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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.

"Fitness trackers out of step when measuring calories, research shows," The Guardian reports. An independent analysis of a number of leading brands found they were all prone to inaccurate recording of energy expenditure.

"Meditation can leave you feeling even more stressed," the Daily Mail reports. The claim is prompted by a study of 60 practitioners of Buddhist meditation in the US which found they'd had a range of "challenging or difficult" experiences associated with the practice. However, it's not clear how relevant the results are to the majority of people who use meditation apps or take mindfulness classes. This article discusses a great example of bad medical reporting from the daily mail. Note how the numbers stack up (e.g "almost 100" is actually 60 patients)

A good example of poor reporting of a medical study, the Daily Mail claimed that "Diets laden with butter, cream and cheese 'can help combat surge in type 2 diabetes' - but the evidence does not support that argument - looking at the evidence, it's clear there is a small quantifiable difference between the two groups analysed, and that the study focuses on a short period of time.

A psychologist compared online reviews of three medical products with results from clinical trials, and found the reviews are skewed towards the positive. The author of the study, Dr Micheál de Barra, wanted to look into whether people who have had good outcomes from treatments are more likely to go online and give positive reviews than people who have had average or poor outcomes. As such, the product reviews provided by online retailers may be distorted. The author looked at Amazon.com - the US version of the site - and analysed two cholesterol-reducing products and one weight loss treatment. In general, he found the extent of cholesterol reduction or weight loss reported by online reviewers was substantially greater than that demonstrated in randomised controlled trials, a more reliable source of evidence on effectiveness.

But shouldn't there be some kind of accountability when you're talking about public money? My response would be what kind of accountability do we have now? Our schools are graded by test scores, and half the schools are doing worse than the other half and nobody does anything about that at all. This is the advantage of letting parents control the venue for education. And Michael Gove (excerpt at) https://twitter.com/Annelies_Leeuw/status/851945727110643717/photo/1