I missed the story in the Guardian on March 6th about our “growing lifespan”. (I do think ‘growing’ is a strange adjective: surely ‘increasing’ would be better?)
Anyway, I came across the story today after reading the bemusing phrase:
The lifespan of the average British person increases by five hours a day.
on the BBC website.
Reading that made me suddenly feel tired.
Continue reading “not born yesterday”
The BBC website reports that the Office for National Statistics has released figures describing the average man and woman in Britain today.
The bit that really bothers me is this:
The average British man is 38, will live another 41 years and is educated at least to A-levels.
The figures […] show the average British woman is two years older and will live to 72.
I received a very worrying newspaper cutting through the post this weekend. (Yes, I know people who still communicate by ‘real’ mail and take the trouble to clip and send on articles of interest.) It came from the UK Metro, and the headline read Take the Pill ‘for a long life’. What was particularly disturbing was the following phrase that also appears on the web version of the story:
Women who take the contraceptive are 12 per cent less likely to die compared with those who never have.
The same story on the IBTHealth site says:
Continue reading “health check”
Which is all very well, but I actually stopped and read the prices being shown: the “before” and “after” figures, and the alleged percentage discounts.
Of the five properties, only two have the figures calculated correctly.
Continue reading “counting the cost”
There was an interesting article on the BBC yesterday, about “information visualisation”, written by Davd McCandless, the guy behind the Information is Beautiful website.
The article discusses how information can often be shown more easily by pictures than by text, and includes a number of different types of graphic to demonstrate the point.
Continue reading “picture a fact”
don't confuse the narrator 