UTS-AEI

Mona Chalabi (@MonaChalabi) is the Data Editor of The Guardian US and a columnist at New York Magazine. Mona uses hand-drawn visualisations and data stories to make the numbers more relatable. Before getting into journalism, Mona worked in the nonprofit sector, first at the Bank of England, then Transparency International and the International Organization for Migration. 30 minute podcast interview, with some great examples of why data matters, and how to tell stories with data.

"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)

Data analysis is playing an increasing role in the U.S. electoral system, raising an important question as the Trump administration prepares to oversee the 2020 Census: What if the data aren't reliable?

Nice little interactive piece from the NYTimes - they've charted sets of data from the Bush presidency, can you accurately extend their line charts to show the change over the Obama years?

Mona Chalabi on the perils of polling data and the importance of official statistics

Should newspapers be adding confidence intervals to their graphics? Why, she asked, are newspapers like hers hesitant to print confidence intervals, a statistical measure of uncertainty? With the exception of noting sampling error in polling data, newspapers like the Times only show uncertainty when they're forced to - and often to prove the opposite of what point data might show.

A piece I wrote on how psychology helps us understand fake news and information seeking. Every day we face complex situations in which the information we need, and who we trust to provide that information, has a very real impact on our lives. How do we evaluate the competing claims of politicians on climate change policy, or Brexit; navigate medical information regarding vaccinating our children; or assess the relative merits of diet versus regular foods in adopting a healthy lifestyle?

A new paper published in PLOS One by John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ullrich Ecker tests the power of inoculation; not against disease, but against the sort of misinformation that created the conditions leading to Minnesota measles outbreak. Inoculation theory suggests that exposing people to the tricks used to spread misinformation can equip them with the tools to recognize and reject such bogus claims.

While shark attacks are very rare, reports of shark attacks are on the rise. They have more than tripled in recent decades - from a total of 157 reports worldwide between 1970 and 1979 to a combined 661 reports from 2000 to 2009, according to the Florida Program for Shark Research (FPSR), which maintains a database of known attacks dating back to the mid-1500s. It's important to note that the increase is partly the result of an improved reporting system. But research also indicates that human population growth, increased interest in aquatic recreational activities and changes in weather and water quality play a role.

Not a day goes by without a flurry of data-driven memes passing through my Facebook news feed, sailing by on my Twitter stream or landing as alerts in my email inbox that cite what appear to be reputable datasets and using them to offer surprising conclusions, typically wrapped up in a mesmerizing infographic. Yet, when I pick any of these memes at random and delve into it, I find that it is the rare meme indeed that stands up to statistical scrutiny.

What do you take from this hypothetical headline: "Reading the Research Digest blog is associated with higher intelligence"? How about this one: "Reading this blog might increase your intelligence"? According to science writing guides like HealthNewsReview.org, taking the first correlational finding from a peer-reviewed article and reporting it for the public using the second wording, implying causation, is a sin of exaggeration, making a relationship appear more causal than the evidence suggests.

Sometimes it's hard to know what statistics are worthy of trust. But we shouldn't count out stats altogether ... instead, we should learn to look behind them. In this delightful, hilarious talk, data journalist Mona Chalabi shares handy tips to help question, interpret and truly understand what the numbers are saying.

'Middle Australia' earns much less than the government would have you believe and women continue to earn much less than men. ...The 2014-15 taxation statistics released last week revealed that the median taxable income of the 9.95m Australians with a taxable income was just $54,543. If you earned more than that, then you earned more than at least half of Australians.

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

Interesting discussion of how we perceive risk, and the risks of everyday activities! So let's answer the first question: how likely is a fatal shark attack for an Australian? To get a crude estimate of this, averaged across the whole population, you would divide the number of people who have died due to a shark attack each year (on average three to four each year based on recent data) by the population of Australia (approximately 24 million). This yields a risk of approximately one in eight million per year, which is thankfully very low. Does this assuage your fear? If not, the reason is probably that the imagery of a shark attack is so terrifying. Any unusual and dramatic event has a huge impact on our psyche and this distorts our perception. Also, it's not that easy for us to interpret what a risk expressed as a relative frequency truly means.