Actually, depressingly, this probably is your average stats mistake.

Speaking to the BBC, the director of telecoms for a communications company announced that,

“Britain might be riding the wave of a super-fast broadband revolution, but for 49% who get less than the national average broadband speed, the wave isn’t causing so much a splash as a ripple,”

You may have one of two reactions to this; one is to assume that one cannot have 49% below the average, it must be 50% below and 50% above.

In fact, ‘average’ is usually taken to indicate the mean (in this case, the broadband speed for each household in the country, divided by the number of households included). This is not the same as the median (if you put the speed for each household in order, lowest to highest, then picked the middle one – that would be the median).

Either way, it’s splitting hairs about an amusing error. It would be more meaningful if the median were substantially different to the mean, as that would indicate a ’skewed’ distribution. But that’s something for another time, perhaps.

Sometimes a science article in a newspaper is so bad that it pays to take a quick look at just why it’s so bad, to learn from the mistakes made. Today’s offering is courtesy of the Daily Mail.
“Playing football games on computers ‘makes you more aggressive‘” they cry. The upshot of the article is that [...]

As human beings, our ability to make judgements and decisions quickly has long been paramount to our survival. Our brains have evolved to be able to take huge amounts of information and quickly synthesise conclusions based on what we see as the most important factors. This is useful in day to day life, but can [...]

There is an age old debate amongst undergraduates in universities the world over. It is a split that generally occurs between science and arts students, and goes something like this, “My subject is difficult, important and full of intellectual subtlety – yours is not”.
This has long been the case, but with recent cuts to higher [...]

In recent times, science has been portrayed as sexy and exciting. From Professor Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System/Universe to Hans Rosling’s attempts to convince us that statistics are sexy. And you know something? They’re right.
Exciting demonstrations of the joy of science can lead us to forget just how much time, dedication and in [...]

I don’t know about you, but when I was in school I was taught that concentration was a limited resource. I remember quite vividly my plump, forthright Religious Education teacher telling the class that ’studies had shown’ that concentration was limited to about 40 minutes at time, and that this was the reason we had [...]

A paper recently published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has been causing a bit of a stir. This a reputable, top journal. And the paper it has just published claims to support ‘psi’.
‘Psi’ refers to what you and I would call ‘psychic powers’, but is intended to avoid, or at least be [...]

Alzheimer’s disease is a terrible affliction, both for those who suffer with it, and their families. It is a neurodegenerative disorder that involves the gradual loss of memory and ability to function, and is currently irreversible. It is also a disease that becomes more likely the older someone is.
The media have an affinity for devoting [...]

Temporary post of my response to this: http://ukhomeopathynews.com/2010/10/the-skeptic-and-the-homeopath/
That video is rather childish and unrepresentative of just about every skeptic I know. Generally speaking, the positions are reversed – any scientist worth their salt will be interested in evidence and its constructive questioning. This does not always happen, granted – there are variations within any disparate [...]

Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous quote, “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger…” is often accepted as a truism. Naturally, however, the reality when it comes to real people in the real world is a little more complicated than that.
In fact, there is a large body of research that demonstrates that experiencing what most people would [...]