Why Journalists Need to Understand Statistics

“There is a base level of understanding of statistics that journalists need to have because it’s just too easy to be misled. It’s just way too easy to be misled. There are studies that look good and they’re just crap. To some extent as journalists—even a statistically...

Why Journalists Need to Understand Statistics

“There is a base level of understanding of statistics that journalists need to have because it’s just too easy to be misled. It’s just way too easy to be misled. There are studies that look good and they’re just crap. To some extent as journalists—even a statistically...

Causation vs Correlation

Journalists are constantly being reminded that “correlation doesn’t imply causation;” yet, conflating the two remains one of the most common errors in news reporting on scientific and health-related studies. In theory, these are easy to distinguish—an action or...

Communicating Plant Biology

This is a guest post from Eric Hamilton After four long days at a conference, all you want to do is board a flight home, crawl into bed, and try to forget how your boss saw you dancing at the open-bar party. But on July 30, 2015, a dedicated group of scientists and...

The Drink of Death?

How reliable is the claim that sugary drinks are killing 184,000 people every year?   Sugar-Sweetened Beverages (SSBs)—soda, fruit juice, iced tea to the non-academic—have increasingly been blamed for fattening and sickening the world; now, according to a new...