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Interesting perspective on communicating evidence. With controversy about science communication, facts and alternative facts hitting the headlines recently, I've been having a number of conversations with colleagues from all over the world about why science seems to be losing in the current war on reason. This isn't in the usual fringe battle fronts like creationism or flat-Earthers. It's on topics deep behind our lines, in areas like whether climate change exists or not, how many people were present at a given time at a given place and whether one man with a questionable grasp on reality should be the only source people get their news from.

Two Words That Could Shape the Politics of the Trade War: Loss Aversion The pain of a loss tends to be greater than the enjoyment of a win. That has big implications for trade, and also helps explain the politics of health care and taxes.

I set out to discover which Harry Potter actors have had the best careers since the franchise kicked off in 2001 - similar to the analysis I did of people who've acted in the Star Wars franchise. How many other movies did they make, how good were those movies and how much money did they bring in? To find out, I turned to IMDb. For every actor who was credited in one of the eight Harry Potter movies, I pulled every full-length feature film2 that he or she was credited in, as well as the ratings for each film and its box-office take, if IMDb had it.

This week, Hannah Devlin speaks with some of the statistical vigilantes who are scouring datasets to identify cases of fraud and poor scientific practice. These include the consultant anaesthetist John Carlisle, from Torbay Hospital in Devon, who details his role in the Fujii scandal. Hannah also speaks to a PhD student from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, Michèle Nuijten, about software she has helped develop to "spell-check" statistics found in psychology papers. And finally, we hear from the University of Cambridge's Winton professor for the public understanding of risk, David Spiegelhalter, who is also president of the Royal Statistical Society, about the dangers of statistical malpractice.

An introduction to a set of deep dive articles an important issue....When we tell people that we work at the intersection of statistics and human rights, the reaction is often surprise. Everyone knows that lawyers and journalists think about human rights problems … but statisticians? Yet, documenting and proving human rights abuses frequently involves the need for quantification. In the case of war crimes and genocide, guilt or innocence can hinge on questions of whether violence was systematic and widespread or one group was targeted at a differential rate compared to others. Similar issues can arise in assessing violations of civil, social, and economic rights. Sometimes the questions can be answered through simple tabulations, but often, more-complex methods of data collection and analysis are required.

how could two groups of 'experts' come up with such different conclusions, given they broadly agree of the evidence? David Aaronovitch in the Times identified the critical underlying issue behind the ensuing conflict: whether we take an individual- or a population-based approach. Essentially, the authors point out that any absolute risks are small from an individual perspective, and may generally be cancelled out by the enjoyment of eating, and the bother of changing habits. But these small benefits can be important from a public-health, population-wide perspective, since a lot of people making a small change, that only reduces their risk by a personally-negligible amount, can add up to thousands fewer cases of disease. That's what has generated the disagreement. It can be perfectly reasonable for guidance to be given by authorities, and it can also be perfectly reasonable for individuals to ignore it. Both can be 'right'.

One way of working out if the data you're gathering is particularly sensitive is to do a thought experiment: what would happen if this data got into the hands of a malicious actor? Who would be keen to get their hands on it? What are the worst things that they could do with this data? Sometimes, though, it can be hard to put yourself in the shoes of your enemies, or to envision potential future actions. As a result, practising data minimisation is a keystone of a rights-based, responsible data approach. And sadly, it's the opposite of the approach we're seeing governments around the world take.