then, they argue over which candidate specific ballots should count for. Finally, they argue over whether all the eligible votes were counted correctly - the actual recount. Humans are much better than machines at making decisions around the first two kinds of ambiguous disputes, Stewart said, but evidence suggests that the computers are better at counting. Michael Byrne, a psychology professor at Rice University who studies human-computer interaction, agreed. "That's kind of what they're for," he said.

During the 2016 EU referendum campaign, both sides used statistics pretty freely to back their arguments. Understandably, UK broadcasters felt compelled to balance competing perspectives, giving audiences the opportunity to hear the relative merits of leaving or remaining in the EU. In doing so, however, the truth of these statistical claims was not always properly tested. This might help explain some of the public's misconceptions about EU membership. So, for example, although independent sources repeatedly challenged the Leave campaign's claim that the UK government spent £350m per week on EU membership, an IPSOS MORI survey found that almost half of respondents believed this was true just days before the election. Of the 6,916 news items examined in our research, more than 20% featured a statistic. Most of these statistical references were fairly vague, with little or limited context or explanation. Overall, only a third provided some context or made use of comparative data. Statistics featured mostly in stories about business, the economy, politics and health. So, for example, three-quarters of all economics items featured at least one statistic, compared to almost half of news about business. But there were some areas - where statistics might play a useful role in communicating trends or levels of risk - that statistics were rarely used.

The public understandably focuses on polling results and how much these results seem to vary. Take two presidential approval polls from March 21. Polling firm Rasmussen Reports reported that 50 percent of Americans approve of President Donald Trump's performance, while, that same day, Gallup stated that only 37 percent do. In late February, the website FiveThirtyEight listed 18 other presidential approval polls in which Trump's approval ratings ranged from 39 percent to 55 percent. Some of these pollsters queried likely voters, some registered voters and others adults, regardless of their voting status. Almost half of the polls relied on phone calls, another half on online polling and a few used a mix of the two. Further complicating matters, it's not entirely clear how calling cellphones or landlines affects a poll's results. Each of these choices has a consequence, and the range of results attests to the degree that these choices can influence results.

journalists often write about public opinion polls, which are designed to measure the public's attitudes about an issue or idea. Some of the most high-profile polls center on elections and politics. Newsrooms tend to follow these polls closely to see which candidates are ahead, who's most likely to win and what issues voters feel most strongly about. Other polls also offer insights into how people think. For example, a government agency might commission a poll to get a sense of whether local voters would support a sales tax increase to help fund school construction. Researchers frequently conduct national polls to better understand how Americans feel about public policy topics such as gun control, immigration reform and decriminalizing drug use. When covering polls, it's important for journalists to try to gauge the quality of a poll and make sure claims made about the results actually match the data collected. Sometimes, pollsters overgeneralize or exaggerate their findings. Sometimes, flaws in the way they choose participants or collect data make it tough to tell what the results really mean. Below are 11 questions we suggest journalists ask before reporting on poll results. While most of this information probably won't make it into a story or broadcast, the answers will help journalists decide how to frame a poll's findings - or whether to cover them at all.

Nice set of short videos on some fallacies from PBS. Moving the Goal Posts Fallacy | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios by PBS Idea Channel 2:05 The Fallacy Fallacy | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios by PBS Idea Channel 2:13 The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios by PBS Idea Channel 2:40 The Strawman Fallacy | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios by PBS Idea Channel 2:12 The Ad Hominem Fallacy | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios by PBS Idea Channel 2:23 The Black and White Fallacy | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios by PBS Idea Channel 2:05 The Authority Fallacy | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios by PBS Idea Channel 2:02 The "No True Scotsman" Fallacy | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios by PBS Idea Channel 2:22 3 Fallacies For Election Season! by PBS Idea Channel 11:50

Mashable's series Algorithms explores the mysterious lines of code that increasingly control our lives - and our futures. The world in 2020 has been given plenty of reasons to be wary of algorithms. Depending on the result of the U.S. presidential election, it may give us one more. Either way, it's high time we questioned the impact of these high-tech data-driven calculations, which increasingly determine who or what we see (and what we don't) online. The impact of algorithms is starting to scale up to a dizzying degree, and literally billions of people are feeling the ripple effects. This is the year the Social Credit System, an ominous Black Mirror-like "behavior score" run by the Chinese government, is set to officially launch. It may not be quite as bad as you've heard, but it will boost or tighten financial credit and other incentives for the entire population. There's another billion unexamined, unimpeachable algorithms hanging over a billion human lives.