| Description |
1 online resource (podcast (19 min., 05 sec.)) |
| Series |
Social science bites |
|
Social science bites
|
| Summary |
About this Podcast: Despite the current hype around 'fake news', the dissemination of biased and misleading information is far from a new phenomenon. In this 'post-truth' era you might hope to find a respite from subjectivity in cold, hard numbers. On the contrary, propagandists are becoming increasingly sophisticated at methods of falsification and misrepresentation of numerical data. More than ever we learn to live by the maxim "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Some concerned parties have invested themselves in combating this malpractice, in an effort to expose and discourage the flawed or dishonest use of numbers. One such statistics vigilante is David Spiegelhalter, professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge and current president of the Royal Statistical Society. In this podcast David talks about trust and communication in statistics. "There's always been the use of statistics and numbers and facts as rhetorical devices to try and get people's opinion across, and to in a sense manipulate our emotions and feelings on things," he tells interviewer David Edmonds. "People might still think that statistics and numbers are cold, hard facts but they're soft, fluffy things. They can be manipulated and changed, made to look big, made to look small, all depending on the story that someone wants to tell." David discusses how we should determine which communicators and organizations to trust and what organizations themselves should strive for. This leads on to a discussion about how ordinary citizens can be empowered to critically engage with data by asking key questions such as "What am I not being told" and "Why I am hearing this?". Rather than individually tackling every bit of fake news, he aims to inoculate others against its influence |
| Notes |
XML content and online resource (SAGE, viewed on April 14, 2020) |
| Subject |
Correlation (Statistics)
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Newspapers -- Statistics
|
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Fake news.
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Quantitative research.
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correlation.
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Correlation (Statistics)
|
|
Fake news
|
|
Newspapers
|
|
Quantitative research
|
| Genre/Form |
Statistics
|
| Form |
Streaming audio
|
| Author |
Edmonds, David, 1964- host, interviewer.
|
| ISBN |
9781526496782 |
|
152649678X |
|
