Making sense of stats
Recently I’ve been reading The Tiger That Isn’t: Seeing Through a World of Numbers by Michael Blastland & Andrew Dilnot. It was partly out of interest as I’ve been a fan of their series More or Less on Radio 4 for a number of years. I can heartily recommend it, even for the numerically-challenged as it’s very readable & brings the figures back from the abstract into real life. It’s a great help not just for charting a rational path through the health scares and political claims & counter-claims, but also for making sense of the statistics that are conjured up about the Internet.
In the past month there has been interest about the novel approach that Radiohead took for charging to download their latest album, and all things connected with mobile phones has gone into a frenzy after the launch of the iphone & Google’s involvement. In amongst the hype there have been some good articles redressing the balance on Mashable (Radiohead: comScore Doesn’t Have a Clue) and The Register (Analysts talk telephone numbers on mobile games).
These also act as a timely reminder that the hard part of putting together a (useful) online poll or survey isn’t the technology. Instead it’s framing the questions correctly, finding a representative sample and interpreting the results.
Read the book & keep those sceptical antennae twitching.
