Group items tagged

So what does it mean to be "entitled" to an opinion? If "Everyone's entitled to their opinion" just means no-one has the right to stop people thinking and saying whatever they want, then the statement is true, but fairly trivial. No one can stop you saying that vaccines cause autism, no matter how many times that claim has been disproven. But if 'entitled to an opinion' means 'entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth' then it's pretty clearly false. And this too is a distinction that tends to get blurred.

Journalists often make mistakes when reporting on data such as opinion poll results, federal jobs reports and census surveys because they don't quite understand - or they ignore - the data's margin of error. Data collected from a sample of the population will never perfectly represent the population as a whole. The margin of error, which depends primarily on sample size, is a measure of how precise the estimate is. The margin of error for an opinion poll indicates how close the match is likely to be between the responses of the people in the poll and those of the population as a whole. To help journalists understand margin of error and how to correctly interpret data from polls and surveys, we've put together a list of seven tips, Look for the margin of error - and report it. It tells you and your audience how much the results can vary. Remember that the larger the margin of error, the greater the likelihood the survey estimate will be inaccurate. Make sure a political candidate really has the lead before you report it. Note that there are real trends, and then there are mistaken claims of a trend. Watch your adjectives. (And it might be best to avoid them altogether.) Keep in mind that the margin of error for subgroups of a sample will always be larger than the margin of error for the sample. Use caution when comparing results from different polls and surveys, especially those conducted by different organizations.

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.

Ocean acidification is an inevitable consequence of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That's a matter of fact. We don't know exactly what will happen to complex marine ecosystems when faced with the additional stress of falling pH, but we do know those changes are happening and that they won't be good news.Freedom of speech, and of the press, is, of course, precious. Yet that freedom also brings responsibility. The Editors' Code of Practice - which IPSO says it upholds - requires the "highest professional standards". This includes taking care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, including headlines not supported by the text. In addition, a significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and - where appropriate - an apology published.Is this just an honest opinion, a statement of fact or wilfully misleading and clever rhetoric? That depends on what is meant by "evidence". If it means quality research carried out by scientists with expertise in the field, the statement is factually incorrect. But if evidence includes anything said by non-experts, such as Delingpole, then that's an increase, right?

If you were surprised by the result of the Brexit vote in the UK or by the Trump victory in the US, you might live in an echo chamber - a self-reinforcing world of people who share the same opinions as you. Echo chambers are a problem, and not just because it means some people make incorrect predictions about political events. They threaten our democratic conversation, splitting up the common ground of assumption and fact that is needed for diverse people to talk to each other. A few tools are mentioned in the post that help you see "the other side" of a story - you might like to play with them, e.g. http://politecho.org "is a browser extension that shows the political biases of your friends and Facebook newsfeed"

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...

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."

Excellent NYT interactive - where do you draw the line on how your data is used by social media companies and smart devices?

Most people pass through some type of public space in their daily routine - sidewalks, roads, train stations. Thousands walk through Bryant Park every day. But we generally think that a detailed log of our location, and a list of the people we're with, is private. Facial recognition, applied to the web of cameras that already exists in most cities, is a threat to that privacy. To demonstrate how easy it is to track people without their knowledge, we collected public images of people who worked near Bryant Park (available on their employers' websites, for the most part) and ran one day of footage through Amazon's commercial facial recognition service.

When it comes to Sydney's perennial east vs west rivalry, there are plenty of opinions and stereotypes about the spray-tanned, salmon-wearing 'silver tails' and ugg boot-bound bogan 'westies'. And then there are facts. Here, we've used data to explore the actual differences between life in a selection of Sydney's eastern and western suburbs. Some of it's serious, some of it's fun. Nothing here is meant to be perjorative. Because there's no 'superior' Sydney - just different ones.

