How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them) by Tom Chivers and David Chivers
Tom is the science editor at UnHerd and has twice been awarded a Royal Statistical Society “statistical excellence in journalism” prize, in 2018 and 2020, and was highly commended for the same prize in 2017. Tom was the science writer of the year by the Association of British Science Writers in 2021. In addition, has been shortlisted for the science journalist of the year by both the British Press Awards and the British Journalism Awards.
His cousin David is an assistant professor of economics at Durham University. He was a lecturer at University of Oxford and completed his PhD from the University of Manchester. David is published in academic journals such as Review of Economic Dynamics, Economic Theory and Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
Today, more than ever before, we live in a world of sensational headlines from seemingly thousands of websites who lead with data driven reports. So, is it not a surprise in which they misquote the data in which they present. Of course not. So where does one start to understand a baseline of news data and statistics?