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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.

When we launched Beyond the blade earlier this year, we wanted to know how many young people and children were being killed by knives in the UK. Who are these young people being killed?, Where are they dying? Is the scale of the issue changing, and if so how? We spoke to experts about the number of children and teenagers affected in Britain and Northern Ireland. We checked with the Office for National Statistics, the Home Office, politicians, academics and thinktanks. But the answer to how many young people are dying every year, it seemed, was that nobody knows. So we started trying to find out. Until now, there has been no publicly available information about the demographic profiles of those who have died from knife attacks in the UK

Social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and our own genetics are among the factors influencing us beyond our awareness. This raises an ancient question: do we have control over our own lives? This article is part of The Conversation's series on the science of free will.