2009/12/16 Matt Wardman <[email protected]>: > > > Probably not :-), but don't tell Gordon. > > Data itself already gets 'taxed' by charging for access (e.g., full census > details). > > I was thinking about a world where there may be dozens of different analyses > purporting to prove different things, and how we will navigate through and > make sense of it.
Perhaps there needs to be some consequential analyses of those analyses to expose the poor reasoning or misuse of tools that would be inherent in the "purporting"? It seems to me that the growth of the availability of data (which is not recent, albeit it may have speeded up) requires a coordinate growth in comprehension of that data. I wonder what is being done to further that? In fact, leafing through a copy of the Times yesterday I saw a before/after pictorial statistic illustrated by people of different sizes where the value was the height, but the people grew in both dimensions. A classic trick, but an extremely cheap one. Do the journalists realise they are doing this or not? Evil (*) or Idiotic? I can't tell. Mind you I once saw a business newspaper use a logarithmic graph to illustrate the rapid decline of the value of a company. Unsurprisingly a linear decline looked rather awful. (*) "evil" - a strong word to use maybe, but to deliberately tell an untruth, knowing that it is untrue, in the mass media surely conts as a very wicked thing to do; millstones around necks perhaps? -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