Nearly every ad you see online is tailored just for you. These digital ads are powered by vast, hidden datasets that allow advertisers to make eerily accurate guesses about who you are, where you've been, how you feel and what you might do next. While targeted ads may be familiar by now, how they work - and the power they have - often seems invisible. We decided to lift the veil on this part of the internet economy, so we bought some ad space. We picked 16 categories (like registered Democrats or people trying to lose weight) and targeted ads at people in them. But instead of trying to sell cars or prescription drugs, we used the ads to reveal the invisible information itself.

Last month, CNBC reported on a page in Google's account settings titled "Purchases" - a month-by-month list of items you've bought across online services like Amazon and other apps that are collected via Google services like Gmail. Purchases is a jarring example of how leaky our data really is and how large companies can aggregate that information unbeknown to the consumer. I, for one, was unaware that almost every concert ticket, Domino's pizza and Amazon purchase (including a 2014 accidental purchase of the film "Tango & Cash") was being logged by Google. Equally troubling: The purchases can't easily be deleted from the page without also deleting the receipt emails from your Gmail account.

just knowing facts doesn't necessarily guarantee that one's opinions and behaviors will be consistent with them. For example, many people "know" that recycling is beneficial but still throw plastic bottles in the trash. Or they read an online article by a scientist about the necessity of vaccines, but leave comments expressing outrage that doctors are trying to further a pro-vaccine agenda. Convincing people that scientific evidence has merit and should guide behavior may be the greatest science communication challenge, particularly in our "post-truth" era. Luckily, we know a lot about human psychology - how people perceive, reason and learn about the world - and many lessons from psychology can be applied to science communication endeavors.

An opinion piece in last week's Annals of Internal Medicine argues that just how aggressively we screen for some cancers can actually distort our understanding of the risk factors for a particular cancer, as well as how common we perceive it to be.

Interesting article about how different kinds of data (like your social media data) can give insights into health, but don't have the same protections as health data

Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) Media Watch is based on the same premise as the ABC show Media Watch. It aims to highlight poor examples of journalism regarding AOD-related issues in the hope that we can assist journalists to report more objectively using science and evidence rather than perpetuating myths, opinions and moral panic. Research has found moral panics in the media can actually be detrimental. Moral panics in the media can actually be detrimental by counter-intuitively leading to increased drug use since it increases the perception that more people are using the drug than actually are. It has also been found to found that moral panics reduce the degree to which some people believe that the drug being reported on is harmful. It also reduces the credibility of AOD information in the media.

News stories regarding the latest in the world of medicine are often popular. After all, most people are interested in their own health and that of their family and friends. But sometimes reports can be confusing. For example, one minute coffee seems good for you, and the next it's bad for your health. And remember when 150 health experts from around the world called for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games to be cancelled or postponed because of the Zika virus? This call was swiftly opposed by both the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Sometimes these contradictions reflect differences of opinion in the scientific community, and different approaches to research. These are a normal part of the scientific process. But in other instances, health news misinforms because of the way some journalists interpret and report research findings.

When creating a machine-learning algorithm, designers have to make many choices: what data to train it on, what specific questions to ask, how to use predictions that the algorithm produces. These choices leave room for discrimination, particularly against people who have been discriminated against in the past. For example, training an algorithm to select potential medical students on a data set that reflects longtime biases against women and people of color may make these groups less likely to be admitted. In computing, the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" describes how poor-quality input leads to poor-quality output. In this case we might say, "White male doctors in, white male doctors out."

On Friday, the Australian Taxation Office, as it does every April, released the latest batch of annual taxation statistics. And as ever, the data was used in rather contorted ways to suggest the budget needed to reduce the level of taxation paid by the wealthiest and to make it seem like the richest were the ones doing it tough. The other old chestnut that got a run in the Australian is that more school teachers actually use negative gearing than company executives. Again, is it really a shock that "while 72,000 investors were listed as company executives, 99,000 people claiming rental losses on their tax returns were either teachers, nurses or midwives"? Given there are about 300,000 more people working as teachers, nurses or midwives than there are company executives, does anyone really think that because 27,000 more of them might use negative gearing is proof of anything? The crucial thing is not the total number, but the proportion of teachers and nurses (and any other profession) who use negative gearing.

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.